through
the flesh, God hath done by the gift of His Son and Spirit. The
law-giving of Sinai on tables of stone has been succeeded by the
law-giving of the Spirit on the table of the heart: the Holy Spirit is
the power of obedience, and is so the Spirit of Holiness, who, in
obedience, prepares our hearts for being the dwelling of the Holy One.
Let us in this faith yield ourselves to a life of obedience: it is the
New Testament path to the realization of the promise: 'If ye will _obey_
my voice indeed, ye shall be unto me an _holy_ nation.'

We have already seen how holiness in its very nature supposes the
personal relation to God, His personal presence. 'I have brought you
_unto myself_; if ye obey, ye shall be _unto me_ an holy nation.' It is
as we understand and hold fast this personal element that obedience will
become possible, and will lead to holiness. Mark well God's words: 'If
ye will obey my _voice_, and keep my covenant.' The voice is more than a
law or a book; it always implies a living person and intercourse with
him. It is this that is the secret of gospel obedience: hearing the
voice and following the lead of Jesus as a personal friend, a living
Saviour. It is being led by the Spirit of God, having Him to reveal the
Presence, and the Will, and the Love of the Father, that will work in us
that personal relation which the New Testament means when it speaks of
doing everything unto the Lord, as pleasing God.

Such obedience is the pathway of holiness. Its every act is a link to
the living God, a surrender of the being for God's will, for God Himself
to take possession. In the process of assimilation, slow but sure, by
which the will of God, as the meat of our souls, is taken up into our
inmost being, our spiritual nature is strengthened, is spiritualized,
growing up into an holy temple in which God can reveal Himself and take
up His abode.

Let every believer study to realize this. When God sanctified the
seventh day as His period of making holy, He taught us that He could not
do it at once. The revelation and communication of holiness must be
gradual, as man is prepared to receive it. God's sanctifying work with
each of us, as with the race, needs time. The time it needs and seeks is
the life of daily, hourly obedience. All that is spent in self-will, and
not in the living relation to the Lord, is lost. But when the heart
seeks day by day to hearken to the voice and to obey it, the Holy One
Himself watche