These are your difficulties, are they? But who made them for you? Heaven did not send them. I am not sure, even, that the devil was the author of them. You made every one of them yourselves. It was your own weak yielding that formed those habits so dear to you. It was because you preferred your own way to God's that you took to pleasures and self-indulgences which were wrong in His sight. It was your own choice that sought out and formed friendships and companionships of the ungodly sort. If you have any joys, delights, and associations which Christ would compel you to resign, they are only such as you ought never to have entered upon. They are self-made difficulties which ought never to have been made; and now, with curious inconsistency, you are urging them as reasons why you cannot serve God. You are using the sinful things which you have done in the past as an excuse for not doing the right and noble thing now. There are hundreds of people who, if they could begin again, would join the ranks of the religious--at least they think they would, and perhaps say it. If we could just start with a clean sheet, we would be Christians, we would walk in the noble and faithful way. But then, you see, we cannot undo the years that have been lived in the other way. We have committed ourselves to the irreligious side. We have made all who know us understand that we do not care about religious things. We have talked about them carelessly, perhaps contemptuously, as if we put no value upon them at all. We have made a reputation of that sort, and now it stands in the way. We cannot go back of all our old professions; the inconsistency would be manifest. No one expects it of us. No one would believe if we did it. There you have the self-made difficulties again. Because you did wrong all those years, you must needs go on doing wrong. Because you talked and acted in an unbelieving way, you must not now change into the higher and prayerful way. Because you have robbed God and your own souls so long, there is nothing for you but to continue repeating the offence. Yet these, when you name them, are so absurd, that one could almost laugh at them. The conviction that you have hitherto been on the wrong side is the one thing that ought to force you now to the right side. Why should you perpetuate blunders, follies, and misdoings? Why should the evil past chain you? Let the dead bury its dead--forget the things which are behind. You have paid the hundred talents to the wrong master. Why should you go on paying because you have done it once? Let God's mercy cover and forgive that. And now pay your vows and give your lives to Him henceforth. II. We are held back from the right thing by the fear of the loss which it will involve.