water makes steam, does it not?  And what is to be done with the steam that comes off the ‘boiling’ spirit?  You may either let it go roaring through a waste-pipe and do nothing but make a noise and be idly dissipated in the air, or you may lead it into a cylinder and make it lift a piston, and then you will get work out of it.  That is what the Apostle desires us to do with our emotion.  The lightning goes careering through the sky, but we have harnessed it to tram-cars nowadays, and made it ‘work for its living,’ to carry our letters and light our rooms.  Fervour of a Christian spirit is all right when it is yoked to Christian work, and made to draw what else is a heavy chariot.  It is not emotion, but it is indolent emotion, that is the curse of much of our ‘fervent’ Christianity.

There cannot be too much fervour.  There may be too little outlet provided for the fervour to work in.  It may all go off in comfortable feeling, in enthusiastic prayers and ‘Amens!’ and ‘So be it, Lords!’ and the like, or it may come with us into our daily tasks, and make us buckle to with more earnestness, and more continuity.  Diligence driven by earnestness, and fervour that works, are the true things.

And surely, surely there cannot be any genuine Christianity—­certainly there cannot be any deep Christianity—­which is not fervent.

We hear from certain quarters of the Church a great deal about the virtue of moderation.  But it seems to me that, if you take into account what Christianity tells us, the ‘sober’ feeling is fervent feeling, and tepid feeling is imperfect feeling.  I cannot understand any man believing as plain matter-of-fact the truths on which the whole New Testament insists, and keeping himself ‘cool,’ or, as our friends call it, ‘moderate.’  Brethren, enthusiasm—­which properly means the condition of being dwelt in by a god—­is the wise, the reasonable attitude of Christian men, if they believe their own Christianity and are really serving Jesus Christ.  They should be ’diligent in business, fervent’—­boiling—­in spirit.

III.  The diligence and the fervency are both to be animated by the thought, ‘Serving the Lord!’

Some critics, as many of you know, no doubt, would prefer to read this verse in its last clause ‘serving the time.’  But that seems to me a very lame and incomplete climax for the Apostle’s thought, and it breaks entirely the sequence which, as I think, is discernible in it.  Much rather, he here, in the closing member of the triplet, suggests a thought which will be stimulus to the diligence and fuel to the fire that makes the spirit boil.