If we do that, brethren, if we really yield ourselves to Him, in heart and will, in life and conduct, submitting our understanding to His infallible Word, and our wills to His authority, regulating our conduct by His perfect pattern, and in all things seeking to serve Him and to realise His presence, then be sure of this, that we shall be set free from the one real bondage, and that is the bondage of our own wicked selves.  There is no such tyranny as mob tyranny; and there is no such slavery as to be ruled by the mob of our own passions and lusts and inclinations and other meannesses that yelp and clamour within us, and seek to get hold of us and to sway.  There is only one way by which the brute domination of the lower part of our nature can be surely and thoroughly put down, and that is by turning to Jesus Christ and saying to Him, ’Lord! do Thou rule this anarchic kingdom within me, for I cannot govern it myself.  Do Thou guide and direct and subdue.’  You can only govern yourself and be free from the compulsion of your own evil nature when you surrender the control to the Master, and say ever, ’Speak, Lord! for Thy slave hears.  Here am I, send me.’

And that is the only way by which a man can be delivered from the bondage of dependence upon outward things.  I said at the beginning of these remarks that my text occurred in the course of a discussion in which the Apostle was illustrating the tendency of true Christian faith to set man free from, and to make him largely independent of, the varieties in external circumstances.  Christian faith does so, because it brings into a life a sufficient compensation for all losses, limitations, and sorrows, and a good which is the reality of which all earthly goods are but shadows.  So the slave may be free in Christ, and the poor man may be rich in Him, and the sad man may be joyful, and the joyful man may be delivered from excess of gladness, and the rich man be kept from the temptations and sins of wealth, and the free man be taught to surrender his liberty to the Lord who makes him free.  Thus, if we have the all-sufficient compensation which there is in Jesus Christ, the satisfaction for all our needs and desires, we do not need to trouble ourselves so much as we sometimes do about these changing things round about us.  Let them come, let them go; let the darkness veil the light, and the light illuminate the darkness; let summer and winter alternate; let tribulation and prosperity succeed each other; we have a source of blessedness unaffected by these.  Ice may skin the surface of the lake, but deep beneath, the water is at the same temperature in winter and in summer.  Storms may sweep the face of the deep, but in the abyss there is calm which is not stagnation.  So he that cleaves to Christ is delivered from the slavery that binds men to the details and accidents of outward life.