mpet, who blows it? God! It is by His Divine
Spirit dwelling within us, and breathing through us, that the harsh
discords of our natural lives become changed into melody of praise and
the music of witness for Him. Keep near Christ, live in communion with
God, let Him breathe through you, and when His Spirit passes through
your spirits their silence will become harmonious speech; and from you
'will sound out the word of the Lord.'

In a tropical country, when the sun goes behind a cloud, all the insect
life that was cheerily chirping is hushed. In the Christian life, when
the Son of Righteousness is obscured by the clouds born of our own
carelessness and sin, all the music in our spirit ceases, and no more
can we witness for Him. A scentless substance lying in a drawer, with a
bit of musk, will become perfumed by contact, and will bring the
fragrance wherever it is carried. Live near God, and let Him speak to
you and in you; and then He will speak through you. And if He be the
breath of your spiritual lives, and the soul of your souls, then, and
only then, will your lives be music, the music witness, and the witness
conviction. And only then will there be fulfilled what I pray there may
be more and more fulfilled in us as a Christian community, this great
word of our text, 'from you sounded out,' clear, rousing, penetrating,
melodious, 'the word of the Lord,' so that we, with our poor preaching,
need not to speak anything.

WALKING WORTHILY

'Walk worthy of God.'--1 THESS. ii. 12.

Here we have the whole law of Christian conduct in a nutshell. There may
be many detailed commandments, but they can all be deduced from this
one. We are lifted up above the region of petty prescriptions, and
breathe a bracing mountain air. Instead of regulations, very many and
very dry, we have a principle which needs thought and sympathy in order
to apply it, and is to be carried out by the free action of our own
judgments.

Now it is to be noticed that there are a good many other passages in the
New Testament in which, in similar fashion, the whole sum of Christian
conduct is reduced to a 'walking worthy' of some certain thing or other,
and I have thought that it might aid in appreciating the many-sidedness
and all-sufficiency of the great principles into which Christianity
crystallises the law of our life, if we just gather these together and
set them before you consecutively.

They are these: we are told in our te