hinder you working at your
character and succeeding in making it what it ought to be; and to form
character is the end of life. 'To be weak is miserable, doing or
suffering.' Ay! that is true, though Milton put it into the devil's
mouth. And there is only one strength that will last, 'for even the
youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fail.'
But the strength of a fixed and illuminated and conscience-guided will,
which governs the man and is governed by God, shall never faint or grow
weak. This is the strength which we should seek, and which I ask you to
make the conscious aim of your lives.

II. Now note, secondly, how to get it.

'Ye are strong, and the Word of God abideth in you.' Those young Asiatic
Christians, that John had in his eye, had learned the secret and the
conditions of this strength; and not only in limb and sinew, or in
springy and elastic buoyancy of youthful, mental, and spiritual vigour
were they strong, but they were so because 'the Word of God abode in
them.' Now, there are two significations of that great expression, both
of them frequent in John's Gospel, and both of them, I think,
transferred to this Epistle, each of which may yield us a word of
counsel. By 'the Word of God,' as I take it, is meant--perhaps I ought
to say _both_, but, at all events, _either_--the revelation of God's
truth in Holy Scripture, or the personal revelation of the will and
nature of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Whichever of these two
meanings--and at bottom they come to be one--we attach to this
expression, we draw from them an exhortation. Let me put this very
briefly.

Let me say to you, then, if you want to be strong, let Scripture truth
occupy and fill and be always present to your mind. There are powers to
rule and to direct all conduct, motive powers of the strongest character
in these great truths of God's revelation. They are meant to influence a
man in all his doings, and it is for us to bring the greatest and
solemnest of them to bear on the smallest things of our daily life.
Suppose, now, that you go to your work, and some little difficulty
starts up in your path, or some trivial annoyance ruffles your temper,
or some lurking temptation is suddenly sprung upon you. Suppose your
mind and heart were saturated with God's truth, with the great thoughts
of His being, of His love, of His righteousness, of Christ's death for
you, of Christ's presence with you, of Christ's guardianship