nothing that you Christian people need more to have dinned into you than
this, that your continuance in the state of a redeemed man, with all the
security and blessing that attach thereto, depends upon your continuing
to be righteous. Every sin, every flaw, every dropping beneath our own
standard in conscience of what we ought to be, has for its inevitable
result that we are robbed for the time being of consciousness of the
walls of the city being about us and of our being citizens thereof. 'Who
shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in His holy
place?' The New Testament, as emphatically as the old psalm, answers,'
He that hath clean hands and a pure heart.' 'Let no man deceive you. He
that doeth righteousness is righteous.' There is no way by which
Christian men here on earth can pass into and keep within the city of
the living God, except they possess personal purity, righteousness of
life, and cleanness of heart.

They used to say that Venice glass was so made that any poison poured
into it shivered the vessel. Any drop of sin poured into your cup of
communion with God, shatters the cup and spills the wine. Whosoever
thinks himself a citizen of that great city, if he falls into
transgression, and soils the cleanness of his hands, and ruffles the
calm of his pure heart by self-willed sinfulness, will wake to find
himself not within the battlements, but lying wounded, robbed, solitary,
in the pitiless desert. My brother, it is 'the righteous nation' that
'enters in,' even here on earth.

I do not need to remind you how, admittedly by us all, that is the case
in regard to the final form of the city of our God, into which nothing
shall enter 'that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination or
maketh a lie.' Heaven can only be entered into hereafter by, as here and
now it can only enter into, those who are pure of heart. All else there