dness. Do you adequately repay such lavish love? Has He not 'sown
much and reaped little' in all our hearts? Has He not poured out the
fulness of His affection, and have we not answered Him with a few
grudging drops squeezed from our hearts? Oh! brethren! 'Walk worthy of
the Lord,' and neither dishonour Him by your conduct as professing
children of His, nor affront Him by the wretched refuse and remnants of
your devotion and service that you bring back to Him in response to His
love to you.

II. Now a word about the next form of this all-embracing precept. The
whole law of our Christian life may be gathered up in another
correspondence, 'Walk worthy of the Gospel' (Phil. i. 27), in a manner
conformed to that great message of God's love to us.

That covers substantially the same ground as we have already been going
over, but it presents the same ideas in a different light. It presents
the Gospel as a rule of conduct. Now people have always been apt to
think of it more as a message of deliverance than as a practical guide,
as we all need to make an effort to prevent our natural indolence and
selfishness from making us forget that the Gospel is quite as much a
rule of conduct as a message of pardon.

It is both by the same act. In the very facts on which our redemption
depends lies the law of our lives.

What was Paul's Gospel? According to Paul's own definition of it, it was
this: 'How that Jesus Christ died for our sins, according to the
Scriptures.' And the message that I desire now to bring to all you
professing Christians is this: Do not always be looking at Christ's
Cross only as your means of acceptance. Do not only be thinking of
Christ's Passion as that which has barred for you the gates of
punishment, and has opened for you the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven.
It has done all that; but if you are going to stop there you have only
got hold of a very maimed and imperfect edition of the Gospel. The Cross
is your _pattern_, as well as the anchor of your hope and the ground of
your salvation, if it is anything at all to you. And it is not the
ground of your salvation and the anchor of your hope unless it is your
pattern. It is the one in exactly the same degree in which it is the
other.

So all self-pleasing, all harsh insistence on your own claims, all
neglect of suffering and sorrow and sin around you, comes under the lash
of this condemnation: 'They are not worthy of the Gospel.' And all
unforgivingness of spi