ess. 'The house not made with hands,' eternal, the building
of God in the Heavens, is the end that God has in view for all His
children.

II. So, then, secondly, note the slow process of the Divine Workman.

The Apostle employs here a very emphatic compound term for 'hath
wrought.' It conveys not only the idea of operation, but the idea of
continuous and somewhat toilsome and effortful work, as if against
the resistance of something that did not yield itself naturally to
the impulse that He would bestow. Like some sculptor with a hard bit
of marble, or some metallurgist who has to work the rough ore till it
becomes tractable, so the loving, patient, Divine Artificer is here
represented as labouring long and earnestly with a somewhat obstinate
material which can and does resist His loving touch, and yet going on
with imperturbable and patient hope, by manifold touches, here a
little and there a little, all through life preparing a man for His
purpose. The great Artificer toils at His task, 'rising early' and
working long, and not discouraged when He comes upon a black vein in
the white marble, nor when the hard stone turns the edge of His
chisels.

Now I would have you notice that there lies in this conception a very
important thought, viz. God cannot make you fit for heaven all at a
jump, or by a simple act of will. That is not His way of working. He
can make a world so, He cannot make a saint so. He can speak and it
is done when it is only a universe that has to be brought into being;
or He can say, 'Let there be light,' and light springs at His word.
But He cannot say, and He does not say, Let there be holiness, and it
comes. Not so can God make man meet for the 'inheritance of the
saints in light.' And it takes Him all His energies, for all a
lifetime, to prepare His child for what He wants to make of him.

There is another thought here, which I can only touch, and that is
that God cannot give a man that glorified body of which I have been
speaking, unless the man's spirit is Christlike. He cannot raise a
bad man at the resurrection with the body of His glory. By the
necessities of the case it is confined to the purified, because it
corresponds to their inward spiritual being. It is only a perfect
spirit that can dwell in a perfect body. You could not put a bad man,
Godless and Christless, into the body which will be fit for them whom
Christ has changed first of all in heart and spirit into His own
likeness. He