sonal
appropriation of the person of Jesus Christ and His death?

III. And now, lastly, notice the life which is built upon this faith.

The true Christian life is dual. It is a life in the flesh, and it is
also a life in faith. These two, as I have said, are like two spheres,
in either of which a man's course is passed, or, rather, the one is
surface and the other is central. Here is a great trailing spray of
seaweed floating golden on the unquiet water, and rising and falling on
each wave or ripple. Aye! but its root is away deep, deep, deep below
the storms, below where there is motion, anchored upon a hidden rock
that can never move. And so my life, if it be a Christian life at all,
has its surface amidst the shifting mutabilities of earth, but its root
in the silent eternities of the centre of all things, which is Christ
in God. I live in the flesh on the outside, but if I am a Christian at
all, I live in the faith in regard of my true and proper being.

This faith, which grasps the Divine Christ as the person whose
love-moved death is my life, and who by my faith becomes Himself the
Indwelling Guest in my heart; this faith, if it be worth anything, will
mould and influence my whole being. It will give me motive, pattern,
power for all noble service and all holy living. The one thing that
stirs men to true obedience is that their hearts be touched with the
firm assurance that Christ loved them and died for them.

We sometimes used to see men starting an engine by manual force; and
what toil it was to get the great cranks to turn, and the pistons to
rise! So we set ourselves to try and move our lives into holiness and
beauty and nobleness, and it is dispiriting work. There is a far better,
surer way than that: let the steam in, and that will do it. That is to
say--let the Christ in His dying power and the living energy of His
indwelling Spirit occupy the heart, and activity becomes blessedness,
and work is rest, and service is freedom and dominion.

The life that I live in the flesh is poor, limited, tortured with
anxiety, weighed upon by sore distress, becomes dark and gray and dreary
often as we travel nearer the end, and is always full of miseries and of
pains. But if within that life in the flesh there be a life in faith,
which is the life of Christ Himself brought to us through our faith,
that life will be triumphant, quiet, patient, aspiring, noble, hopeful,
gentle, strong, Godlike, being the life of Chris