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1. What gives Christ's mediatorship its practical dignity is not only its display of Divine mercy but also its fitness to invigorate and encourage a spiritual life in the believer; and the most reverential view of God manifest in the flesh is the largest producer of daily holiness, as well as the dearest to the heart.

2. The first fact that we encounter in the historic consciousness of the Church is Christ's invisible supremacy as its head and Lord in the private hearts of disciples and in their public organization and activity. No sooner was Jesus gone than, with the widest diversities of tastes and habits, they were united in one common bond of a hidden life. Journey where they will their hearts cling to one invisible Master.

3. And so it has been in the line of spiritual descent every since. Personal fellowship with Christ has been the hereditary blood in the veins of the Church. This inward life we have now to interpret.

I. IN ITS NECESSITY. The need of sharing the Mediator's life lies within the soul itself.

1. From the consciousness of spiritual deficiency.

(1) We all feel that we are not what we ought to be, but terribly otherwise.

(2) Now if we lived under an abstract law this sense of deficiency would remain an inoperative discontent at having fallen short only of an ideal standard, so that we should be but offenders against our own ambition, not sinners.

(3) On the contrary, we are under the government of a personal God. Our goings astray are not mistakes, but sins; not merely dwarfings of our manhood's stature, but affronts against a heavenly Father. His law is good, but our lives are not. Suppose the past score settled by repentance, who of us but knows that he will sin again.

(4) What, then, were our life without a Mediator reconciling it? What, except it were animated by His power, and forgiven by His pardon?

2. From the native notion of perfection.

(1) The trace of glory past, and pledge of immortality to be lingers with us. The soul will not be content with its degradation. Nicodemus dreams of a character saintlier than a Pharisee, and feels his way to Christ.

(2) Here again, if there were no personal God to whom these aspirations reach up, if they did not culminate in the supreme desire for harmony with the holy Father, then we should need no Mediator, and these notions would be only transient visitants. But the moment our eyes are opened on our true relations to God we see that there is no such thing as a satisfactory striving after ideal standards, but only after reconciliation with Him, that the restless heart gets peace at the moment of the conviction that God is its friend. Perfection of character is not to be gained except by that inspiration; a peaceful progress in goodness comes only by that faith.

(3) And now again, the only way to the Father is by the Son. For in Christ every ideal of excellence is realized. We no longer aim at the cloudy excellence of imagination. Christ is before us. Those that place their hands in His He leads to the Father. To be Christlike is to be perfect; to have faith in Christ is to be brought near to God.

II. ITS NATURE. In what special kinds of force do its power and peace and charm consist.

1. In this, that being received into our faith in just these two characters in which we need Him,

(1) Christ creates within the disciples the freedom that comes from the consciousness of being forgiven. That is the beginning of all healthful obedience. What was a dismal compulsion before becomes a spontaneous and freewill offering now. With life all is new; its spring is gratitude, not law; its principle love, not fear; its end, the Divine glory and man's good, not a selfish salvation. But this life is thankfully and joyously hid with Christ. Expunge the Cross, and in what other gospel will you look for the glad tidings of forgiveness.

(2) Christ directs the disciple's practical energies to a model that is Divine. Christ is the pattern for the energies that form character. But the example of Jesus loses its grandest inspiration when He is made to stand apart from His followers. It is not a statue outside us, but a vital force working within. To have our life hid with Him we must have Him formed in us. And the pattern is not the Christ of Caesar's time, but the ever living Immanuel. Paul had that fellowship so palpably that he said, "I live, yet not!," etc.

2. The life hid with Christ in God is a life constantly invigorated by Christ's quickening spirit received by faith.

4. The doctrine of spiritual union through Christ with God affects devotion. He who is conscious of it knows it by the richer interest given to his prayers. For it reveals Christ as our "advocate with the Father." How can He intercede for us but by a present acquaintance with our needs? Praying in His name is something more than repeating a proposition at the end of our petitions. It must be praying from the feeling that He knows the substance of our prayer and the heart it confesses, and that He aids it by His prevailing sympathies now as much as when He taught His disciples to say, "Our Father."

4. Even in those relations which lie most directly between our souls and the Father, which might therefore seem to be most independent of a Mediator, the highest style of piety is not seen without a lively sense of Christ. That faith, e.g., that every concern in our lives is contrived for us by a sympathizing God, a faith which embosoms us in a care so fatherly that we want some warmer word than Providence to express it, is not found except in hearts alive with personal love for Christ.

III. ITS RESULTS.

1. It is the life of love. Being hid with Christ it is penetrated with the spirit of Him who loved as never man loved. Being hid in God it is suffused by the affections of Him whose name is Love. No man hating his brother can abide in this fellowship, no despiser of the poor, no bigot, no oppressor, no conceited Pharisee. Jesus is charity, and to live in Him is to live mercifully, fraternally, and liberally. When the world's life is hid with Him, the bloodshed of nations, the overreachings of commerce, the unequal administrations of govern-merits, the barbarous contrasts in Christian cities, the hatreds of households, will yield to a constructive principle of heavenly order. "I in them," etc. — the social life of the disciples hid with Christ in God.

2. This life solves the old contradiction between works and faith. Christian character is not a mosaic of moralities, but a growth. All we have to do is to receive Christ, and then the fruits of daily righteousness will naturally spring forth, in all forms of manly uprightness, womanly serenity, conscientious citizenship, beneficent industry.

3. The doctrine gives the world truth in all its uncompromising rigour and concrete applications. If Jesus be admitted in all the purity of His transparent soul as a visible witness of the conventional veracity that is satisfied if it equivocates by lying labels, or evasions in a bargain, and artifices in law courts, of the silly falsehoods of flattery, or cowardly falsehoods to avoid offence, who would dare to confront with them the look of His Divine rebuke? Christ, then, hid in the heart, is the test and guardian of truth.

4. And of justice no less; not that formal honesty, which is only a moral name for a selfish policy, not the legal integrity which has no higher sanction than the letter of the statute book, and so cheats the helpless or steals a competitor's reputation, but rather that spiritual justice which treats every man uprightly because a child of God, although only a servant or an office boy.

5. The hiding of our life with Christ corrects the error that religion is a product of humanity. A few conquests over matter have flattered us into the conceit that God must look down with vast complacency on our attainments, and so we come to substitute decorum for piety, and fancy that we make ourselves acceptable with God. A reception of Christ would expel this self-reference and measurement. The inner life in Christ is offered because otherwise the soul is weak and dark.

(Bishop Huntington.)

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KJV: For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.

WEB: For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.