everything on earth or in hell of being unloving.  One sharp word to your brother or sister brings a cloud upon you without your knowing it.  People are so accustomed to talk just as they like about each other that they say sharp and unkind and unloving things, and when a cloud comes in consequence they cannot understand it.  If there is one thing that grieves God, if there is one thing that hinders the Spirit—­the fruit of the Spirit is love—­it is the want of lovingness.  If you want to live in the joy of the Holy Ghost make your covenant with God.  “But,” you say, “there is a Christian man who makes me so impatient; he does trouble me and vex me so with his stupidity.  And there are those worldly men; how they have tempted me in times past and done me harm!  And there is that business man who is trying to ruin me.”  Take them all, and your own wife and children and every one around you and say, “I understand it, love is rest, and rest is love.  God resteth in His love.  Love is rest and rest is love, and where there is no love the rest must be disturbed.”  And let us say to-day, “I see what the joy is; it is the joy of always loving, it is the joy of losing my own life in love to others.”  In connection with humility, some one asks, “How about that text, ‘In honor preferring one another?’” When a soul comes into perfect humility before God it becomes nothing, and God becomes all in all.  I am nothing.  There is no self to be affronted; I have said before God:  “I am nothing; it is only Thy life and light that shines.  The honor is Thine, and nothing may touch me but what is against the glory of my God.”

Beloved, are you living in the joy of the Holy Ghost?  Come and accept a blessing and give yourself up to live a life of humility in which you are nothing, and a life of love like Christ’s in which you only live for your fellow-men, for the kingdom of God is the joy of the Holy Ghost.

My last thought is that the joy of the Holy Ghost is the joy of working for God.  The joy of the presence of Jesus, the joy of deliverance from sin, the joy of love for the brethren, and then the joy of working for God.  Some of us have at times felt what an incomprehensible thing it is that the everlasting God should work through us; and we have said, “Lord, what is this, that Thou the Almighty One dost work in me and through me, a vile worm by nature?” It is a mystery that passeth knowledge, and yet it is so true.  The joy of the Holy Ghost comes when a man gives himself up to the Christlike work of carrying the love of God to men.  Let us seek the perishing, let us live and die for souls, let us live and die that our fellow-men may be reclaimed and brought back to their God.  There is no joy like hearing the joy-song of a new-born soul.  But yes, there is another joy that may be as deep.  Even if God does not give me the blessing of hearing the newborn soul sing its song, I may have the joy, the sympathy with Jesus in His rejected life, and