d out the word of the Lord, not only in Macedonia and
Achaia, but also in every place your faith to Godward is spread abroad;
so that we need not to speak anything.' We do not need to talk to you
about 'love of the brethren,' for 'yourselves are taught of God to love
one another, and my heart is full of thankfulness when I think of your
work of faith and labour of love and patience of hope.' The men had been
transformed. What transformed them? The message of a divine and dying
Christ, who had offered up Himself without spot unto God, and who was
their peace and their righteousness and their power.

III. Thirdly, notice what this witness has to say about the risen and
ascended Christ. Here is what it has to say: 'Ye turned unto God . . . to
wait for His Son from heaven whom He raised from the dead.' And again:
'The Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout.' The risen
Christ, then, is in the heavens, and Paul assumes that these people,
just brought out of heathenism, have received that truth into their
hearts in the love of it, and know it so thoroughly that he can take for
granted their entire acquiescence in and acceptance of it.

Remember, we have nothing to do with the four Gospels here. Remember,
not a line of them had yet been written. Remember, that we are dealing
here with an entirely independent witness. And then tell us what
importance is to be attached to this evidence of the Resurrection of
Jesus Christ. Twenty years after His death here is this man speaking
about that Resurrection as being not only something that he had to
proclaim, and believed, but as being the recognised and notorious fact
which all the churches accepted, and which underlay all their faith.

I would have you remember that if, twenty years after this event, this
witness was borne, that necessarily carries us back a great deal nearer
to the event than the hour of its utterance, for there is no mark of
its being new testimony at that instant, but every mark of its being the
habitual and continuous witness that had been borne from the instant of
the alleged Resurrection to the present time. It at least takes us back
a good many years nearer the empty sepulchre than the twenty which mark
its date. It at least takes us back to the conversion of the Apostle
Paul; and that necessarily involves, as it seems to me, that if that
man, believing in the Resurrection, went into the Church, there would
have been an end of his association with