My friend, take the picture home, and look at it. Study it well, and see if you can see yourself in it. Ah, you professing Christian, does your soul look any thing like it? If indeed it be a temple, does it not become you to watch its portals with untiring vigilance, lest pollution enter it? Have you kept the temple pure? Our text calls you to serious self-examination. Go inside the temple, and look about. See if its walls be not hung round with pictures of earthly idolatry. See whether pride and vanity and fashion have not built their altars within. See whether greedy avarice has not set up the tables of the money-changers there, and well-nigh turned the temple of the soul, which is God's house, into a house of merchandise. Listen whether there is heard there the tumult of angry passions, and the clamors of selfish and forbidden lusts. Oh search the temple well, for God will search it soon. "The Lord shall suddenly come to his temple; but who may abide the day of his coming, and who shall stand when he appeareth? For he is like a refiner's fire, and like fuller's soap." None but the pure in heart, the sanctified in Christ Jesus, will endure the trial. These shall stand the fires of the judgment-day, and shine in bliss and glory for ever in the city of God. But not a few professed temple-builders will be confounded, and their work consumed; for the fire shall try every man's work, of what sort it is. V. God's Witnesses. YE ARE MY WITNESSES. ISA. 43:10. There is a sense in which all the works of God declare his glory, and bespeak his eternal power and godhead. But in the work of redemption through Jesus Christ his Son, he places his people in a peculiar position, and employs them in a special mission. They are surrounded with a world of ungodliness and impenitence, and he has commissioned them to bear an authoritative testimony in behalf of Him. As professed believers, they stand before the world as those who are the subjects of his grace, who have embraced and tried that religion which is offered to them in Christ Jesus. They claim to have actually received Christ, and to have submitted to his authority. God calls them his people; they call themselves so. In them grace exhibits what it can do by what it is already doing. They hold a peculiar relation to a godless world around them. God acknowledges them to be standing for him: "Ye are my witnesses." They are bearing testimony in his behalf before the jury, consisting of the multitude of unbelievers. They are credible witnesses. The world is willing to listen to their evidence, and judge of the religion of Christ by what they say and do.