n offering and
sacrifice to God on our behalf; and God, who had of old made it plain
by His prophets that He could find no satisfaction in animal victims,
accepted 'as a sweet savour' this free-will offering of
self-sacrificing love. In the self-sacrifice of Christ, therefore, we
have the clear disclosure both of what God is and of what God will
accept from man.

But this ideal of life as lying in love and in the deliberate
self-sacrifice of one for another is the plain negation of some maxims
for life generally accepted in heathen society. It is the plain
negation of sensual self-indulgence at the expense of others, or at the
expense of our spiritual nature, of 'fornication and uncleanness of all
kinds,' of filthy conduct, of the sort of jesting or wit which ignores
all moral restraints. It is the plain negation again of selfish greed
or the unlimited desire to get--'covetousness.' These things are out
of the question for a body of saints, that is, men dedicated to a holy
God.

{194}

[Sidenote: _Life in the light_]

The tone and language which befits such a dedicated life is the tone
and language of thanksgiving. But clearly Asiatic Christians were only
too ready to forget the essential incompatibility of their new
profession with the old sinful habits around them. So St. Paul
emphasizes 'This ye know for certain that fornication or unclean living
on the one hand, or the turning of gain into a god on the other, surely
excludes a man from the kingdom of Christ and God[1].' And he
reiterates 'let no man deceive you with empty words.' Such vices,
being in plain contradiction to the divine will, make men subjects of
the divine wrath, and for you this should be startlingly plain. You
have been brought out of the realm of darkness of which once you formed
a part, into the realm of light, of which you now form a part, the
realm whose light is Christ. There is no fellowship between the light
and the darkness[2]. To live in the light means to bring forth fruit
of goodness and righteousness and truth, the fruit of a character like
Christ's. For you have in Christ a definite standard by which you can
test what is well pleasing to the {195} Lord. It is your business,
therefore, to keep yourselves altogether separate from the works of
darkness which bear no fruit. Not only so, but it is your business to
'reprove' or convict the dark world of sin; not, of course, by making
the works of darkness the subjects of y