Tj A lady came to me in Japan last summer, and said, " I am a missionary here, and have come to make a sad confession to you. I have come to tell you this — that though I came out from America to teach the people here in Japan, I have never had a single hour of joy in my Christian life. And " she said, " I feel so ashamed of it. Can you tell me the secret of joy ? Can you
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tell me how to get some gladness into my life ? I feel that I can- not commend the religion of Jesus Christ to people, while I have a joyless experience." I said, " I do not know any secret of joy like this — I am alive in the risen, victorious, indissoluble life of my risen Lord. The glory of that Easter morning is mine. Why, I cannot think of that for five minutes without being glad, without saying good-bye to sorrow and sighing." x
f[ That manly Christian, that stalwart teacher, Dr. Dale, of Birmingham, tells us that, towards the end of his life, he began to ask God to forgive something for which he had never asked forgiveness before. He asked God to forgive him for the sin of gloom. He felt that his face had been gloomy, and that his voice had been gloomy ; and he wanted forgiveness for the gloom that had overshadowed his life. You remember what happened. On one Easter morning, as he was getting ready for the Easter Day services, there flashed upon him, with a new meaning, the thought — Jesus Christ is alive ! He walked up and down his study, and said, " Jesus Christ is alive ! " And, in the glory of that risen life, he went to preach ; and his sun nevermore went down. In the gladness of that resurrection vision, in the glory of that Easter morning, he lived, and his congregation sang every Sabbath morning the Easter hymn, " Christ the Lord is risen to- day, Hallelujah."
Buried with Christ, and raised with Him too,
What is there left for me to do ? Simply to cease from struggling and strife,
Simply to walk in newness of life. Glory be to God.
III.
In Chkist Jesus.
St. Paul describes both the death to sin and the life to God as "in Christ Jesus." In Christ's death we died — in Christ's resurrection we rose again to newness of life. It is by con- templating Christ as dying in our room, and as thereby suffering the punishment due to our sins, that we come to reckon ourselves as dead unto sin — to look upon all sin as that with which we should now have nothing to do — which belongs to a former condition of things that has passed away — the gulf of death.
1 J. Gregory Mantle.
33<5 A GOOD RECKONING
having intervened — and which, whenever doubts appear, should be looked upon with surprise and alarm as a message from the dead, to be immediately dismissed. It is by thus looking upon Christ, as dying that we might live, and as rising again for our justification, that we should be led to reckon ourselves as exempted from death and all its consequences — as restored to the enjoyment of that life, which we had forfeited, with all its privileges — and as thus bound by the most solemn obligations to devote it to Him who looked upon us in our low and lost estate, and who sent forth His only-begotten Son to die in our room.
1. The death to sin is in Christ Jesus. By the cross of Christ, says the Apostle, "the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world " ; "I am crucified with Christ " ; " If we be dead with him, we shall also live with him." We are "buried with him by baptism into death." The thought often recurs that our faith in Him nails our own hands to the cursed tree, closes and films our eye on worldly pageant and glory, crowns us with thorns, exposes us to contumely and shame, makes us the butt of devilish malice, taunts our agony with a cup which we cannot drink, buries us away out of sight of the world, rolls a stone to the door of our sepulchre, shuts us up in darkness, makes us see to the uttermost the misery, the shame, the cowardice, the miscreant humour, the curses, the consequences, the wages of sin. If we have taken up this thought, not only into our intellects, but into our entire spiritual nature so that it has entered into the very essence of our being, that " Christ died for our sins," then we are dead. We have gone through the shame and humiliation of His death.
"[{ As we become alive to what the death of Christ really is and means, how it prepares the only way by which a new life could enter our race, and a new spirit be given to transgressors ; by which God could justify the ungodly, and still be just: as all this, and very much more than this, is partially felt by the simplest mind when it " closes with Christ " (as the old divines expressively said), it is not difficult to understand that faith in Christ, that union to Christ, involves dying with Christ to sin ; that it involves our being crucified and buried with Christ; that it is the mortification of sin, the sharing of His agony, and the participation of the soul in His death. " They that are Christ's