The Christian life is to be one long effort, partial, and gradual, to unfold the freedom possessed.  Paul knew full well that his emancipation was not perfect.  It was, probably, after this triumphant expression of confidence that he wrote, ’Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect.’  The first stage is the gift of power, the appropriation and development of that power is the work of a life; and it ought to pass through a well-marked series and cycle of growing changes.  The way to develop it is by constant application to the source of all freedom, the life-giving Spirit, and by constant effort to conquer sins and temptations.  There is no such thing in the Christian conflict as a painless development.  We must mortify the deeds of the body if we are to live in the Spirit.  The Christian progress has in it the nature of a crucifixion.  It is to be effort, steadily directed for the sake of Christ, and in the joy of His Spirit, to destroy sin, and to win practical holiness.  Homely moralities are the outcome and the test of all pretensions to spiritual communion.

We are, further, to perfect holiness in the fear of the Lord, by ‘waiting for the Redemption,’ which is not merely passive waiting, but active expectation, as of one who stretches out a welcoming hand to an approaching friend.  Nor must we forget that this accomplished deliverance is but partial whilst upon earth.  ’The body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness.’  But there may be indefinite approximation to complete deliverance.  The metaphors in Scripture under which Christian progress is described, whether drawn from a conflict or a race, or from a building, or from the growth of a tree, all suggest the idea of constant advance against hindrances, which yet, constant though it is, does not reach the goal here.  And this is our noblest earthly condition—­not to be pure, but to be tending towards it and conscious of impurity.  Hence our tempers should be those of humility, strenuous effort, firm hope.  We are as slaves who have escaped, but are still in the wilderness, with the enemies’ dogs baying at our feet; but we shall come to the land of freedom, on whose sacred soil sin and death can never tread.

CHRIST CONDEMNING SIN

’For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.’—­ROMANS viii. 3.

In the first verse of this chapter we read that ’There is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.’  The reason of that is, that they are set free from the terrible sequence of cause and effect which constitutes ‘the law of sin and death’; and the reason why they are freed from that awful sequence by the power of Christ is, because He has ‘condemned sin in the flesh.’  The occurrence of the two words ‘condemnation’ (ver. 1) and ‘condemned’