Dear friends, I beseech you to trust your sinful souls to that dear Lord
who bore you in His heart and mind when He bore His cross to Calvary and
completed the work of your redemption. If you will accept Him as your
sacrifice and Saviour, when He cried 'It is finished,' united to Him
your lives will be quickened into intense activity and joyful vigilance
and expectation, and death will be smoothed into a quiet falling asleep.
'The shadow feared of man,' that strikes threateningly across every
path, will change as we approach it, if our hearts are anchored on Him
who died for us, into the Angel of Light to whom God has given charge
concerning us to bear up our feet upon His hands, and land us in the
presence of the Lord and in the perfect society of those who love Him.
And so shall we live together, and all together, with Him.

EDIFICATION

'Edify one another.'--1 THESS. v. 11.

I do not intend to preach about that clause only, but I take it as
containing, in the simplest form, one of the Apostle's favourite
metaphors which runs through all his letters, and the significance of
which, I think, is very little grasped by ordinary readers.

'Edify one another.' All metaphorical words tend to lose their light and
colour, and the figure to get faint, in popular understanding. We all
know that 'edifice' means a building; we do not all realise that 'edify'
means _to build up_. And it is a great misfortune that our Authorised
Version, in accordance with the somewhat doubtful principle on which its
translators proceeded, varies the rendering of the one Greek word so as
to hide the frequent recurrence of it in the apostolic teaching. The
metaphor that underlies it is the notion of building up a structure. The
Christian idea of the structure to be built up is that it is a temple. I
wish in this sermon to try to bring out some of the manifold lessons and
truths that lie in this great figure, as applied to the Christian life.

Now, glancing over the various uses of the phrase in the New Testament,
I find that the figure of 'building,' as the great duty of the Christian
life, is set forth under three aspects; self-edification, united
edification, and divine edification. And I purpose to look at these in
order.

I. First, self-edification.

According to the ideal of the Christian life that runs through the New
Testament, each Christian man is a dwelling-place of God's, and his work
is to build himself up int