Boys, before you go to work to-morrow, before you go to sleep to-night, resolve that, God helping you, you are going to seek first the Kingdom of God.  Perhaps some boys here are deserters; they began once before to serve Christ, and they deserted.  Come back again, come back again today!  Others have never enlisted at all.  Will you not do it now?  You are old enough to decide.  The grandest moment of a boy’s life is that moment when he decides to “Seek first the Kingdom of God.”

THE CHANGED LIFE: 

THE GREATEST NEED OF THE WORLD.

God is all for quality; man is for quantity.  The immediate need of the world at this moment is not more of us, but, if I may use the expression, a better brand of us.  To secure ten men of an improved type would be better than if we had ten thousand more of the average Christians distributed all over the world.  There is such a thing in the evangelistic sense as winning the whole world and losing our own soul.  And the first consideration is our own life—­our own spiritual relations to God—­our own likeness to Christ.  And I am anxious, briefly, to look at the right and the wrong way of becoming like Christ—­of becoming better men:  the right and the wrong way of sanctification.

Let me begin by naming, and in part discarding, some processes in vogue already for producing better lives.  These processes are far from wrong; in their place they may even be essential.  One ventures to disparage them only because they do not turn out the most perfect possible work.

I. The first imperfect method is to rely on

          RESOLUTION.

In will power, in mere spasms of earnestness, there is no salvation.  Struggle, effort, even agony, have their place in Christianity, as we shall see; but this is not where they come in.

In mid-Atlantic the Etruria, in which I was sailing, suddenly stopped.  Something had gone wrong with the engines.  There were five hundred able-bodied men on board the ship.  Do you think that if we had gathered together and pushed against the mast we could have pushed it on?

When one attempts to sanctify himself by effort, he is trying to make his boat go by pushing against the mast.  He is like a drowning man trying to lift himself out of the water by pulling at the hair of his own head.

Christ held up this method almost to ridicule when He said, “Which of you by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature?” Put down that method forever as being futile.

The one redeeming feature of the self-sufficient method is this—­that those who try it find out almost at once that it will not gain the goal.

2.  Another experimenter says:  “But that is not my method.  I have seen the folly of a mere wild struggle in the dark.  I work on a principle.  My plan is not to waste power on random effort, but to concentrate on a single sin.  By taking