The truest lengthening of life is to live while we live, wasting no time but using every hour for the highest ends.God has devised ways and means of making the ungodly man to stand justly accepted before Him: He has set up a system by which with perfect justice He can treat the guilty as if he had been all his life free from offence, yea, can treat him as if he were wholly free from sin. God, the infinitely just Sovereign, knows that there is not a just man upon earth that doeth good and sinneth not, and therefore, in the infinite sovereignty of His divine nature and in the splendor of His ineffable love, He undertakes the task, not so much of justifying the just as of justifying the ungodly. This is a miracle reserved for the Lord alone. It lies not in man's right nor in man's power truly to justify the guilty.
Secondly, "It is not a vain thing"-that is, IT IS NO TRIFLE. I would not for the proudest consideration under heaven know the agony of mind I felt but this one morning before I ventured upon this platform! Nothing but the hope of winning souls from death and hell, and a stern conviction that we have to deal with the grandest of all realities, would bring me here. I do myself feel it to be such an awful thing to preach God's gospel, that if it were not "Woe unto me if I do not preach the gospel," I would resign my charge this moment. And, sirs, true ministers of God feel it to be no trifle. When conscience gets the grip of them, and shakes them, they find it no small thing to be without a hope of pardon-with guilt upon the conscience, and no means of getting rid of it. When they come to die they find it no little thing to die without Christ. The Christian life to them is something so solemn, that when they think of it they fall down before God, and say, "Hold thou me up and I shall be safe." And sinners, too, when they are in their senses, find it no trifle. They tell you it is no trifle to have religion, for it carries them through all their conflicts, bears them up under all distresses, cheers them under every gloom, and sustains them in all labour. They will never forget the pangs of conviction, nor the joys of faith. The saints will tell you it is no trifle to be converted. Recollect that those who have ever known anything of it tell you it is no child's play. Is HE to be trifled with? Trifle with your monarch if you will, but not with the King of kings, the Lord of lords. Consider also with whom it connects you-with God before whom angels bow themselves and veil their faces. Can you laugh at such words as heaven and hell, at glory and at damnation? If you can, if you think these trifles, then is the faith of Christ to be trifled with. Your soul has to live for ever, and the religion of Christ deals with its destiny. As much as a man is better than the garments that he wears, so much is the soul better than the body. If it dealt with your body it were no trifle, for it is well to have the limbs of the body sound, but it has to do with your soul. If it be not true it is detestable, but if it be true it deserves all a man's faculties to consider it, and all his powers to obey it.
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