e of his
faith, and in proportion to his faith, there is in operation an actual,
superhuman, divine power moulding his nature, guiding, quickening,
ennobling, lifting, confirming, and hallowing and shaping him into
conformity with Jesus Christ. I would that we all believed not as a
dogma, but realised as a personal experience, that irrefragable truth,
'Know ye not that the Spirit of Christ dwelleth in you, except ye be
reprobate?' The life of self is evil; the life of Christ in self is
good, and only good. And if you are Christian men, and in the
proportion, as I have said, in which you are living by faith, you have
working in your spirits the very Spirit of Christ Himself.

And that power is the measure of your possibilities. Obviously 'the
power that worketh in us' is able to do a great deal more than it is
doing in any of us. And so with deep significance the Apostle, side by
side with his adducing of this power as being the measure of our
possible attainments, speaks about God as being 'able to do for us,
exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or think.' 'The power
that works in us' transcends in its possibilities our present
experience, it transcends our conceptions, it transcends our desires. It
is able to do everything; it actually does--well, you know what it does
in you. And the responsibility of hampering and hindering that power
from working out its only adequately corresponding results lies at our
own doors. 'A rushing, mighty wind'--yes; and in myself a scarcely
perceptible breathing, and often a dead calm, stagnant as in the
latitudes on either side of the Equator, where, for long, dreary days,
no freshening motion in the atmosphere is perceptible. 'A fire?'--yes;
then why is my grate full of grey, cold ashes, and one little spark in
the corner? 'A fountain springing into everlasting life?'--yes; then why
in my basin is there so much scum and ooze, mud and defilement, and so
little of the flashing and brilliant water? 'The power that works in us'
is sorely hindered by the weakness in which it works.

III. In the third place another form of this measure is stated by the
Apostle, 'According to the measure of the gift of Christ.'

That means, of course, the gift which Christ bestows. It is
substantially the same idea as I have just been dealing with, only
looked at from rather a different point of view. Therefore, I need not
dwell upon its parallelism with what has just been occupying our
attention