Me; and where I am, there shall also My servant be.'

'Made like Him, like Him we rise;
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies.'

So, then, a risen life is the type of all noble life, and before there
can be a risen life there must have been a death. True, we may say that
the spiritual facts in a man's experience, which are represented by
these two great symbols of a death and a rising, are but like the
segment of a circle which, seen from the one side is convex and from the
other is concave. But however loosely we may feel that the metaphors
represent the facts, this is plain, that unless a man dies to flesh, to
self-will, to the world, he never will live a life that is worth calling
life. The condition of all nobleness and all growth upwards is that we
shall die daily, and live a life that has sprung victorious from the
death of self. All lofty ethics teach that; and Christianity teaches it,
with redoubled emphasis, because it says to us, that the Cross and the
Resurrection are not merely imaginative emblems of the noble and the
Christian life, but are a great deal more than that. For, brethren, do
not forget--if you do, you will be hopelessly at sea as to large tracts
of blessed Christian truth--that by faith in Jesus Christ we are brought
into such a true deep union with Him as that, in no mere metaphorical or
analogous sense, but in most blessed reality, there comes into the
believing heart a spark of the life that is Christ's own, so that with
Him we do live, and from Him we do live a life cognate with His, who,
having risen from the dead, dieth no more, and over whom death hath no
dominion. So it is not a metaphor only, but a spiritual truth, when we
speak of being risen with Christ, seeing that our faith, in the measure
of its genuineness, its depth and its operative power upon our
characters, will be the gate through which there shall pass into our
deadness the life that truly is, the life that has nought to do with
death or sin. And this unity with Jesus, brought about by faith, brings
about that the depths of the Christian life are hid with Christ in God,
and that we, risen with Him, do even now sit 'at the right hand in
heavenly places,' whilst our feet, dusty and sometimes blood-stained,
are journeying along the paths of life. This is the great teaching of my
text, and of a multitude of other places; and this is the teaching which
modern Christianity, in its exclusive, or all but exclusiv