olt out of the blue, and he was
checked in full career, as if a voice had spoken to the sea in its
wildest storm, and frozen its waves into immobility.

There is suggested in the word, too, distinctly, our Lord's personal
action in the matter. No doubt, the fact of His supernatural appearance
gives emphasis to the phrase here. But every Christian man and woman has
been, as truly as ever Paul was, laid hold of by the personal action of
Jesus Christ. He is present in His Word, and, by multitudes of inward
impulses and outward providences, He is putting out a gentle and a firm
hand, and laying it upon the shoulders of all of us. Have we yielded?
Have we resisted, when we were laid hold of? Did we try to get away? Did
we plant our feet and say, 'I will not be drawn,' or did we simply
neglect the pressure? If we have yielded, my text tells us what we have
to do next. For that hand is laid upon a man for a purpose, and that
purpose is not secured by the hand being laid upon him, unless he, in
his turn, will put out a hand and grasp. Our activity is needed; that
activity will not be put forth without very distinct effort, and that
effort has to be life-long, because our grasp at the best is incomplete.
So then, we have here, first of all, to consider--

I. What Christ has laid His grip on us for.

Now, the immediate result of that grasp, when it is yielded to, is the
sense of the removal of guilt, forgiveness of sins, acceptance with God.
But these, the immediate results, are by no means the whole results,
although a great many of us live as if we thought that the only thing
that Christianity is meant to do to us is that it bars the gates of some
future hell, and brings to us the message of forgiveness. We cannot
think too nobly or too loftily of that gift of forgiveness, the initial
gift that is laid in every Christian man's hands, but we may think too
exclusively of it, and a great many of us do think of it as if it were
all that was to be given. A painter has to clear away the old paint off
a door, or a wall, before he lays on the new. The initial gift that
comes from being laid hold of by Jesus Christ is the burning off of the
old coat of paint. But that is only the preliminary to the laying on of
the new. A man away in the backwoods will spend a couple of years after
he has got his bit of land in felling and burning the trees, and rooting
out and destroying the weeds. But is that what he got the clearing for?
That is on