But you will observe in our Lord’s words, that it is not merely by fruit, but by much fruit, that God is glorified. All trees of the same kind are not equally fruitful, nor are all believers; thus it by no means follows that all believers glorify God, or that those who do so, do so equally. Our Lord Himself describes four degrees in His parable of the sower. First, there are those who are choked by the cares, and pleasures, and riches, of this life, and bring no fruit to perfection. The plant is not altogether dead, and there may be a little fruit formed; but there is none ripened, nothing worth having, nothing that glorifies God. I fear there is a terrible number of those choked-up Christians in the Church of God. Then where there is real fruitfulness, there are different degrees. Some yield their thirty, some their sixty, and some their hundred-fold. How earnest ought we to be that every one may be what I may term, hundred-fold Christians,—people abounding in the fruits of the Spirit, spending and being spent for God! And why not? The sacred privilege of glorifying God does not belong to some peculiar class of Christians,—to persons who have been suddenly lifted into what they term ‘the higher life,’—but to all those who are abiding in Christ Jesus, and have Him abiding in them; for He says, ‘He that abideth in Me, and I in him; the same bringeth forth much fruit.’ You may have reason therefore to be most deeply humbled under the conviction of indwelling sin, and to be most heartily grieved for the mixed thoughts and motives that have intruded themselves into the holiest acts of your whole lives; you may be utterly displeased with yourselves for the utter poverty of your best services; you may be so convinced of what you consider the peculiar difficulties of your own character, that you may think it quite impossible that you yourselves should ever rise to a high standard of Christian holiness: but there is a power in the Lord Jesus so to raise you above your difficulties that you may not only be saved, but actually raised to such a standard that, though you may not know it, you may bring glory to His name. Nothing could be more hopelessly dead than Aaron’s rod, but in one night it ‘budded and brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms, and yielded fruit.’ Nothing could be more hopeless than the case of David when he was in the horrible pit and the miry clay; but the Lord ‘set his feet on a rock and established his goings, and put a new song into his mouth, even praise unto his God,’ and the result was that God was glorified in his deliverance; for he adds, ‘Many shall see it and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.’ So you may say that you are dead, that you cannot rise, that there is no hope,—and there is no hope in your own efforts at self-quickening,—but He who raised the dead to life can so triumph even over your deadness as to bring out of your dead heart such an abundance of beautiful fruit,