And what did they mean?  They meant what you have so often said:  “You can’t touch pitch without being defiled.”  But this Man sat down with the publican and He didn’t take on any defilement from the publican.  On the other hand, He gave the publican His purity in the life of Jesus Christ.  Things worked the other way.  He was the great negative of God to the very law of evil that you have—­evil contaminates good.  If you will put on a plate one apple that is getting bad among twelve others that are pure, the bad one will influence the others.  Christ came to drive back every force of disease and every force of evil by this strong purity of His own person, and He said:  “I will go among the bad and make them good.”  That is what He was doing the whole way through.  So His spirituality was not asceticism.  And if you are going to be so spiritual that you see no beauty in the flowers and hear no music in the song of the birds; if the life which you pass into when you consent to the crucifixion of self does not open to you the very gates of God, and make the singing of the birds and the blossoming of the flowers infinitely more beautiful, you have never seen Jesus yet.

What was His spirituality?  The spirituality of Jesus Christ was a concrete realization of a great truth which He laid down in His own beatitudes.  What was that?  “Blest are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”  Now, the trouble is we have been lifting all the good things of God and putting them in heaven.  And I don’t wonder that you sing: 

  My willing soul would stay
    In such a frame as this,
  And sit and sing itself away
    To everlasting bliss.

No wonder you want to sing yourself away to everlasting bliss, because everything that is worth having you have put up there.  But Jesus said:  “Blest are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”  If you are pure you will see Him everywhere—­in the flower that blooms, in the march of history, in the sorrows of men, above the darkness of the darkest cloud; and you will know that God is in the field when He is most invisible.

Second, subjection.  The next note in the music of His life is His absolute subjection to God.  You can very often tell the great philosophies which are governing human lives by the little catchwords that slip off men’s tongues:  “Well, I thank God I am my own master.”  That is your trouble, man.  It is because you are your own master that you are in danger of hell.  A man says:  “Can’t I do as I like with my own?” You have got no “own” to do what you like with.  It is because men have forgotten the covenant of God, the kingship of God, that we have all the wreckage and ruin that blights this poor earth of ours.  Here is the Man who never forgot it.

Did you notice those wonderful words:  “I do nothing of myself, but as my Father taught me, I speak.”  He neither did nor spoke anything of Himself.  It was a wonderful life.  He stood forevermore between the next moment and heaven.  And the Father’s voice said, “Do this,” and He said “Amen, I came to do thy will,” and did it.  And the Father’s voice said, “Speak these words to men,” and He, “Amen,” and He spoke.