and far-off gazing eye, ‘steadfastly setting His face to go to Jerusalem,’ and followed as He pressed up the rocky road from Jericho, by that wondering group, astonished at the rigidity of purpose that was stamped on His features.  That Christ gives us His Spirit to make us tenacious, constant, righteously obstinate, inflexible in the pursuit of all that is lovely and of good report, like Himself.  That Divine Spirit will cure the fickleness of our natures; for our wills are never fixed till they are fixed in obedience, and never free until they elect to serve Him.  That Divine Spirit will cure the wandering of our hearts and bind us to Himself.  It will lift us above the selfish and cowardly dependence on externals and surroundings, men and things, in which we are all tempted to live.  We are all too like aneroid barometers, that go up and down with every variation of a foot or two in our level, but if we have the Spirit of Christ dwelling in us, it will cut the bonds that bind us to the world, and give us possession of a deeper love than can be sustained by, or is derived from, these superficial sources.  The true possession of the Divine Spirit, if I might use such a metaphor, sets a man on an insulating stool, and all the currents that move round about him are powerless to reach him.  If we have that Divine Spirit within us, it will give us an experience of the preciousness and the truth, the certitude and the sweetness, of Christ’s Gospel, which will make it impossible that we should ever cast away the confidence which has such ‘recompense of reward.’  No man will be surely bound to the truth and person of Christ with bonds that cannot be snapped, except he who in his heart has the knowledge of Him which is possession, and by the gift of the Divine Spirit is knit to Jesus Christ.

So, dear friends, whilst the world is full of wise words about steadfastness, and exalts determination of character and fixity of purpose, rightly, as the basis of much good, our Gospel comes to us poor, light, thistledown creatures, and lets us see how we can be steadfast and settled by being fastened to a steadfast and settled Christ.  When storms are raging they lash light articles on deck to holdfasts.  Let us lash ourselves to the abiding Christ, and we, too, shall abide.

II.  In the next place, notice the aim or purpose of this Christian steadfastness.

‘He stablisheth us with you in Christ,’ or as the original has it even more significantly, into or ‘unto Christ.’  Now that seems to me to imply two things—­first, that our steadfastness, made possible by our possession of that Divine Spirit, is steadfastness in our relations to Jesus Christ.  We are established in reference or in regard to Him.  In other words, what Paul here means is, first, a fixed conviction of the truth that He is the Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, and my Saviour.  That is the first step.  Men who are steadfast without their intellect guiding and settling the steadfastness are not steadfast, but obstinate and pigheaded.  We are meant to be guided by our understandings, and no fixity is anything better than the immobility of a stone, unless it be based upon a distinct and whole-brained intellectual acceptance of Jesus Christ as the All-in-all for us, for life and death, for inward and outward being.