I have been saying that it has a means of manifestation which all
Christian people are bound to exemplify. But our Lord draws a broad
distinction between that which can be manifested and that which cannot.
As I said, you can show the leaves and the fruits; the roots are
covered. 'Thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it
cometh, nor whither it goeth.'
The origin of that new life is 'hid with Christ in God.' And so, since
we are not dependent upon external things for the communication of the
life, we should not be dependent upon them for its continuation and its
nourishment, and we should realise that, if we are Christians, we are
living in two regions, and, though as regards the surface life we
belong to the things of time, as regards the deepest life, we belong to
eternity. All the surface springs may run dry. What then? As long as
there is a deep-seated fountain that comes welling up, the fields will
be green, and we may laugh at famine and drought. If it be true that
'our lives are hid with Christ in God,' then it ought to be true that
the nourishments, as well as the direction and impulse of them, are
drawn from Him, and that we seek not so much for the abundance of the
things that minister to the external as for the fulness of those that
sustain the inward, the true life, the life of Christ in the soul.
The world does not know where that Christian life comes from. If you
are a Christian, you ought to bear in your character a certain
indefinable something that will suggest to the people round you that
the secret power of your life is other than the power which moulds
theirs. You may be naturalised, and you may speak fairly well the
language of the country in which you are a sojourner, but there ought
to be something in your accent which tells where you come from, and
betrays the foreigner. We ought to move amongst men, having about us
that which cannot be explained by what is enough to explain their
lives. A Christian life should be the manifestation to the world of the
supernatural.
They 'know not whence it cometh nor whither it goeth.' No; that new
life in its feeblest infancy, and before it speaks, if I may so say,
is, by its very existence, a prophet, and declares that there must be,
beyond this 'bank and shoal of time,' a region to which it is native,
and in which it may grow to maturity. You will find in your greenhouses
exotics that stand there, after all your pains and coals, stunted, and
seeming to sigh for the tropical heat which is their home. The earnest
of our inheritance, the first-fruits of the Spirit, the Christian life
which originated in, and is sustained by, the flowing of the divine
life into us, demands that, somehow or other, the stunted plant should
be lifted and removed into that 'higher house where these are
planted'—and what shall be the spread of its branches, and the lustre
of its leaves, and what the gorgeousness of its blossoms, and what the
perennial sweetness of its fruits then and there, 'it doth not yet
appear.'
They 'know not whither it goeth.' And even those who themselves possess
it know not, nor shall know, through the ages of a progressive
approximation to the ever-approached and never-attained perfection.
'This spake He of the Holy Ghost, which they that believe on Him should
receive.' Trust Christ, and 'the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ
Jesus shall make you free from the law of sin and death.'