inhabiting our hearts, and moulding our wills, and being the life of
our lives and the soul of our souls, are we made able to do the
commandments of the Lord. And so, seeing that actual union with Jesus
Christ, and the reception into ourselves of His life, is the precedent
condition of all true obedience, then the more familiar form of
presenting the bond between Him and us, which runs through the New
Testament, falls into its proper place, and the faith, which is the
condition of receiving the life of Christ into our hearts, is at once
the affinity which makes us His kindred, and the means by which we
appropriate to ourselves the power of obedient submission and
conformity to the will of God. 'This is the work of God, that ye
believe on Him whom He hath sent.'

So, then, my text does not in the slightest degree contradict or
interfere with the great teaching that the one way by which we become
Christ's brethren is by trusting in Him. For the text and the doctrine
that faith unites us to Him take up the process at different stages:
the one pointing to the means of origination, the other to the tokens
of reality. Faith is the root, obedience is the flower and the fruit.
He that doeth the will of God, does it, not in order that he may
become, but because he already is, possessor of a blood-relationship
to Jesus Christ.

Then, notice, again, with what emphatic decisiveness our Lord here
takes simple, practical obedience in daily life, in little and in
great things, as the manifestation of being akin to Himself. Orthodoxy
is all very well; religious experiences, inward emotions, sweet,
precious, secret feelings and sentiments cannot be over-estimated.
External forms, whether of the more simple or of the more ornate and
sensuous kind, may be helps for the religious life; and are so in view