by our attainments, to try
to stretch our attainments to what are our legitimate expectations, and
to hear in these words the answer to the faithless and unbelieving doubt
whether such a thing is possible, and the assurance that it is possible.

An impossibility can never be a duty, and yet we are commanded: 'Be ye
perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.' An impossibility can
never be a duty, and yet we are commanded to let Christ abide in our
hearts.

Oh! if we believed less in the power of our sin it would have less power
upon us. If we believed more in the power of an indwelling Christ He
would have more power within us. If we said to ourselves, 'It is
possible,' we should make it possible. The impossibility arises only
from our own weakness, from our own sinful weakness; and though it may
be true, and is true, that none of us will live without sin as long as
we abide here, it is also true that each moment of interruption of our
communion with Christ and therefore each moment of interruption of that
being 'filled with the fulness of God,' might have been avoided. We know
about every such time that we could have helped it if we had liked, and
it is no use bringing any general principles about sin cleaving to men
in order to break the force of that conviction. But if that conviction
be a real one, and if whenever a Christian man loses the consciousness
of God in his heart, making him blessed, he is obliged to say: 'It was
my own fault and Thou wouldst have stayed if I had chosen,' then there
follows from this, that it is possible, notwithstanding all the
imperfection and sin of earth, that we may be 'filled with all the
fulness of God.'

So, dear brethren, take you this prayer as the standard of your
expectations; and oh! take it as we must all take it, as the sharpest of
rebukes to our actual attainments in holiness and in likeness to our
Master. Set by the side of these wondrous and solemn words--'filled with
the fulness of God,' the facts of the lives of the average professing
Christians of this generation, and of this congregation; their
emptiness, their ignorance of the divine indwelling, their want of
anything in their experience that corresponds in the least degree to
such words as these. Judge whether a man is not more likely to be bowed
down in wholesome sense of his own sinfulness and unworthiness, if he
has before him such an ideal as this of my text, than if it, too, has
faded out of his life. I b