And so, brethren, our text tells us what we may all be.  There is no heart without its deity.  Alas! alas! for the many listening to me now whose spirits are like some of those Egyptian temples, which had in the inmost shrine a coiled-up serpent, the mummy of a monkey, or some other form as animal and obscene.

Oh! turn to Christ and cry, ’Arise, O Lord, into Thy rest, Thou and the ark of Thy strength.’  Open your hearts and let Christ come in.  And before Him, as of old, the bestial Dagon will be found, dejected and truncated, lying on the sill there; and all the vain, cruel, lustful gods that have held riot and carnival in your hearts will flee away into the darkness, like some foul ghosts at cock-crow.  ’If any man hear My voice and open the door I will come in.’  And the glory of the Lord shall fill the house.

DEATH, THE FRIEND

   ’...  All things are yours ... death.’—­1 COR. iii. 21, 22.

What Jesus Christ is to a man settles what everything else is to Him.  Our relation to Jesus determines our relation to the universe.  If we belong to Him, everything belongs to us.  If we are His servants, all things are our servants.  The household of Jesus, which is the whole Creation, is not divided against itself, and the fellow-servants do not beat one another.  Two bodies moving in the same direction, and under the impulse of the same force, cannot come into collision, and since ‘all things work together,’ according to the counsel of His will, ‘all things work together for good’ to His lovers.  The triumphant words of my text are no piece of empty rhetoric, but the plain result of two facts—­Christ’s rule and the Christian’s submission.  ‘All things are yours, and ye are Christ’s,’ so the stars in their courses fight against those who fight against Him, and if we are at peace with Him we shall ’make a league with the beasts of the field, and the stones of the field,’ which otherwise would be hindrances and stumbling-blocks, ‘shall be at peace with’ us.

The Apostle carries his confidence in the subservience of all things to Christ’s servants very far, and the words of my text, in which he dares to suggest that ‘the Shadow feared of man’ is, after all, a veiled friend, are hard to believe, when we are brought face to face with death, either when we meditate on our own end, or when our hearts are sore and our hands are empty.  Then the question comes, and often is asked with tears of blood, Is it true that this awful force, which we cannot command, does indeed serve us?  Did it serve those whom it dragged from our sides; and in serving them, did it serve us?  Paul rings out his ‘Yes’; and if we have as firm a hold of Paul’s Lord as Paul had, our answer will be the same.  Let me, then, deal with this great thought that lies here, of the conversion of the last enemy into a friend, the assurance that we may all have that death is ours, though not in the sense that we can command it, yet in the sense that it ministers to our highest good.