that unites us when we come together, we have at once common grounds of interest in the life and activities of the Body of Christ.  Suppose the millionaire going down town in his motor sees his clerk walking and stops and picks him up, and instead of talking constrainedly about the weather or about business, he begins naturally to talk to him about spiritual matters.  Why could they not talk about the Mission that has just been held, or the Quiet Day that is in prospect?  One great trouble, is it not? is that we fight shy of talking to our fellow-Christians of the interests that we really have in common and try to put intercourse on some other ground where we have little or nothing in common.  The things that should, and probably do, vitally interest us, we decline to talk about at all.  We are so stiff and formal and restrained in all matter of personal religious experience that we are unable to express the fact of Christian Brotherhood.  The fact that you smile at the presentment of the case, that you cannot even imagine yourself talking about your spiritual experience with your clerk or your employer, shows how far you are from a truly Christian conception of Brotherhood.

Our Lord’s words that we are making our subject indicate the paramount importance that He laid upon the acceptance of God’s will as the ultimate rule of life.  “Whosoever shall do the will of My Father which is in heaven, the same is my mother, and my sister, and my brother.”  “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.”  That is the common ground on which we are all invited to stand, the ground of a common loyalty to God, of intense zeal for the cause of God.  Our Lord gave His whole life to that cause.  As His disciples watched Him on an occasion, they remembered that it was written:  “The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.”  Zeal is not a very popular quality because it is always disturbing the equanimity and self-complacency of lukewarm people.  And then, we dislike to be thought fanatics.  But I fancy that there will always be a touch of the fanatic about any very zealous Christian, and it is not worth while to suppress our zeal for fear of the world’s judgment upon it.  What we have to avoid is the misdirection of zeal.  There is, no doubt, a zeal which is “not according to knowledge.”  We need to be sure, in other words, that our zeal is a zeal for God, and not a zeal for party or person or cause.  It is no doubt quite easy to imagine that we are seeking to do God’s will when we are merely seeking to impose on our own will.  Self-seeking is quite destructive of the friendship and service of God.  The Kingdom whose interests we are attempting to forward may turn out to be a Kingdom in which we expect to sit on the right hand or the left of the throne because of the brilliance of the service rendered.