st make by way of introduction, and that is,
that the way in which the Apostle here glides from 'being risen with
Christ' to where 'Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God,'
confirms what I have pointed out in former discourses, that the
Ascension of Jesus Christ is always considered in Scripture as being
nothing more than the necessary outcome and issue of the process which
began in the Resurrection. They are not separate facts, but they are two
ends of one process. And so with these thoughts, that Resurrection
develops into Ascension, and that in both Jesus Christ is the pattern
for His followers, let us turn to the words before us.

Then we have here

I. The Christian life considered as a risen life.

Now, we are all familiar with the great evangelical point of view from
which the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ are usually
contemplated. To many of us Christ's sacrifice is nothing more or less
than the means by which the world is reconciled to God, and Christ's
Resurrection nothing more than the seal which was set by Divinity upon
that work. 'Crucified for our offences, and raised again for our
justification,' as Paul has it--that is the point of view from which
most evangelical or orthodox Christian people are contented to regard
the solemn fact of the Death and the radiant fact of the Resurrection.
You cannot be too emphatic about these truths, but you may be too
exclusive in your contemplation of them. You do well when you say that
they are the Gospel; you do not well when you say, as some of you do,
that they are the whole Gospel. For there is another stream of teaching
in the New Testament, of which my text is an example, and a multitude of
other passages that I cannot refer to now are equally conspicuous
instances, in which that death and that Resurrection are regarded, not
so much in respect to the power which they exercise in the
reconciliation of the world to God, as in their aspect as the type of
all noble and true Christian life. You remember how, when our Lord
Himself touched upon the fruitful issues of His death, and said: 'Except
a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if
it die it bringeth forth much fruit,' He at once went on to say that a
man that loved his life would lose it; and that a man that lost his life
would find it, and proceeded to point, even then, and in that
connection, to His Cross as our pattern, declaring: 'If any man serve
Me, let him follow