The second thing implied is, that if you love you will obey.  That is plain enough.  The keeping of the commandments will be easy where there is love in the heart.  The will will bow where there is love in the heart.  Love is the only fire that is hot enough to melt the iron obstinacy of a creature’s will.  The will cannot be driven.  Strike it with violence and it stiffens; touch it gently and it yields.  If you try to put an iron collar upon the will, like the demoniac in the Gospels, the touch of the apparent restraint drives it into fury, and it breaks the bands asunder.  Fasten it with the silken leash of love, and a ‘little child’ can lead it.  So faith works by love, because whom we trust we shall love, and whom we love we shall obey.

Therefore we have got to the root now, and nothing is needful but an operative faith, out of which will come all the blessed possession of a transforming Spirit, and all sublimities and noblenesses of an obedient and submissive will.

My brother!  Paul and James shake hands here.  There is a ‘faith’ so called, which does not work.  It is dead!  Let me beseech you, none of you to rely upon what you choose to call your faith in Jesus Christ, but examine it.  Does it do anything?  Does it help you to be like Him?  Does it open your hearts for His Spirit to come in?  Does it fill them with love to that Master, a love which proves itself by obedience?  Plain questions, questions that any man can answer; questions that go to the root of the whole matter.  If your faith does that, it is genuine; if it does not, it is not.

And do not trust either to forms, or to your freedom from forms.  They will not save your souls, they will not make you more Christ-like.  They will not help you to pardon, purity, holiness, blessedness.  In these respects neither if we have them are we the better, nor if we have them not are we the worse.  If you are trusting to Christ, and by that faith are having your hearts moulded and made over again into all holy obedience, then you have all that you need.  Unless you have, though you partook of all Christian rites, though you believed all Christian truth, though you fought against superstitious reliance on forms, you have not the one thing needful, for ’in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but faith which worketh by love.’

SLAVES AND FREE

   ’He that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the
   Lord’s free man:  likewise also he that is called, being
   free, is Christ’s servant.’—­1 COR. vii. 22.