Paul means, next, a steadfastness in regard to Christ in our trust and love.  Surely if from Him there is for ever streaming out an unbroken flow of tenderness, there should be ever on our sides an equally unbroken opening of our hearts for the reception of His love, and an equally uninterrupted response to it in our grateful affection.  There can be no more damning condemnation of the vacillations and fluctuations of Christian men’s affections than the steadfastness of Christ’s love to them.  He loves ever; He is unalterable in the communication and effluence of His heart.  Surely it is most fitting that we should be steadfast in our devotion and answering love to Him.  And Paul means not only fixedness of intellectual conviction and continuity of loving response, but also habitual obedience, which is always ready to do His will.

So we should answer His ‘Yea!’ with our ‘Amen!’ and having an unchanging Christ to rest upon, we should rest upon Him unchanging.  The broken, fluctuating affections and trusts and obediences which mark so much of the average Christian life of this day are only too sad proofs of how scant our possession of that Spirit of steadfastness must be supposed to be.  God’s ‘Yea’ is answered by our faltering ‘Amen’; God’s truth is hesitatingly accepted; God’s love is partially returned; God’s work is slothfully and negligently done.  ’Be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.’

Another thought is suggested by these words—­viz. that such steadfastness as we have been trying to describe has for its result a deeper penetration into Jesus Christ and a fuller possession of Him.  The only way by which we can grow nearer and nearer to our Lord is by steadfastly keeping beside Him.  You cannot get the spirit of a landscape unless you sit down and gaze, and let it soak into you.  The cheap tripper never sees the lake.  You cannot get to know a man until you summer and winter with him.  No subject worth studying opens itself to the hasty glance.  Was it not Sir Isaac Newton who used to say, ‘I have no genius, but I keep a subject before me’?  ’Abide in Me; as the branch cannot bear fruit except it abide in the vine, no more can ye except ye abide in Me.’  Continuous, steadfast adhesion to Him is the condition of growing up into His likeness, and receiving more and more of His beauty into our waiting hearts.  ’Wait on the Lord; wait, I say, on the Lord.’

III.  Lastly, notice the very humble and commonplace sphere in which the Christian steadfastness manifests itself.

It was nothing of more importance than that Paul had said he was going to Corinth, and did not, on which he brings all this array of great principles to bear.  From which I gather just this thought, that the highest gifts of God’s grace and the greatest truths of God’s Word are meant to regulate the tiniest things in our daily life.  It is no degradation to the lightning to have to carry messages.  It