nse, the tokens that he or she belongs to Jesus Christ. You
ask me how? 'If thy foot or thine hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast
it from thee.'

There are things in your physical nature that you have to suppress; that
you have always to regulate and coerce; that you have sometimes entirely
to cast away and to do without, if you mean to be Jesus Christ's at all.
The old law of self-denial, of subduing the animal nature, its passions,
appetites, desires, is as true and as needful to-day as it ever was; and
for us all it is essential to the loftiness and purity of our Christian
life that our animal nature and our fleshly constitution should be well
kept down under heel and subdued. As Paul himself said in another place,
'I bring under my body, and I keep it in subjection, lest by any means I
should myself, having proclaimed to others the laws of the contest, be
rejected from the prize.' Oh, you Christian men and women! if you are
not living a life of self-denial, if you are not crucifying the flesh,
with its affections and lusts, if you are not bearing 'about in the body
the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Christ may be
manifested in your mortal body,' what tokens are there that you are
Christ's slaves at all?

Then, besides this, we may expand the thought even further, and say
that, in a very real sense, all the pains and sorrows and
disappointments and afflictions that mainly touch our mortal part should
be taken by us as, and made by us to be, the tokens that we belong to
the Master.

But it is not only in limitations and restrictions and self-denials and
pains that Christ's ownership of us ought to be manifested in our daily
lives, and so by means of our mortal bodies, but if there be in our
hearts a deep indwelling possession of the grace and sweetness of
Christ, it will make itself visible, ay! even in our faces, and 'beauty
born of' our communion with Him 'shall pass into' and glorify even
rugged and care-lined countenances. There may be, and there ought to be,
in all Christian people, manifestly visible the tokens of the indwelling
serenity of the indwelling Christ. And it should not be left to some
moment of rapture at the end of life, for men to look upon us, to behold
our faces, 'as it had been the face of an angel,' but by our daily walk,
by our countenances full of a removed tranquillity, and a joy that rises
from within, men ought to take knowledge of us that we have been with
Jesus, and