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‘The wages of sin is death.’
Rom_6:23
I. To St. Paul death, as he here represents it, was the culmination of a condition which man had known throughout all the years of his life—the condition of alienation from God. The ‘wages of sin’ was the breach of communion with God, and this breach of communion was a veritable death. It was death now; it implied death hereafter. Man because of his sin lived in alienation from the Divine Righteousness, and the culmination of that state of alienation was the loss of everlasting life. Death, as here conceived by the Apostle, was a process rather than a momentary experience. It was a state which enveloped man throughout his mortal career. Just as for the Christian eternal life commences here and now; so for the man estranged from God St. Paul thought of death as having already its beginning. The actual dissolution was the climax of that state—the climax in which all the consequences of estrangement found their full meaning. The idea of death could for St. Paul reach out to the experiences of this present world. It could equally cover the experiences of a life to come. Such a life, if lived apart from God, lived in the awful shadow of His wrath, lived in the darkness of completed spiritual separation, was undeserving of the name. An existence of that kind was really death—death in all the fullness of its religious significance. The man who was now without hope of eternal blessedness, though he might have all that this world could give him, though ‘he might come in no misfortune like other folk,’ though he might be exalted with the Herods or enthroned with the Cæsars, was dead. The man who lost eternal blessedness, though consciousness might continue so as to enable him to suffer and endure, though his personality might be interminable, though his existence might be prolonged for ever, was dead. Such was the death which had ‘passed unto all men, for that all sinned.’ Such was the death by which ‘by the trespass of one the many died.’ Such was the death which hitherto ‘had reigned through the One.’ Such is the death which is ‘the wages of sin.’
II. And yet God spared not His Son the spiritual agonies which were inseparable from death as ‘the wages of sin.’—Whatever may be the explanation of the atonement which approximates most nearly to the truth—whether we consider it to have consisted in a penalty paid, in a measure vicariously, by the Head of humanity in satisfaction of human indebtedness, or whether we see in it chiefly the overpowering testimony of the Son of God to the real meaning of moral evil, or whether we interpret it as the offering of that perfect penitence of which only perfect righteousness was capable, yet that Christ died as one Who was ‘made sin,’ as one Who gave Himself ‘a ransom for many,’ is a doctrine which can only be denied upon a widespread repudiation of the testimony of both Apostles and Evangelists. And it is in this aspect of His death that we find the solution of that mystery at which we just glanced—the mystery of His horror of the Cross, and of His sense of forsakenness as He hung there. It was because death as endured by Him was to stand in that terrible intimacy of relation to human transgression that He shrank from it as from a cup too bitter for Him to drink, and that as He drank it His mind went back to the despairing cry of the Psalmist. He—the Crown of the human race, in Whom all life had been summed up through the Incarnation, Who was perfectly and completely that which each one of us is only partially and fragmentarily, Who gathered our human existence into His own Divine person, Who was man ideally and representatively, Who was ‘the Son of Man,’ Who was ‘the Word made flesh’—met death as the wages of the sins of those whose nature He took upon Himself in the infinity of His love. Looked at from this point of view we can understand the deep and awful anguish which overcame Him in that garden ‘under the dark shadows of the trees, amid the interrupted moonlight.’ We can understand, too, in part that cry of exhaustion as He sank closer and closer to the end—that cry which only some caught, of which others heard only the first word and understood to be an appeal to Elijah, the expected forerunner of the Messiah. Sin implied necessary estrangement from God; and this consciousness of necessary estrangement was then upon Him Who ‘bare the sin of many’—nay, the sin of all—and Who in that death of deaths ‘made intercession for the transgressors.’
III. Calvary, as the Gospels depict it, was the outcome of sin.—To this end, awful enough in its external horrors, yet more awful in its spiritual significance the sins of the world brought Him ‘Who for us men and our salvation came down from heaven.’ And let us remember with fear and trembling—remember in those hours when sin is pleasant and welcome, when temptation bears us almost unresisting along, when we are disposed to call gross wickedness by soft names, when we are inclined to rebel against the sterner verdicts of good men or the warnings of our own consciences—that the wages of sin, sin unrepented of, sin for which we have never found or sought forgiveness, sin of which the stain and defilement still remain, is now, as in old days, death. There is such a thing as missing our salvation. There is such a thing as making the Cross of Christ of none effect. There is such a thing as being lost in an ever-deepening estrangement from God. Scripture speaks to us of the fate of the wicked only in figures; but they are figures from which we recoil in dismay. Christ can save us if we will let Him. But He cannot save us against our will. What is our view of sin? What are the eyes with which we look upon our own sins? What are the scales with which we weigh them? Have we ever said to ourselves, said with all the earnestness and solemnity of which we are capable—such earnestness and solemnity as we might employ to warn ourselves against some impending earthly disaster—‘The wages of those sins of mine is death; death now and death hereafter’? It is not easy to pass these verdicts of self-condemnation. Excuses rise so readily to the lips. But when such self-condemnation tarries—when we are inclined to pass some mitigated judgment upon the faults and vices of which we have been guilty—let us go back in thought to all of which this day is commemorative, and remember where and how we have been shown the terrible significance of sin.
IV. The wages of sin! We need never pay them.—Shrouded in perplexity as the doctrine of the reconciliation of God and man, through Him Who was both God and Man, may be, yet we know and are sure that God offers us for His sake ‘the free gift’ of ‘eternal life.’ The atonement has been made. The expiation has been offered. ‘There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.’ Death may indeed be to us, apart from Christ,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe.
But in Christ, with His might to help and sustain us, with His grace to aid our weakness, with the power of His victory to uphold and strengthen us, the ‘night’ will be night no longer, the ‘storm’ will have become a calm, the ‘foe’ will have lost his terrors. The time must indeed come, sooner or later, for each one of us—even for the youngest of us it cannot be so very far off—when
The journey is done, and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall.
But we will not add that ‘a battle’s to fight’ before the final recompense is enjoyed. We will rather say that far back in the centuries a battle was fought once for all—such a battle as the world never before beheld and will never see again, the battle of battles, the battle between salvation and death—and that the triumph, unspeakable and unthinkable, the triumph for ever and ever, was with Him Whose brethren we are, with Him Who was ‘tempted in all points’ as ourselves, with Him Who ‘was despised and rejected of men,’ Who ‘poured out His soul unto death and was numbered with the transgressors,’ with ‘the Son of Man.’ We may be ‘more than conquerors in Him.’ ‘Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.’ ‘The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law; but thanks be to God Which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.’
Rev. the Hon. W. E. Bowen.
Illustrations(1) ‘It has been said that the suffering of a few hours, however severe, would be a small price to pay for the salvation of a world. Yes; but it was not in its physical sufferings that the full bitterness of that death consisted. Those sufferings by themselves appeal to us. We are moved and subdued by some representation of the mere externals of the Passion. Many will call to mind a story told by Canon Liddon, in one of his sermons, of a German nobleman who was converted from a life of religious indifference by a picture of Christ upon the Cross with the words attached to it, “This I did for thee; what hast thou done for Me?” But it was not in those external miseries, horrible as they were, not in anything that the eye can recall or the imagination conjure up, that “the sting of death” consisted for “the Lord of Glory.” ’
(2) ‘How far death, as we know it, bears in its familiar outward circumstances traces of the results and effects of sin is a speculation with which we may occupy ourselves, but to which it is obvious that there can be no certain answer. That this life would be inadequate, even if prolonged indefinitely; that there is in it an element of incompleteness which needs fulfilment; that art and literature, painting and music, the beauties of the sunset, “the roseate hues of early dawn,” mountain peak and silver stream, sea and lake, copse and glade, forest and plain; that all these with their several interests and wonders need a life beyond, where they will be found in perfection—this is a thought which Browning has done so much to impress upon us in his Easter Day. “This mortal” must always “have put on immortality.” And yet the “one clear call” to that other world might have come amidst surroundings of which the beauty would have been realised and acknowledged by all. Death need have come not as “the Arch-Fear,” but as the friend of friends. But the advent of death is something very different. Death may be accepted with resignation; it may be received with hope and confidence; it may be anticipated with courage; it may be looked forward to with a sense of relief; it may be faced with faith. But death is a dread ordeal. It is accompanied by circumstances which cannot be avoided and the nature of which cannot be forgotten. How far are these circumstances the results, directly or indirectly, of the coming of sin? It is, as I have said, a question without an answer. We can scarcely conceive of death as stripped of certain characteristics; but we cannot, on the other hand, forget that once in the annals of the world death came to One Who was without sin, and that “God did not give His Holy One to see corruption.” ’
THE SENSE OF SIN
I. The reason why men and women are losing hold of the religion of Jesus Christ is this—that they are losing their sense of sin.—They lead a life in which sin is admitted, courted, and caressed. They do not wish to part with it; they do not recognise its burden or realise its guilt. Why should they seek a Saviour from that from which they do not wish to be saved? The life which so many live now who call themselves Christians has no room, no place, for that. It is not the true life, the highest life, the best life. They must live very fast, and give themselves no time to think; they must ask others to pronounce them happy and to give them the sanction of approval which their own conscience refuses to give. It is to the interest of the average man that Christianity should not be true. Sin is an ugly word; punishment is a disagreeable thought; eternal punishment is intolerable. Christianity, it is quite true, has nothing to say to the average man, and the average man is, therefore, labouring to have nothing to say to Christianity. We need not be surprised, while men and women live as they are living now, that they turn away from Christ, and say, ‘We will not have this Man to reign over us.’ We need not be surprised that they have no difficulty in finding men who persuade them that religion is an affair of the mind and not of the heart, that Christ is a great teacher and nothing else, that His revelation is to the wise and prudent, that we walk by sight and not by faith, that the highest power is criticism, and that the ultimate standard of all truth is the self-consciousness of the individual, and that it does not matter which we believe as long as we are in earnest.
II. What the world needs is to recover the sense of sin, and in recovering the sense of sin it will recover its sense of need for a Saviour, and in finding its Saviour will learn to lay hold once more of that life of faith and that life of obligation which enables a man not merely to imitate an ideal which he imperfectly grasps, but to become himself the son of God, and to rise to the fullness of his being and the greatness of his heritage. It is impossible to study progress unless we first study the mystery of sin. Because if we believe what God has told us, sin represents a wrong attitude towards the world. Our path to perfection lies in following out the Will of God, and, as of old, the sense of that Will is subject to the eclipses which are brought on by desire, by temptation, by disobedience, by the lawlessness which is the Bible conception of sin, which abuses this world instead of using it, and turns the things which should have been to our wealth into an occasion of falling. Have you any real sense of sin? Do you really feel that you need a Saviour? Have you found such a Saviour in Jesus Christ? These are momentous questions, and it is because men turn away from them that they are taking up with a lower life which ought not to be, in which undetected sin warps their whole character and spoils it. It is because men do not feel the need that they allow the foolish cleverness of the age to take away Christ and to disparage religion.
III. Sin is unnatural, and ought not to exist within us.—And sin brings nothing with it but misery wherever it is found, and is the enemy of progress and the degradation of the human race. The Bible, of course, is persistent in this estimate of sin. It sets before us in unswerving fidelity the consequences of that fatal choice made by our first parents to follow desire instead of duty, and inclination instead of God. But we have another testimony still, and that is the testimony of human language. In human language we have crystallised for us the testimony of experience, which gathers itself up into a single word—significant, eloquent, monitory; capable of giving up its meaning to those who will interrogate it. Sin is the offence, the blow, the bar to civilisation. They were right who first called it by that name; and ‘sin’ itself, whenever we take the word on our lips, speaks to us of injury. When we speak of ‘faults’ we speak of those dread flaws and cracks which remain even in the case of forgiven sin; ‘wickedness’ tells us of its bewitching fascination; ‘evil’ carries with it a sense of injury; ‘iniquity’ of a failure in moral rectitude. You will never induce Christian men, if you can judge by the testimony of their language, ever to acquiesce in that estimate of sin which represents it as a tender and graceful defect, inevitable, irresistible, and to a great extent the result of causes which cannot be resisted.
IV. And we may say with reverence that because God knew this He sent His Son into the world to be our Saviour.—Christianity is not merely one among the religions of the world, which a progressive criticism is to reduce to the limits which our sublime understanding is willing to accept. Christianity is a necessity; Christianity is a matter which concerns our salvation. Christ is our Saviour, and if He is our Saviour it means that we need His salvation. ‘The wages of sin is death’; this is as true of the nation as of the individual. The road to progress is the road of Christianity. The road to ruin is the road of human wilfulness. To each and to all of us Christ makes His great appeal—‘Wilt thou be made whole? For the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ.’
—
Rev. Canon Newbolt.
Illustration‘Nature in a lower animal and nature in a man are to this extent different things. An animal in following nature follows its impulses and desires, guided by instinct, which controls and regulates him at every turn. And this will be seen more clearly in the case of animals in their natural state before they are brought under the cultivation and training of man. But for a human being to follow nature is to bring all his desires, impulses, and passions under the guidance of reason, and to submit, in its turn, reason to the illumination of the Spirit, which is his point of contact with God. If a man forgets this, and mistakes animalism for nature, see what follows. He loses at once, or very speedily, his position as a man. The passions rebel against the will, and reason feebly protests, and the spirit has been silenced. The will totters on its throne, and you see that most piteous of all sights—a human being degraded beyond the degradation of any other living thing, an ungoverned and ungovernable derelict on the rough tide of the world, a degraded being bitterly conscious of its own degradation, a being endowed with free will enslaved to passion and fettered in its freedom, and powerless to exert the commanding force of the will. If the plea of nature degrades our humanity, so the plea which says, “I cannot help it” enslaves it under an intolerable bondage. I am free, and I know that I am free, and no one yet, who has not bowed his neck beneath the bonds of deadly habit, has been able to say, when he sinned, that he could not help it, or has felt that it was impossible for him to have acted otherwise than as a puppet in the hands of an invisible player, hid behind the veil of his origin.’
WHAT IS SIN?
I. ‘Sin’ is any violation of God’s will, or word, which a man does with his eyes open.—We can make no scale of sin. All scales of sin are arbitrary and false. The only measure of the sin is the light which it darkens and the grace which it resists. An allowed bad temper at home, pride and unkindness, want of truth, self-indulgence and sloth, lust and uncleanness, meanness, ‘covetousness, which is idolatry,’ a cherished scepticism, and all the negatives—no prayer, no love to God, no usefulness, all, and many else, are equally ‘sin.’
II. Every ‘sin’ has its ‘wage’; and the devil is the paymaster.—He promises, indeed, very different ‘wages’ from what he gives. He promises the gay, and the affectionate, and the satisfying. But God has drawn up the compact, and He has shown it to you, and if you enlist in the service of sin, you never can say you have not read it; you have known it from your infancy—‘The wages of sin is death.’
III. Concerning these wages, it will strike you, at once, that the expression implies that there is a deliberate engagement—a title, and a true and horrid title it is! You have a right to your ‘wages.’ A servant can claim his ‘wages,’ and the master must give them; for whosoever ‘sins’ is an employed one, though he does not see it; he is doing his employer’s work. Let me tell you what it is.
(a) First, to destroy your own soul;
(b) Then to spread a contagion, and hurt others’ souls, so to increase your master’s kingdom, and give him another and another victim!
(c) Is that all? No, it is not half. To insult God—to grieve the Holy Ghost—to rob Christ of a jewel. That is the work which every one who ‘sins’ is doing for his employer.
IV. What are the wages?—Separation. Even in this life, little by little, the separation from the good and the pure will yet widen. A very small time you will spend upon your knees. Good thoughts will be almost strangers. The Bible will be a thing put farther and farther aside. Gulfs will come in between you and God. They will become deeper. It will be very difficult to keep them back again. And out at that distance, the soul will have got very cold; heavenly things will wither! But it is not over. There is a great deal unpaid yet. Perhaps there will come a separation unmitigated by any real hope of a reunion—a separation from the holy, and the loving, and the loved: to go out—where? To the unknown! to the drear! to a land of darkness! No voice in the valley! no arm in the crossing! And, then, separation for ever—irretrievable! Separation from that father of yours, that mother, that husband, that wife, that child, that saint, that church, that happy fellowship, that God! Separation! Eternal punishment? Yes. This is the eternal punishment—separation! I want no more. ‘For the wages of sin is death.’
—
Rev. James Vaughan.
Illustration‘We are judged now, and we shall be judged hereafter, according to the honest resistance we have made, and not because we are more or less ‘corrupt’ from the beginning. I may be fenced about with wickedness from my earliest years; oaths perhaps my first utterances; indecency before my eyes in foul and degrading habitations; my earliest habits immoral; until the mercy of God finds me out and shows me all this is bad and contrary to His will and commandment. I may then, with strong resolution, begin an entirely new course, embracing virtue with my whole heart, and renouncing utterly what I before did ignorantly, and none of those things shall be remembered any more. But if I begin the old practice over again, and deliberately swear, and become intemperate, or filthy, that relapse will be a thousand times farther removed from pardon than the shameful record of former years.’
‘The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.’
Rom_6:23
II.—The Service.—In the one case it is slavery; in the other, perfect freedom.
III. The Recompense.—In the one case, the recompense is death; in the other it is life eternal.
(a) The wages—literally the soldier’s rations—assigned to the slave of sin are death. What is involved in this awful description no tongue can tell. And is it to secure such a doom that men consent to wear the chains of Satan?
(b) The gift. On the other hand, observe upon what terms God engages free spirits in His honourable service. A gift is indicative of the friendly relations between the Lord and the servant. The mediation of Christ is represented as the means of service, and as the channel of reward. Eternal life is a phrase which passes all our human powers to explain; it means life in God, life in bliss, life for evermore!
‘The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.’
Rom_6:23
I. Eternal life is God’s gift.—He gives it to us from the very first. He it was that breathed into Adam the breath of life, whereby he became a living soul. He it is that in our Baptism gives to us His Spirit to purify and sanctify us so that we are joined to the Lord and are ‘one spirit’ with Him. In that holy sacrament He received us into the number of His children and gave us the promise of eternal life. And ever since that time He has continually been fitting us to enjoy it; by every trial and suffering we have undergone, by every holy thought and good desire He has put into our hearts; whenever we have assembled in His house we have heard Him warning and exhorting us by the voice of His Holy Scripture, and of his authorised ministers, setting before us life and death, and bidding us choose life; whenever we have approached His holy table with faith and repentance, He has fed us with the spiritual food of the body and blood of His dear Son, assuring us thereby that we are heirs through hope of His everlasting Kingdom. When He calls us away from this world, He will give us rest and peace with all His holy ones who have gone before us; and in that day, which is steadily drawing on, though we know not when it shall come, He shall raise our bodies from the dust, and we shall really enter on the enjoyment of life, and that a life eternal. Such is the gift of God.
II. Our eternal life is the wages of the righteousness of Christ.—He earned it for us. So that while it is His wages, to us it is a free and undeserved gift. It is God’s gift to us through Christ. But it does not follow that because we cannot do anything to deserve it, that therefore we need do nothing to obtain it. It is the gift of God ‘through Christ.’ To whom, then, will He give it but to the faithful followers of Christ—to those who love their Lord and His appearing? And this shows more clearly the meaning of the Apostle in the text. He says not there one word of righteousness, but it is implied in the expressions he uses: ‘The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ As though he had said, ‘Your sins, if you give way to them, and persevere in them, will at last bring you to death eternal; which is indeed their wages, their well-earned and well-deserved punishment; but if you live a different life, if you strive by the grace of God to overcome your sins, and to conform yourselves to the likeness of your Lord and Saviour, that course of life will bring you to the life eternal; not as a reward, not as something due to you, but it will be given you by God, for the sake of Christ.’
III. The text is an encouragement, because it shows us that life is not the reward of our righteousness, but the gift of God; so that we may hope to receive that gift, even though our righteousness be not quite perfect. What is absolutely necessary is that we should be united to Christ. It is through Him that God gives life; through our union with Him we receive it.
Bishop Lord Alwyne Compton.
Illustration‘The whole parable of the verse, Rom_6:23, lies in the two words Wages and Gift. Each of these words has a special meaning. The word wages is the word used for a soldier’s pay: not merely a servant’s wages, but the “pay” of a soldier. And the word gift is the word used for the largess of a successful general after a victory: not merely a gift in the ordinary sense of any one making a present or gift to some one else, but that particular gift—or largess—which the commander of an army gives his soldiers when a battle has been won or a city taken. Both words belong to soldiers, and not merely to servants. The first word means the regular stated “pay.” The second word means something over and above “pay”; that largess which, after victory, a general, in the joy of victory, gives bountifully to the soldiers who had shared his labours and fought under his banners.’
THAT THEY MIGHT HAVE LIFE
I. God’s gift in Christ of eternal life to the world.—Since sin entered into the world, its end has not only been eternal death, but it frustrates the purpose of God for eternal life, for it separates God from man and increases the weakness in our fallen human nature. But God so eternally loved us that He provided His own remedy for sin in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, who said, ‘I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.’
II. Christ claimed in His own person to meet and correct every individual need of man.—In order to make it quite intelligible to us how our life is sustained by incorporation into His, our Blessed Lord reveals His intimate relation with every soul by that series of claims which declare Him to be:—
(a) The Source of Life—‘The True Vine.’
(b) The Redeemer and Protector of Life—‘The Good Shepherd.’
(c) The Sustainer of Life—‘The Bread of Life.’
(d) The Restorer of Life—‘The Resurrection and the Life.’
Rev. G. Perry-Gore.
Illustrations(1) ‘There is a great picture by a distinguished French artist, in which in the foreground of the picture he has portrayed the different ages of the world, whilst in the background, right on the horizon, he has placed the cross which forms the focus for his light and colour, and which he spreads with a masterly power in varying shades of vermilion over all the clustered scenes of his picture. And as the picture is studied, two lessons are disclosed. First, that the cross, as it fills the background of the picture, unites, in the person of our Lord, earth with heaven; and, secondly, that the colour which radiates from the cross lights up every age over which it falls, and so tells the story of the universality of Christ’s Incarnate work; and as the painter makes the light from the Christ to fill with warmth and life the whole picture, so, as we contemplate our Lord’s Incarnate work, we see how His great redemption meets the whole world’s needs.’
(2) ‘The story is told of one who had to minister to an old shepherd who could not read, and to help him to realise our Blessed Lord’s care and love for his soul. The clergyman gave him a picture of Christ as the Good Shepherd, with a crown of thorns on His head and carrying on His shoulders a wounded lamb, and some time afterwards, when calling to see him, the old man pointed to the picture and said, “Ah! I want Him to carry me back just like that; but,” added the old shepherd, “what touches me most of all is that”—pointing to the crown of thorns.’
WHAT IS LIFE?
I. Life here.—What then is life! The beasts have a life; but of man only was it said that God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. There is therefore a difference between their life and ours. God created them living creatures. Then God created man with an animal life like the beasts. And then over and above that animal life God gave man a higher life as well, by which he became ‘a living soul.’ That higher life which we now have is God’s gift. And so perhaps this difference may help us to conceive something of the still higher life which is meant by the words Eternal Life, which describe the state to which God will raise those who have spent this life in the service of His Son. That nobler life which He will raise us to will be something as much higher and more exalted than our present life, as our present life is nobler and better than that of the beasts. And what is it that constitutes life? Life is energy, and action, and intelligence and thought, and above all, it is love. How often do we say of the slothful, or the dull, or the inactive, that he does not live, he only exists or vegetates. Even now we hardly think it worth while to call a mere slothful existence by the name of life. A man who never exerts himself, or a man who never thinks, but only goes on in a miserable routine, or the miser who lives only for himself, or the selfish man who seems incapable of loving wife or friend—such men we scarcely think of as truly living. Whereas when, even in the lower animals, we see traces of something like a real, unselfish love and self-devotion, the first thing we say is, we wonder that such a being can really die.
II. Life hereafter.—And all this teaches us, then, to have some kind of imagination what that eternal life which is here spoken of may mean.
(a) Certainly not a state of being in which less activity, less intelligence, less opportunities of showing love and affection, will occur than we have now, but more. More of all of them; and that, too, set free from the burdensomeness which all energy brings with it in this life. Here labour, even in the noblest forms of it, brings fatigue, and it wears us down, and the higher forms of labour wear us down faster than the lower. The mind is nobler than the body, and mental labour wears us down faster than bodily exertion. The heart is nobler than the mind, the power of loving is a higher thing than the power of thinking, and so the anxieties we encounter through our affections wear us down more utterly than all intellectual work. But hereafter this will not be so. There life in all its forms of action will be a delight.
(b) It will never wear down. It will be eternal. Very noticeable are those words of the Apocalypse, ‘there shall be no night there.’ Here we need night for repose and rest, and our rest is but like a daily portion of the death which at last will stop our present lives altogether. There we shall need no rest, for there shall be no fatigue, and there will be no death to stop the eternal life which God will give us.
Such is our glorious prospect. Only let us bear in mind that to win that glorious gift of God, we must be ready to spend this life in the service of the Captain Whom we follow: remembering that it is only the man who is willing to lose his life who has the promise of finding it. It is God’s gift, not our earning.