The tragic scenes of the garden and the cross, while terribly alarming to the impénitent sinner, speak peace to the Christian believer. Indeed, it is just the fact that Jesus suffered so very much as his surety, which certifies the latter that nothing remains for himself to suffer. If Jesus had suffered less, there might have been reason to apprehend that a share of sin's penalty was still in reserve for the believer himself. But since Jesus actually endured the whole of the curse, the believer may warrantably count on his own entire immunity from penal infliction. If the vials of wrath have been already emptied on the head of my surety, where is the drop of wrath remaining for me to drink? That strict and inflexible justice of God, which is the terror of the unpardoned sinner, is the believer's strong tower of defence. For it is as much the part of justice to exempt him whose debt has been paid by a surety, as to exact that debt at the surety's hands. And hence the believer may turn to the very severity of his Saviour's woes as the sheet-anchor of his hope, and rejoice in the persuasion that, if he confess his sins over the head of his substitute, God is faithful and just to forgive him his sins, and to cleanse him from all unrighteousness. Trust, then, and be not afraid, ye who through faith have transferred the punishment of your sins to Christ. Against you the broken law has

now no claim. On you the curse of the second death can never alight.

"Where is the judge who can condemn,

Since God hath justified?

Who shall charge those with guilt or crime

For whom the Saviour died?"

You are not, indeed, exempt more than other men from the ordinary ills of the human lotfrom sickness, bereavement, worldly loss, temporal death. But then in your case these evils are not penal, as they were in the case of Jesus; they are only corrective. They are not judicial inflictions, but only fatherly chastisements. They are sent for a benevolent purpose. They are sent to spoil your relish for sin, to wean you from the love of the world, to bring your will and affections into fuller attunement with the unseen and eternal. And therefore, instead of construing them into a token of the divine displeasure, you ought to prize them as a salutary moral discipline, to rejoice in them as a mark of sonship, and so to bear them and benefit by them, that you may be able to say with the apostle, "Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory."

4. A further and final lesson is, That Jesus has a paramount claim to the love and obedience of His people.

Wherefore did Jesus submit to the humiliation

and horrors of the garden, the judgment-hall, the cross? Was it not that He might exhaust the curse in the room of His people, and redeem them from sin and woe? Surely such generous selfsacrifice on His part calls for thankful and loving service on theirs. Think of the eternal Son of the Highest emptying Himself of His glory— stooping down to the sorrowful estate of man— submitting to be treated as a sinner, though He knew no sin-brooking the mysterious agony in the garden-bowing His head in death amid yon ring of cruel mockers—and all for us sinners and enemies! O, does not such a benefactor deserve all the affection our hearts can feel, and all the service our active powers can render? Whom, indeed, ought we to love and serve if not Him, "who, though He was rich, yet for our sakes became poor, that we through His poverty might be rich"? O then, love and serve Jesus, all ye His people! Love Him supremely; serve Him devotedly. Rest not till you find your chief pleasure in pleasing Him.

to discourse, and that with the twofold design of showing what His were and what ours ought to be.

It may not be unnecessary to premise that there is, in one respect, a marked unlikeness between our Lord's joys and ours. In virtue of what He has purchased for us by His endurance of the curse in our room, we are favoured with an ample dower of temporal enjoyments. We know the pleasures of sense, the pleasures of taste, the pleasures of domestic and social intercourse; and it is open to us, if we choose, to engage in the exciting pursuit of honour, power, fame, riches, and of all manner of social gratifications. But to our Lord temporal enjoyments were all but unknown. Of such of them as are sinful He was incapable, and from such of them as are lawful He purposely abstained. Once and again, it is true, He was present at scenes of hilarity—as at the wedding in Cana, and the feast in the Pharisee's house. But He does not seem in either case to have entered personally into the merriment, or to have known any pleasure beyond that which the sight of the joy of others afforded Him. To such scenes He went when invited, because His benevolent temper led Him to sympathise with all human happiness. But it does not appear that such scenes had any real charm or zest for Him. Nor, indeed, is this to be wondered at in

the case of the "man of sorrows." A grief-laden heart is out of tune for worldly delights. What cares the mother who is watching beside the couch of her dying child for mirth, or finery, or even bodily refreshment? What relish for the banquet does he bring with him who has received, while on the way to it, a letter apprising him of a heavy pecuniary loss or a suddenly-blasted scheme of ambition? And why then wonder that Jesus, with the crushing weight of imputed sin ever on His soul, and the prospective horrors of Gethsemane and Calvary ever in His eye, should have tasted but seldom, if at all, of the fleeting pleasures of earth? Far from improbable is the ancient tradition, that Jesus was never known to laugh, though He often sighed and wept.

The joys of our Lord were of another character. He "rejoiced in spirit." His joys, like His sorrows, were mainly spiritual. And as they appear, moreover, to have been, in most instances, the exact correlatives of His sorrows, we shall probably best arrive at a just conception of them by viewing them side by side with those sorrows of which they were at once the antithesis and the alleviation.

I. One of our Lord's joys-perhaps His chief joy-arose from the sense of His Father's love and approval.