Resisted grace! What is that but to withstand God to His face, and to say: _I will not serve?_ To resist grace, what is that but to despise the precious Blood of Christ. To obtain for us those graces, the Blood of Christ and all His sufferings were given, and without them we should have been left in our sins and miseries; and so to refuse these graces is to make light of Christ's most bitter Death and Passion. To resist grace, what is that but to refuse glory. For each grace of God has a corresponding degree of glory attached to it; and, if we refuse the one, we reject the other. The truth is, we forget too much God's personal agency in our salvation. We are on earth, and God is far away in heaven. He has indeed left us His Law, and He is coming to judge us at the last day, but He is not now a present, watchful, living, speaking God to us. We forget that "_He is not far from every one of us_." We forget that He is about our path, and about our bed; that He watches us with the eagerness and tenderness of a mother for her child; that He intensely desires our salvation; that He pleads with us, warns us, calls to us, stretches out His Hand to us all the day long. It is nothing that He Himself tells us He stands at the door and knocks; it is nothing that He calls to us from without, saying: "_Open to Me, My love, for my head is wet with dew, and My locks with the drops of the night;_" we open not; we heed Him not; we hear Him not. Oh! I believe, at the Judgment Day, many a man will be appalled to see how he has treated Christ. In the description which our Lord has given us of that day, He tells us that the wicked shall say, in answer to His reproofs: "_When saw we Thee hungry or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister to Thee?_" So, I believe, many will say: "O Lord, when did we refuse to hear Thee? When did we shut our hearts to Thy grace?" And He will answer: "When, at the voice of My preacher, you refused to forsake that sin; when, at the invitation of My Church, you refused to repent and amend; when, at the call of My Spirit, you refused to awake from your sloth, and follow after that perfection I demanded of you. In rejecting My agents, you have rejected Me. It was I; I, your God and your Saviour; I, your End and Reward, who walked with you on your way through life, who opened to you the Scriptures, and sought to enter in and tarry with you." {346} And, again, as resistance to grace is a special sin in itself, and a special matter about which we must render an account to God, so, when persisted in, it is the sure road to final impenitence and reprobation. Let me bring before your mind some of our Lord's emphatic teaching on this point.