ched at it. He was a
Christian, but the Christ that he discerned when he first discerned Him
through the mists, and the Christ that he had in his life and in his
heart, after, say, twenty years of Christian living, are very different.
The old Christ remained, but the old Christ was becoming new day by day,
according to the new necessities and positions. And that is what will be
our experience if we have any real Christianity in us. The old Christ
that we trusted at first was able to do for us all that we asked Him to
do, but we did not ask Him at first for half enough, and we did not
learn at first a tithe of what was in Him. Suppose, for instance, some
great ship comes alongside a raft with ship-wrecked sailors upon it, and
in the darkness of the night transfers them to the security of its deck.
They know how safe they are, they know what has saved them, but what do
they know compared with what they will know before the voyage ends of
all the reservoirs of power and stores of supplies that are in her?
Christ comes to us in the darkness, and delivers us. We know Him for our
Deliverer from the first moment, if we truly have grasped Him. But it
will take summering and wintering with Him, through many a long day and
year, before we can ever have a partially adequate apprehension of all
that lies in Him.

And what will teach us the depths of Christ, and how does He become new
to us? Well, by trusting Him, by following Him, and by the ministry of
life. Some of us, I have no doubt, can look back upon past days when
sorrow fell upon us, blighting and all but crushing; and then things
that we had read a thousand times in the Bible, and thought we had
believed, blazed up into a new meaning, and we felt as if we had never
understood anything about them before. The Christ that is with us in the
darkness, and whom we find able to turn even it, if not into light, at
least into a solemn twilight not unvisited by hopes, that Christ is more
to us than the Christ that we first of all learnt so little to know. And
life's new circumstances, its emerging duties, are like the strokes of
the spade which clears away the soil, and discloses the treasure in all
its extent which we purchased when we bought that field. We buy the
treasure at once, but it takes a long time to count it. The old Christ
is perpetually the new Christ.

So, brethren, Christian progress consists not in getting away from the
original facts, the elements of the Gospel, b