"Heaven's unencumbered plan" of "victory and triumph, against the devil, the world, and the flesh," is no day-dream of romance. It lives, it works in the most open hour of the common world of sin and sorrow. _We have seen_ this "putting on of the Lord Jesus Christ" victoriously successful where the most fierce, or the most subtle, forms of temptation were to be dealt with. _We have seen_ it preserving, with beautiful persistency, a life-long sufferer from the terrible solicitations of pain, and of still less endurable helplessness--every limb fixed literally immovable by paralysis on the ill-furnished bed; _we have seen_ the man cheerful, restful, always ready for wise word and sympathetic thought, and affirming that his Lord, present to his soul, was infinitely enough to "keep him." _We have seen_ the overwhelmed toiler for God, while every step through the day was clogged by "thronging duties," such duties as most wear and drain the spirit, yet maintained in an equable cheerfulness and as it were inward leisure by this same always adequate secret, "the Lord Jesus Christ put on." _We have known_ the missionary who had, in sober earnest, hazarded his life for the blessed Name, yet ready to bear quiet witness to the repose and readiness to be found in meeting disappointment, solitude, danger, not so much by a stern resistance as by the use, then and there, confidingly, and in surrender, of the Crucified and Living Lord. Shall we dare to add, with the humiliated avowal that only a too partial proof has been made of this glorious open Secret, that _we know_ by experiment that the weakest of the servants of our King, "putting on HIM," find victory and deliverance, where there was defeat before?
Let us, writer and reader, address ourselves afresh in practice to this wonderful secret. Let us, as if we had never done it before, "put on the Lord Jesus Christ."[230] Vain is our interpretation of the holy Word, which not only "abideth, but _liveth_ for ever" (1 Pet. i. 23), if it does not somehow _come home_. For that Word was written on purpose to come home; to touch and move the conscience and the will, in the realities of our inmost, and also of our most outward, life. Never for one moment do we stand as merely interested students and spectators, outside the field of temptation. Never for one moment therefore can we dispense with the great Secret of victory and safety.
Full in face of the realities of sin--of Roman sin, in Nero's days; but let us just now forget Rome and Nero; they were only dark accidents of a darker essence--St Paul here writes down, across them all, these words, this spell, this Name; "_Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ_." Take first a steady look, he seems to say, at your sore need, in the light of God; but then, at once, look off, look _here_. Here is the more than Antithesis to it all. Here is that by which you can be "more than conqueror." Take your iniquities at the worst; this can subdue them. Take your surroundings at the worst; this can emancipate you from their power. It is "the Lord Jesus Christ," and the "putting on" of Him.
Let us remember, as if it were a new thing, that He, the Christ of Prophets, Evangelists, and Apostles, is a Fact. Sure as the existence now of His universal Church, as the observance of the historic Sacrament of His Death, as the impossibility of Galilean or Pharisaic imagination having _composed_, instead of _photographed_, the portrait of the Incarnate Son, the Immaculate Lamb; sure as is the glad verification in ten thousand blessed lives to-day of all, of all, that the Christ of Scripture undertakes to be to the soul that will take Him at His own terms--so sure, across all oldest and all newest doubts, across all _gnosis_ and all _agnosia_, lies the present Fact of our Lord Jesus Christ.