So, dear friends, we come here in sight of the unique and blessed characteristic of all Christian morality, and of all its practical exhortations, and the Gospel stands alone as the mightiest moulding power in the world, just because its word is ’love, and do as thou wilt.’  For in the measure of thy love will thy will coincide with the will of Christ.  There is nothing else that has anything like that power.  We do not want to be told what is right.  We know it a great deal better than we practise it.  A revelation from heaven that simply told me my duty would be surplusage.  ’If there had been a law that could have given life, righteousness had been by the law.’  We want a life, not a law, and the love of Christ brings the life to us.

And so, dear friends, that life, restrained and impelled by the love to which it is being assimilated, is a life of liberty and a life of blessedness.  In the measure in which the love of Christ constrains any man, it makes for him difficulties easy, the impossible possible, the crooked things straight, and the rough places plain.  The duty becomes a delight, and self ceases to disturb.  If the love of God is shed abroad in a heart, and in the measure in which it is, that heart will be at rest, and a great peace will brood over it.  Then the will bows in glad submission, and all the powers arise to joyous service.  We are lords of the world and ourselves when we are Christ’s servants for love’s sake; and earth and its good are never so good as when the power of His echoed love rules our lives.  Do you know and believe that Christ loves you?  Do you know and believe that you had a place in His heart when He hung on the Cross for the salvation of the world?  Have you answered that love with yours, kindled by your faith in, and experience of, His?  Is His love the overmastering impulse which urges you to all good, the mighty constraint that keeps you back from all evil, the magnet that draws, the anchor that steadies, the fortress that defends, the light that illumines, the treasure that enriches?  Is it the law that commands, and the power that enables?  Then you are blessed, though people will perhaps say that you are mad, whilst here; and you will be blessed for ever and ever.

THE ENTREATIES OF GOD

   ’Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God
   did beseech ... by us:  we pray ... in Christ’s stead,
   be ye reconciled to God.’—­2 COR. v. 20.

These are wonderful and bold words, not so much because of what they claim for the servants as because of what they reveal of the Lord.  That thought, ‘as though God did beseech,’ seems to me to be the one deserving of our attention now, far rather than any inferences which may be drawn from the words as to the relation of preachers of the Gospel to man and to God.  I wish, therefore, to try to set forth the wonderfulness of this mystery of a beseeching God, and to put by the side of it the other wonder and mystery of men refusing the divine beseechings.