ions of us, safely and
humbly, and to say, 'With me it is a very small matter to be judged
of you, or of man's judgment. He that judgeth me is the Lord.'

The envoy of some foreign power cares very little what the
inhabitants of the land to which he is ambassador may think of him
and his doings; it is his sovereign's good opinion that he seeks to
secure. The soldier's reward is his commander's praise, the slave's
joy is the master's smile, and for us it ought to be the law of our
lives, and in the measure in which we really belong to Christ it will
be the law of our lives, that 'we labour that, whether present or
absent, we may be pleasing to Him.'

So, brethren, as teachers, as patterns, as objects of love which is
only too apt to be exclusive and to master us, we can only take one
another in subordination to our supreme submission to Christ, and if
we are His, our duty, as our joy, is to count no man necessary to our
wellbeing, but to hang only on the one Man, whom it is safe and
blessed to believe utterly, to obey abjectly, and to love with all
our strength, because He is more than man, even God manifest in the
flesh.

II. And now let us pass to the next idea here, secondly, Christ's
servants are the lords of 'the world.'

That phrase is used here, no doubt, as meaning the external material
universe. These creatures around us, they belong to us, if we belong
to Jesus Christ. That man owns the world who despises it. There are
plenty of rich men in Manchester who say they possess so many
thousand pounds. Turn the sentence about and it would be a great deal
truer--the thousands of pounds possess them. They are the slaves of
their own possessions, and every man who counts any material thing as
indispensable to his wellbeing, and regards it as the chiefest good,
is the slave-servant of that thing. He owns the world who turns it to
the highest use of growing his soul by it. All material things are
given, and, I was going to say, were created, for the growth of men,
or at all events their highest purpose is that men should, by them,
grow. And therefore, as the scaffolding is swept away when the
building is finished, so God will sweep away this material universe
with all its wonders of beauty and of contrivance, when men have been
grown by means of it. The material is less than the soul, and he is
master of the world, and owns it, who has got thoughts out of it,
truth out of it, impulses out of it, visions of God out of