‘They say.  What say they?  Let them say.’  If we take Christ’s commandment for our absolute law, and Christ’s approbation for our highest aim and all-sufficient reward, we shall then be able to brush aside other maxims and other people’s opinions of us, safely and humbly, and to say, ’With me it is a very small matter to be judged of you, or of man’s judgment.  He that judgeth me is the Lord.’

The envoy of some foreign power cares very little what the inhabitants of the land to which he is ambassador may think of him and his doings; it is his sovereign’s good opinion that he seeks to secure.  The soldier’s reward is his commander’s praise, the slave’s joy is the master’s smile, and for us it ought to be the law of our lives, and in the measure in which we really belong to Christ it will be the law of our lives, that ’we labour that, whether present or absent, we may be pleasing to Him.’

So, brethren, as teachers, as patterns, as objects of love which is only too apt to be exclusive and to master us, we can only take one another in subordination to our supreme submission to Christ, and if we are His, our duty, as our joy, is to count no man necessary to our wellbeing, but to hang only on the one Man, whom it is safe and blessed to believe utterly, to obey abjectly, and to love with all our strength, because He is more than man, even God manifest in the flesh.

II.  And now let us pass to the next idea here, secondly, Christ’s servants are the lords of ‘the world.’

That phrase is used here, no doubt, as meaning the external material universe.  These creatures around us, they belong to us, if we belong to Jesus Christ.  That man owns the world who despises it.  There are plenty of rich men in Manchester who say they possess so many thousand pounds.  Turn the sentence about and it would be a great deal truer—­the thousands of pounds possess them.  They are the slaves of their own possessions, and every man who counts any material thing as indispensable to his wellbeing, and regards it as the chiefest good, is the slave-servant of that thing.  He owns the world who turns it to the highest use of growing his soul by it.  All material things are given, and, I was going to say, were created, for the growth of men, or at all events their highest purpose is that men should, by them, grow.  And therefore, as the scaffolding is swept away when the building is finished, so God will sweep away this material universe with all its wonders of beauty and of contrivance, when men have been grown by means of it.  The material is less than the soul, and he is master of the world, and owns it, who has got thoughts out of it, truth out of it, impulses out of it, visions of God out of it, who has by it been led nearer to his divine Master.  If I look out upon a fair landscape, and the man who draws the rents of it is standing by my side, and I suck more sweetness, and deeper impulses, and larger and loftier thoughts out of it than he does, it belongs