Him, are both repeated, with no unmeaning tautology, but with profound significance in our text—­’By whom also we have access’—­as well as—­’the peace of God’—­’access by faith into this grace.’  So then, for the initial blessing, and for all the subsequent blessings of the Christian life, the way is the same.  The medium and channel is one, and the act by which we avail ourselves of the blessings coming through that one medium is the same.  Now the language of my text, with its talking about access, faith, and grace, sounds to a great many of us, I am afraid, very hard and remote and technical.  And there are not wanting people who tell us that all that terminology in the New Testament is like a dying brand in the fire, where the little kernel of glowing heat is getting covered thicker and thicker with grey ashes.  Yes; but if you blow the ashes off, the fire is there all the same.  Let us try if we can blow the ashes off.

This text seems to me in its archaic phraseology, only to need to be pondered in order to flash up into wonderful beauty.  It carries in it a magnificent ideal of the Christian life, in three things:  the Christian place, ‘access into grace’; the Christian attitude, ‘wherein we stand’; and the Christian means of realising that ideal, ‘through Christ’ and ‘by faith.’  Now let us look at these three points.

I. The Christian Place.

There is clearly a metaphor here, both in the word ‘access’ and in that other one ‘stand.’  ‘The grace’ is supposed as some ample space into which a man is led, and where he can continue, stand, and expatiate.  Or, we may say, it is regarded as a palace or treasure-house into which we can enter.  Now, if we take that great New Testament word ‘grace,’ and ponder its meanings, we find that they run something in this fashion.  The central thought, grand and marvellous, which is enshrined in it, and which often is buried for careless ears, is that of the active love of God poured out upon inferiors who deserve something very different.  Then there follows a second meaning, which covers a great part of the ground of the use of the phrase in the New Testament, and that is the communication of that love to men, the specific and individualised gifts which come out of that great reservoir of patient, pardoning, condescending, and bestowing love.  Then there may be taken into view a meaning which is less prominent in Scripture but not absent, namely, the resulting beauty of character.  A gracious soul ought to be, and is, a graceful soul; a supreme loveliness is imparted to human nature by the communication to it of the gifts which are the results of the undeserved, free, and infinite love of God.