This needs to be as fully and emphatically preached as the other doctrine that eternal life is the gift of God.  All manner of mischiefs may come, and have come, from either of these twin thoughts, wrenched apart.  But let us weave them as closely together as the stems of the flowers that make the garlands are twined, and feel that there is a perfect consistency of both in theory, and that there must be a continual union of both, in our belief and in our practice.  Eternal life is the gift of God, on condition of our diligence and earnestness.  It is not all the same whether you are a lazy Christian or not.  It does make an eternal difference in our condition whether here we ’run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus.’  We have to receive the crown as a gift; we have to wrestle and run, as contending for a prize.

III.  And now, lastly, note the power of the reward as motive for life.

Paul says roundly in our text that the desire to obtain the incorruptible crown is a legitimate spring of Christian action.  Now, I do not need to waste your time and my own in defending Christian morality from the fantastic objection that it is low and selfish, because it encourages itself to efforts by the prospect of the crown.  If there are any men who are Christians—­if such a contradiction can be even stated in words—­only because of what they hope to gain thereby in another world, they will not get what they hope for; and they would not like it if they did.  I do not believe that there are any such; and sure I am, if there are, that it is not Christianity that has made them so.  But a thought that we must not take as a supreme motive, we may rightly accept as a subsidiary encouragement.  We are not Christians unless the dominant motive of our lives be the love of the Lord Jesus Christ; and unless we feel a necessity, because of loving Him, to aim to be like Him.  But, that being so, who shall hinder me from quickening my flagging energies, and stimulating my torpid faith, and encouraging my cowardice, by the thought that yonder there remain rest, victory, the fulness of life, the flashing of glory, and the purity of perfect righteousness?  If such hopes are low and selfish as motives, would God that more of us were obedient to such low and selfish motives!

Now it seems to me, that this spring of action is not as strong in the Christians of this day as it used to be, and as it should be.  You do not hear much about heaven in ordinary preaching.  I do not think it occupies a very large place in the average Christian man’s mind.  We have all got such a notion nowadays of the great good that the Gospel does in society and in the present, and some of us have been so frightened by the nonsense that has been talked about the ‘other-worldliness’ of Christianity—­as if that was a disgrace to it—­that it seems to me that the future of glory and blessedness has very largely faded away, as a motive for Christian men’s energies, like the fresco off a neglected convent wall.