PREFACED, BY PERMISSION, WITH AN EXTRACT FROM THE
WORKS OF THE REV. THOMAS GUTHRIE, D.D.

"HE PREACHED UNTO THEM JESUS AND THE RESURRECTION.".

ACTS xvii. 18.

London:

SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO.

Tavistock:

GEORGE SPENCER.

147. g 228

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RISEN WITH CHRIST.

*66

They who are risen with Him, undergoing a greater change than the saints whose graves were opened at His death, and whose natural life was restored at His resurrection, are those whose souls once dead in sin have become alive through grace. Your way to spiritual life opened up, perhaps, by convictions that have rent the rocky heart and shaken the soul as earthquakes shake a trembling world, have you risen to newness of life? Then cast off, like grave clothes, the habits of sin, and bursting its bonds, go forth to enjoy the light and walk in the liberty of the sons of God. For the duty enjoined on those who have thus risen with Christ is, Seek those things which are above, or, as Paul more fully expresses it in words we shall by and bye consider, Set your affections on things in heaven, and not on things on earth. When the doctrine of a resurrection was first revealed, it dazzled all eyes and blinded some. Reason started at the strange announcement; and treating its great preacher with undisguised contempt, the Athenians sneered, asking as they curled the lip and pointed to Paul, "What doth this babbler say?" To throw some light on the mystery, he employed the similitude of such familiar objects as the corn-seed, which is cast on the soil, and though when buried in the furrow a dry, sapless, lifeless-looking thing, rises to push aside the clods and clothe the fields with verdure, and with golden sheaves fill the barns of the husbandman. In other realms of nature, science finds a still more remarkable similitude in the insects that, sporting in sunbeams and flitting from flower to flower, give life to the air and beauty to the scene. Once creeping worms, after a while they wove a shroud and wrapped it round them, and, dropping from bush or tree, sought a grave beneath the clod, where they lay entombed till spring winds thawed and *From "Risen with Christ," Vol. I. of the Sunday Magazine.

summer beams warmed the soil, and at the appointed time shuffled off their shroud and rose into the air on silken wings, in form, in food, in tastes, in habits so different, that it might be said of them "Old things have passed away, and all things are become new." An image of the change on our bodies when the dust of death shall hear the trumpet, and mortality put on immortality, this is not less, but perhaps more, an image of the change wrought on our souls when the Spirit of God renews them at the second birth and first resurrection. Then indeed, at least in their dominant power, old things have passed away, and in their bud and germ at least all things have become new. The Bible, for example, so soon as a man is converted, reads like a new book; the Sabbath bell rings out new sounds. Jesus, once despised, is invested with such new and attractive graces that He is prized as the chiefest among ten thousand and altogether lovely-every feeling and affection leaving its old channel, flows in a new and opposite direction; and loving what once he hated and hating what once he loved, shunning what once he sought and seeking what once he shunned, the years he spent in sin seem to the renewed man like a strange and horrid dream from which he has just awakened. Yet, though perfect in nature, this change is here imperfect in degree-many being the hostile influences to which believers are exposed, the temptations that assail their virtue, the difficulties that impede their course, and the conflicts which they have to maintain against the love of the world and the remaining corruption of their hearts. Therefore the Apostle urges them to withdraw their affection from things on earth, and as those that have risen from sin to the enjoyments of a new life, to set them on things above."

The Compiler of this little work desires to express her sincere thanks to those who have kindly allowed her to make use of their copyright pieces.