mely illustration--soap and
water wash your hands clean, and what you have to do is simply to rub
the soap and water on to the hand, and bring them into contact with the
foulness. You cleanse yourselves. Yes! because without the friction
there would not be the cleansing. But is it you, or is it the soap, that
does the work? Is it you or the water that makes your hands clean? And
so when God comes and says, 'Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil
of your doings, your hands are full of blood,' He says in effect, 'Take
the cleansing that I give you and rub it in, and apply it: and your
flesh will become as the flesh of a little child, and you shall be
clean.'

That is to say, the very deepest word about Christian effort of
self-purifying is this--keep close to Jesus Christ. You cannot sin as
long as you hold His hand. To have Him with you;--I mean by that to have
the thoughts directed to Him, the love turning to Him, the will
submitted to Him, Him consciously with us in the day's work. To have
communion with Jesus Christ is like bringing an atmosphere round about
us in which all evil will die. If you take a fish out of water and bring
it up into the upper air, it writhes and gasps, and is dead presently;
and our evil tendencies and sins, drawn up out of the muddy depths in
which they live, and brought up into that pure atmosphere of communion
with Jesus Christ, are sure to shrivel and to die, and to disappear. We
kill all evil by fellowship with the Master. His presence in our lives,
by our communion with Him, is like the watchfire that the traveller
lights at night--it keeps all the wild beasts of prey away from the
fold.

Christ's fellowship is our cleansing, and the first and main thing that
we have to do in order to make ourselves pure is to keep ourselves in
union with Him, in whom inhere and abide all the energies that cleanse
men's souls. Take the unbleached calico and spread it out on the green
grass, and let the blessed sunshine come down upon it, and sprinkle it
with fair water; and the grass and the moisture and the sunshine will do
all the cleansing, and it will glitter in the light, 'so as no fuller on
earth can white it.'

So cleansing is keeping near Jesus Christ. But it is no use getting the
mill-race from the stream into your works unless you put wheels in its
way to drive. And our holding ourselves in fellowship with the Master in
that fashion is not all that we have to do. There have to be distin