od. Perhaps some boys here are deserters; they began
once before to serve Christ, and they deserted. Come back again, come
back again today! Others have never enlisted at all. Will you not do
it now? You are old enough to decide. The grandest moment of a boy's
life is that moment when he decides to "_Seek first the Kingdom of
God_."

THE CHANGED LIFE:

THE GREATEST NEED OF THE WORLD.

God is all for quality; man is for quantity. The immediate need of the
world at this moment is not more of us, but, if I may use the
expression, a better brand of us. To secure ten men of an improved
type would be better than if we had ten thousand more of the average
Christians distributed all over the world. There is such a thing in
the evangelistic sense as winning the whole world and losing our own
soul. And the first consideration is our own life--our own spiritual
relations to God--our own likeness to Christ. And I am anxious,
briefly, to look at the right and the wrong way of becoming like
Christ--of becoming better men: the right and the wrong way of
sanctification.

Let me begin by naming, and in part discarding, some processes in
vogue already for producing better lives. These processes are far from
wrong; in their place they may even be essential. One ventures to
disparage them only because they do not turn out the most perfect
possible work.

I. The first imperfect method is to rely on

RESOLUTION.

In will power, in mere spasms of earnestness, there is no salvation.
Struggle, effort, even agony, have their place in Christianity, as we
shall see; but this is not where they come in.

In mid-Atlantic the Etruria, in which I was sailing, suddenly stopped.
Something had gone wrong with the engines. There were five hundred
able-bodied men on board the ship. Do you think that if we had
gathered together and pushed against the mast we could have pushed it
on?

When one attempts to sanctify himself by effort, he is trying to make
his boat go by pushing against the mast. He is like a drowning man
trying to lift himself out of the water by pulling at the hair of his
own head.

Christ held up this method almost to ridicule when He said, "Which of
you by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature?" Put down that
method forever as being futile.

The one redeeming feature of the self-sufficient method is this--that
those who try it find out almost at once that it will not gain the
goal.

2. Another exp