to me far more than it does to him.  The world is his who from it has learned to despise it, to know himself and to know God.  He owns the world who uses it as the arena, or wrestling ground, on which, by labour, he may gain strength, and in which he may do service.  Antagonism helps to develop muscle, and the best use of the outward frame of things is that we shall take it as the field upon which we can serve God.

And now all these three things—­the contempt of earth, the use of earth for growing souls, and the use of earth as the field of service—­all these things belong most truly to the man who belongs to Christ.  The world is His, and if we live near Him and cultivate fellowship with Him, and see His face gleaming through all the Material, and are led up nearer to Him by everything around us, then we own the world and wring the sweetness to the last drop out of it, though we may have but little of that outward relation to its goods which short-sighted men call possessing them.  We may solve the paradox of those who, ‘having nothing, yet have all,’ if we belong to Christ the Lord of all things, and so have co-possession with Him of all His riches.

III.  Further, my text tells us, in the third place, that Christian men, who belong to Jesus Christ, are the lords and masters of ’life and death.’

Both of these words are here used, as it seems to me, in their simple, physical sense, natural life and natural death.  You may say, ‘Well, everybody is lord of life in that sense.’  Yes, of course, in a fashion we all possess it, seeing that we are all alive.  But that mysterious gift of personality, that awful gift of conscious existence, only belongs, in the deepest sense, to the men who belong to Jesus Christ.  I do not call that man the owner of his own life who is not the lord of his own spirit.  I do not see in what, except in the mere animal sense in which a fly, or a spider, or a toad may be called the master of its life, that man owns himself who has not given up himself to Jesus Christ.  The only way to get a real hold of yourselves is to yield yourselves to Him who gives you back Himself, and yourself along with Him.  The true ownership of life depends upon self-control, and self-control depends upon letting Jesus Christ govern us wholly.  So the measure in which it is true of me that ’I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,’ is the measure in which the lower life of sense really belongs to us, and ministers to our highest good.

And then turn to the other member of this wonderful antithesis, ‘whether life or death.’  Surely if there is anything over which no man can become lord, except by sinfully taking his fate into his own hands, it is death.  And yet even death, in which we seem to be abjectly passive, and by which so many of us are dragged away reluctantly from everything that we care to possess, may become a matter of consent and therefore a moral act.  Animals expire; a Christian man may yield his soul to his Saviour, who is the Lord both of the dead and of the living.  If thus we feel our dependence upon Him, and yield up our lives to Him, and can say, ’Living or dying we are the Lord’s,’ then we may be quite sure that death, too, will be our servant, and that our wills will be concerned even in passing out of life.