' 'Ye have learned Christ if so be that ye
have hearkened to Him.'

II. Secondly, mark the condition of learning the Lesson and hearing the
Teacher.

Our Authorised Version, in accordance with its very frequent practice,
has evacuated the last words of my text of their true force by the
substitution of the more intelligible '_by_ Him' for what the Apostle
writes--'_in_ Him.' The true rendering gives us the condition on which
we learn our Lesson and hear our Teacher. '_In_ Him,' is no mere
surplusage, and is not to be weakened down, as this translation of ours
does, into a mere '_by_ Him' but it declares that, unless we keep
ourselves in union with Jesus Christ, His voice will not be heard in our
hearts, and the lesson will pass unlearned.

You know, dear brother, how emphatically and continually in the New
Testament this doctrine of the dwelling of the believing soul in Christ,
and the reciprocal dwelling of Christ in the believing soul, is insisted
upon. And I, for my part, believe that one great cause of the
unsatisfactory condition of the average Christianity of this day is the
slurring over and minimising of these twin great and solemn truths. I
would fain bring you back to the Master's words, as declaring the
deepest truths in relation to the connection between the believing soul
and the Christ in whom it believes:--'Abide in Me, and I in you.' I wish
you would go home and take this Epistle to the Ephesians and read it
over, putting a pencil mark below each place in which occurs the words
'in Christ Jesus.' I think you would learn something if you would do it.

But all that I have to say at present is that, if we would keep
ourselves, by faith, by love, by meditation, by aspiration, by the
submission of the will, and by practical obedience, in Jesus Christ,
enclosed in Him as it were--then, and then only, should we learn His
lesson, and then, and then only, should we hear Him speak. Why! if you
never think about Him, how can you learn Him? If you seldom, or
sleepily, take up your Bibles and read the Gospels, of what good is His
example to you? If you wander away into all manner of regions of thought
and enjoyment instead of keeping near to Him, how can you expect that He
will communicate Himself to you? If we keep ourselves in touch with that
Lord, if we bring all our actions to Him, and measure our conduct by His
pattern, then we shall learn His lesson. What does a student in a school
of design do? He puts his