bares his thin arm, his scarred bosom, and bids these
contumacious Galatians look upon them, and learn that he has a right to
speak as the representative and messenger of the Lord Jesus.

So we have here two or three points, I think, worth considering. First,
think for a moment of the slave of Christ; then of the brands which mark
the ownership; then of the glory in the servitude and the sign; and then
of the immunity from human disturbances which that service gives. 'From
henceforth let no man trouble me. I bear in my body the marks of the
Lord Jesus.'

I. First, then, a word or two about that conception of the slave of
Christ.

It is a pity that our Bible has not rendered the title which Paul ever
gives himself at the beginning of his letters, by that simple word
'slave,' instead of the feebler one, 'servant.' For what he means when
he calls himself the 'servant of Jesus Christ' is not that he bore to
Christ the kind of relation which servants among us bear to those who
have hired and paid them, and to whom they have come under obligations
of their own will which they can terminate at any moment by their own
caprice; but that he was in the roughest and simplest sense of the word,
Christ's slave.

What lies in that metaphor? Well, it is the most uncompromising
assertion of the most absolute authority on the one hand, and claim of
unconditional submission and subjection on the other.

The slave belonged to his master; the master could do exactly as he
liked with him. If he killed him nobody had anything to say. He could
set him to any task; he could do what he liked with any little
possession or property that the slave seemed to have. He could break all
his relationships, and separate him from wife and kindred.

All that is atrocious and blasphemous when it is applied to the
relations between man and man, but it is a blessed and magnificent truth
when it is applied to the relations between a man and Christ. For this
Lord has absolute authority over us, and He can do what He likes with
everything that belongs to us; and we, and our duties, and our
circumstances, and our relationships, are all in His hands, and the one
thing that we have to render to Him is utter, absolute, unquestioning,
unhesitating, unintermittent and unreserved obedience and submission.
That which is abject degradation when it is rendered to a man, that
which is blasphemous presumption when it is required by a man, that
which is impossible, in