ct of God's, and only after that can think about our
acts. To work up towards salvation is, in the strict sense of the words,
_preposterous_; it is inverting the order of things. It is beginning at
the wrong end. It is saying X Y Z before you have learnt to say A B C.
We are to work downwards from salvation because we have it, not that we
may get it. And whatever 'good works' may mean, they are the
consequences, not the causes, of 'salvation,' whatever that may mean.
But they are consequences, and they are the very purpose of it. So says
Paul in the archaic language of my text--which only wants a little
steadfast looking at to be turned into up-to-date gospel--'We are His
workmanship, created unto good works'; and the fact that we are is one
great reason for the assertion which he brings it in to buttress, that
we are saved by grace, not by works. Now, I wish, in the simplest
possible way, to deal with these great words, and take them as they lie
before us.

I. We have, first, then, this as the root of everything, the divine
creation.

Now, you will find that in this profound letter of the Apostle there are
two ideas cropping up over and over again, both of them representing the
facts of the Christian life and of the transition from the unchristian
to the Christian; and the one is Resurrection and the other is Creation.
They have this in common, that they suggest the idea that the great gift
which Christianity brings to men--no, do not let me use the abstract
word 'Christianity'--the great gift which _Christ_ brings to men--is a
new life. The low popular notion that salvation means mainly and
primarily immunity from the ultimate, most lasting future consequences
of transgression, a change of place or of condition, infects us all, and
is far too dominant in our popular notions of Christianity and of
salvation. And it is because people have such an unworthy, narrow,
selfish idea of what 'salvation' is that they fall into the bog of
misconception as to how it is to be attained. The ordinary man's way of
looking at the whole matter is summed up in a sentence which I heard not
long since about a recently deceased friend of the speaker's, and the
like of which you have no doubt often heard and perhaps said, 'He is
sure to be saved because he has lived so straight.' And at the
foundation of that confident epitaph lay a tragical, profound
misapprehension of what salvation was.

For it is something done in you; it is _not_ so