istians being in
the truest sense conquered captives, bound to the chariot wheels of
One who has overcome them.

The image implies a prior state of hostility and alienation. Now, do
not let us exaggerate, let us take Paul's own experience. He is
speaking about himself here; he is not talking doctrine, he is giving
us autobiography, and he says, 'I was an enemy, and I have been
conquered.'

What sort of an enemy was he? Well! He says that before he became a
Christian he lived a pure, virtuous, respectable life. He was a man
'as touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.'
Observant of all relative duties, sober, temperate, chaste; no man
could say a word against him; he knew nothing against himself. His
conscience acquitted him of wrong: 'I thought I ought to do many
things,' as I did them. And yet, looking back from his present point
of view upon a life thus adorned with many virtues, pure from all
manifest corruption, to a large extent regulated by conscientious and
religious motives of a kind, he says, 'Notwithstanding all that, I
was an enemy.' Why? Because the retrospect let him see that his life
was barren of the deepest faith and the purest love. And so I come to
some of my friends here now, and I say to you, 'Change the name, and
the story is true about you,' respectable people, who are trying to
live pure and righteous lives, doing all duties that present
themselves to you with a very tolerable measure of completeness and
abominating and trying to keep yourselves from the things that your
consciences tell you are wrong, yet needing to be conquered, in the
deepest recesses of your wills and your hearts, before you become
the true subjects of the true King. I do not want to exaggerate, nor
to say of the ordinary run of people who listen to us preachers, that
they commit manifest sins, 'gross as a mountain, open, palpable.'
Some of you do, no doubt, for, in every hundred people, there are
always some whose lives are foul and whose memories are stained and
horrible; but the run of you are not like that. And yet I ask you,
has your will been bowed and broken, and your heart overcome and
conquered by this mighty Prince, the Prince of Peace, the Prince of
Life? Unless it has, for all your righteousness and respectability,
for all your outward religion and real religiousness of a sort, you
are still hostile and rebellious, in your inmost hearts. That is the
basis of the representation of my text.

Wh