oject, and then had very
distinctly hung back from implementing its promises and fulfilling its
good intentions. So the Apostle, in the chapter from which my text is
taken, with wonderful delicacy, dignity, and profundity, sets forth the
true principle, not only of Christian giving, but of Christian asking.
The text advises that the gushing sentiments of brotherly sympathy and
liberality which had inspired the Corinthians a year ago should now bear
some fruit in action. So Paul is going to send Titus, his right-hand man
at the time, to hurry up and finish off the collection and have done
with it. The text is in effect the message which Titus was to carry; but
it has a far wider application than that. It is a needful advice for us
all about a great many other things: 'As there was a readiness to will,
so let there be a performance also.'

Resolutions, noble and good and Christlike, have a strange knack of
cheating the people who make them. So we all need the exhortation not to
be befooled by fancying that we have done, when we have only willed. Of
course we shall not do unless we will. But there is a wide gap, as our
experience witnesses, between the two things. We all know what place it
is to which, according to the old proverb, the road is paved with good
intentions; and the only way to pull up that paving is to take Paul's
advice here and always, and immediately to put into action the resolves
of our hearts. Now I desire to say two or three very plain and simple
things about this matter.

I. I would have you consider the necessity of this commandment.

Consider that the fault here warned against is a universal one. What
different men we should be if our resolutions had fruited in conduct! In
all regions of life that is true, but most emphatically is it true in
regard to religion. The damning tragedy of many lives, and I dare say of
those of some of my hearers, is that men have over and over again
determined that they would be Christians, and they are not Christians
yet; just because they have let 'the native hue of resolution be
sicklied over' by some paleness or other, and so have resolved and
resolved and resolved till every nerve of action is rotted away, and
they will die unchristian. I dare say that there are men or women
listening to me now, perhaps with grey hairs upon them, who can remember
times, in the springtide of their youth, when they said, 'I will give my
heart to Jesus Christ, and set my faith upon H