likewise the 'things
that are lovely.'

II. And so, now, turn to the second point here, viz. the Christian
attitude.

'The grace wherein ye _stand_'; that word is very emphatic here,
and does not merely mean 'continue,' but it suggests what I have put
into that phrase, the Christian attitude.

Two things are implied. One is that a life thus suffused by the love,
and enriched by the gifts, and adorned by the loveliness that come
from God, will be stable and steadfast. Resistance and stability are
implied in the words. One very important item in determining a man's
power of resistance, and of standing firm against whatever assaults
may be hurled against him, is the sort of footing that he has. If you
stand on slippery mud, or on the ice of a glacier, you will find it
hard to stand firm; but if you plant your foot on the grace of God,
then you will be able to 'withstand in the evil day, and having done
all to stand.' And how does a man plant his foot on the grace of God?
simply by trusting in God, and not in himself. So that the secret of
all steadfastness of life, and of all successful resistance to the
whirling onrush of temptations and of difficulties, is to set your
foot upon that rock, and then your 'goings' will be established.

Jesus Christ brings to us, in the gift of life in Him, stability
which will check the vacillations of our own hearts. We go up and
down, we yield when pressure is brought to bear against us, we are
carried off our feet often by the sudden swirl of the stream, and the
fitful blast of the wind. But His grace comes in, and will make us
able to stand against all assaults. Our poor natures, necessarily
changeable, and sinfully vacillating and weak, will be uniform, in
the measure in which the grace of God comes into our hearts. Just as
in these so-called petrifying wells, they take a bit of cloth, a
bird's nest, a billet of wood, and plunge it into the water, and the
mineral held in solution there infiltrates into the substance of the
thing plunged in, and makes it firm and inflexible: so let us plunge
our poor, changeful, vacillating resolutions, our wayward, wandering
hearts, our passions, so easily excited by temptation, into that
great fountain, and there will filter into our flexibility what will
make it firm, and into our changefulness what will give in us some
faint copy of the divine immutability, and we shall stand fast in the
Lord and in the power of His might.

Further, in regar