it, who
has by it been led nearer to his divine Master. If I look out upon a
fair landscape, and the man who draws the rents of it is standing by
my side, and I suck more sweetness, and deeper impulses, and larger
and loftier thoughts out of it than he does, it belongs to me far
more than it does to him. The world is his who from it has learned to
despise it, to know himself and to know God. He owns the world who
uses it as the arena, or wrestling ground, on which, by labour, he
may gain strength, and in which he may do service. Antagonism helps
to develop muscle, and the best use of the outward frame of things is
that we shall take it as the field upon which we can serve God.

And now all these three things--the contempt of earth, the use of
earth for growing souls, and the use of earth as the field of
service--all these things belong most truly to the man who belongs to
Christ. The world is His, and if we live near Him and cultivate
fellowship with Him, and see His face gleaming through all the
Material, and are led up nearer to Him by everything around us, then
we own the world and wring the sweetness to the last drop out of it,
though we may have but little of that outward relation to its goods
which short-sighted men call possessing them. We may solve the
paradox of those who, 'having nothing, yet have all,' if we belong to
Christ the Lord of all things, and so have co-possession with Him of
all His riches.

III. Further, my text tells us, in the third place, that Christian
men, who belong to Jesus Christ, are the lords and masters of 'life
and death.'

Both of these words are here used, as it seems to me, in their
simple, physical sense, natural life and natural death. You may say,
'Well, everybody is lord of life in that sense.' Yes, of course, in a
fashion we all possess it, seeing that we are all alive. But that
mysterious gift of personality, that awful gift of conscious
existence, only belongs, in the deepest sense, to the men who belong
to Jesus Christ. I do not call that man the owner of his own life who
is not the lord of his own spirit. I do not see in what, except in
the mere animal sense in which a fly, or a spider, or a toad may be
called the master of its life, that man owns himself who has not
given up himself to Jesus Christ. The only way to get a real hold of
yourselves is to yield yourselves to Him who gives you back Himself,
and yourself along with Him. The true ownership of life depends upo