But here is a Man that stands amid His enemies, and He looks out upon His enemies, and He says, “I do the things that please him”—­not “I teach them,” not “I dream them,” not “I have seen them in a fair vision,” but “I do them.”  There never was a bigger claim from the lips of the Master than that:  “I do always the things that please him.”

You would not thank me to insult your Christian experience, upon whatever level you live it, by attempting to define that statement of Christ.  History has vindicated it.  We believe it with all our hearts—­that He always did the things that pleased God.  But I have got on to a level that I can touch now.  The great ideal has come from the air to the earth.  The fair vision has become concrete in a Man.  Now, I want to see that Man; and if I see that Man I shall see in Him a revelation of what God’s purpose is for men, and I shall see, therefore, a revelation of what the highest possibility of life is.  Now this is a tempting theme.  It is a temptation to begin to contrast Him with popular ideals of life.  I want to see Him; I want, if I can, to catch the notes of the music that make up the perfect harmony which was the dropping of a song out of God’s heaven upon man’s earth, that man might catch the key-note of it and make music in his own life.  What are the things in this Man’s life?  He says:  “I have realized the ideal—­I do.”  There are four things that I want to say about Him, four notes in the music of His life.

First, spirituality.  That is one of the words that needs redeeming from abuse.  He was the embodiment of the spiritual ideal in life.  He was spiritual in the high, true, full, broad, blest sense of that word.

It may be well for a moment to note what spirituality did not mean in the life of Jesus Christ.  It did not mean asceticism.  During all the years of His ministry, during all the years of His teaching, you never find a single instance in which Jesus Christ made a whip of cords to scourge Himself.  And all that business of scourging oneself—­an attempt to elevate the spirit by the ruin of the actual flesh—­is absolutely opposed to His view of life.  Jesus Christ did not deny Himself.  The fact of His life was this—­that He touched everything familiarly.  He went into all the relationship of life.  He went to the widow.  He took up the children and held them in His arms, and looked into their eyes till heaven was poured in as He looked.  He didn’t go and get behind walls somewhere.  He didn’t get away and say:  “Now, if I am going to get pure I shall do it by shutting men out.”  You remember what the Pharisees said of Him once.  They said:  “This man receiveth sinners.”  You know how they said it.  They meant to say:  “We did hope that we should make something out of this new man, but we are quite disappointed.  He receives sinners.”