’Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble:  13.  Every man’s work shall be made manifest:  for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.’—­1 COR. iii. 12, 13.

Before I enter upon the ideas which the words suggest, my exegetical conscience binds me to point out that the original application of the text is not exactly that which I purpose to make of it now.  The context shows that the Apostle is thinking about the special subject of Christian teachers and their work, and that the builders of whom he speaks are the men in the Corinthian Church, some of them his allies and some of them his rivals, who were superimposing upon the foundation of the preaching of Jesus Christ other doctrines and principles.  The ‘wood, hay, stubble’ are the vapid and trivial doctrines which the false teachers were introducing into the Church.  The ‘gold, silver, and precious stones’ are the solid and substantial verities which Paul and his friends were proclaiming.  And it is about these, and not about the Christian life in the general, that the tremendous metaphors of my text are uttered.

But whilst that is true, the principles involved have a much wider range than the one case to which the Apostle applies them.  And, though I may be slightly deflecting the text from its original direction, I am not doing violence to it, if I take it as declaring some very plain and solemn truths applicable to all Christian people, in their task of building up a life and character on the foundation of Jesus Christ; truths which are a great deal too much forgotten in our modern popular Christianity, and which it concerns us all very clearly to keep in view.  There are three things here that I wish to say a word about—­the patchwork building, the testing fire, the fate of the builders.

I. First, the patchwork structure.

’If any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble.’  In the original application of the metaphor, Paul is thinking of all these teachers in that church at Corinth as being engaged in building the one structure—­I venture to deflect here, and to regard each of us as rearing our own structure of life and character on the foundation of the preached and accepted Christ.

Now, what the Apostle says is that these builders were, some of them, laying valuable things like gold and silver and costly stones—­by which he does not mean jewels, but marbles, alabasters, polished porphyry or granite, and the like; sumptuous building materials, which were employed in great palaces or temples—­and that some of them were bringing timber, hay, stubble, reeds gathered from the marshes or the like, and filling in with such trash as that.  That is a picture of what a great many Christian people are doing in their own lives—­the same man building one course of squared and solid and precious