blessed warm morning air of the sun of
righteousness, with healing in its beams, will rush in, scatter the
darkness and raise the temperature. 'Faith' by which we simply mean the
act of the mind in accepting and of the will and heart in casting one's
self upon Christ as the Saviour--that act is the condition of this new
life. And so each Christian is 'God's workmanship, created in Christ
Jesus.'

And now, says Paul--and here some of us will hesitate to follow
him--that new creation has to go before what you call 'good works.' Now,
do not let us exaggerate. There has seldom been a more disastrous and
untrue thing said than what one of the Fathers dared to say, that the
virtues of godless men were 'splendid vices.' That is not so, and that
is not the New Testament teaching. Good is good, whoever does it. But,
then, no man will say that actions, however they may meet the human
conception of excellence, however bright, pure, lofty in motive and in
aim they may be, reach their highest possible radiance and are as good
as they ought to be, if they are done without any reference to God and
His love. Dear brethren, we surely do not need to have the alphabet of
morality repeated to us, that the worth of an action depends upon its
motive, that no motive is correspondent to our capacities and our
relation to God and our consequent responsibilities, except the motive
of loving obedience to Him. Unless that be present, the brightest of
human acts must be convicted of having dark shadows in it, and all the
darker because of the brightness that may stream from it. And so I
venture to assert that since the noblest systems of morality, apart from
religion, will all coincide in saying that to be is more than to do, and
that the worth of an action depends upon its motive, we are brought
straight up to the 'narrow, bigoted' teaching of the New Testament, that
unless a man is swayed by the love of God in what he does, you cannot,
in the most searching analysis, say that his deed is as good as it ought
to be, and as it might be. To be good is the first thing, to do good is
the second. Make the tree good and its fruit good. And since, as we have
made ourselves we are evil, there must come a re-creation before we can
do the good deeds which our relation to God requires at our hands.

II. I ask you to look at the purpose of this new creation brought out in
our text.

'Created in Christ Jesus unto good works.' That is what life is given to
yo