Persis seems to me to suggest, too, the safeguard of work.  Ah, if she had not ‘laboured in the Lord,’ and been ‘in the Lord’ whilst she was labouring, she would very soon have stopped work.  Our Christian work, however pure its motive when we begin it, has in itself the tendency to become mechanical, and to be done from lower motives than those from which it was begun.  That is true about a man in my position.  It is true about all of us, in our several ways of trying to serve our dear Lord and Master.  Unless we make a conscience of continually renewing our communion with Him, and getting our feet once more firmly upon the rock, we shall certainly in our Christian work, having begun in the spirit, continue in the flesh, and before we know where we are, we shall be doing work from habit, because we did it yesterday at this hour, because people expect it of us, because A, B, or C does it, or for a hundred other reasons, all of which are but too familiar to us by experience.  They are sure to slip in; they change the whole character of the work, and they harm the workers.  The only way by which we can keep the garland fresh is by continually dipping it in the fountain.  The only way by which we can keep our Christian work pure, useful, worthy of the Master, is by seeing to it that our work itself does not draw us away from our fellowship with Him.  And the more we have to do, the more needful is it that we should listen to Christ’s voice when He says to us, ’Come ye yourselves apart with Me into a solitary place, and there renew your communion with Me.’

The last lesson about our work which I draw from Persis is the unexpected immortality of true Christian service.  How Persis would have opened her eyes if anybody had told her that nearly 1900 years after she lived, people in a far-away barbarous island would be sitting thinking about her, as you and I are doing now!  How astonished she would have been if it had been said to her, ’Now, Persis, wheresoever in the whole world the Gospel is preached, your name and your work and your epitaph will go with it, and as long as men know about Jesus Christ, your and their Master, they will know about you, His humble servant.’  Well, we shall not have our names in that fashion in men’s memories, but Jesus will have your name and mine, if we do His work as this woman did it, in His memory.  ’I will never forget any of their works.’  And if we—­self-forgetful to the limit of our power, and as the joyful result of our personal union with that Saviour who has done everything for us—­try to live for His praise and glory in any fashion, then be sure of this, that our poor deeds are as immortal as Him for whom they are done, and that we may take to ourselves the great word which He has spoken, when He has declared that at the last He will confess His confessors’ names before the angels in heaven.  Blessed are the living that ’live in the Lord’; blessed are the workers that work ‘in the Lord,’ for when they come to be the dead that ‘die in the Lord’ and rest from their labours, their works shall follow them.