Again, the vision of the risen Christ will also lead to patient persistence in duty.  If we have Him before us, the distasteful duty which He sets us will not be distasteful, and the small tasks, in which great faithfulness may be manifested, will cease to be small.  If we have Him before us we have in that risen Christ the great and lasting Example of how patient continuance in well-doing triumphs over the sorrows that it bears, by and in patiently bearing them, and is crowned at last with glory and honour.  The risen Christ is the Pattern for the men who will not be turned aside from the path of duty by any obstacles, dangers, or threats.  The risen Christ is the signal Example of glory following upon faithfulness, and of the crown being the result of the Cross.  The risen Christ is the manifest Helper of them that put their trust in Him; and one of the plainest lessons and of the most imperative commands which come from the believing gaze upon that Lord who died because He would do the will of the Father, and is throned and crowned in the heavens because He died, is—­By patient continuance in well-doing let us commit the keeping of our souls to Him:  and abide in the calling wherewith we are called.

And, again, the sight of the risen Christ leads to a life of calm expectancy.  ‘If I will that He tarry till I come’ conveys that shade of meaning.  The Apostle was to wait for the Lord from Heaven, and that vision which was given to these 500 men sent them home to their abodes to make all the rest of their lives one calm aspiration for, and patient expectation of, the return of the Lord.  These primitive Christians expected that Jesus Christ would come speedily.  That expectation was disappointed in so far as the date was concerned, but after nineteen centuries it still remains true that all vigorous and vital Christian life must have in it, as a very important element of its vitality, the onward look which ever is anticipating, which often is desiring, and which constantly is confident of, the coming of the Lord from Heaven.  The Resurrection has for its consequences, its sequel and corollary, first the Ascension; then the long tract of time during which Jesus Christ is absent, but still in divine presence rules the world; and, finally, His coming again in that same body in which the disciples saw Him depart from them.  And no Christian life is up to the level of its privileges, nor has any Christian faith grasped the whole articles of its creed, except that which sets in the very centre of all its visions of the future that great thought—­He shall come again.

Questions of chronology have nothing to do with that.  It stands there before us, the certain fact, made certain and inevitable by the past facts of the Cross and the Grave and Olivet.  He has come, He will come; He has gone, He will come back.  And for us the life that we live in the flesh ought to be a life of waiting for God’s Son from Heaven, and of patient, confident expectancy that when He shall be manifested we also shall be manifested with Him in glory.