This objective sense of the Servant's temper must always be the first for us to understand. For more than he was, we are, mortal, ready ourselves to _break and to fade_. But having experienced the grace, let us show the same in our service to others. Let us understand that we are sent forth like the great Servant of God, that man _may have life, and have it more abundantly_. We need resolutely and with pious obstinacy to set this temper before us, for it is not natural to our hearts. Even the best of us, in the excitement of our work, forget to think of anything except of making our mark, or of getting the better of what we are at work upon. When work grows hard, the combative instincts waken within us, till we look upon the characters God has given us to mould as enemies to be fought. We are passionate to convince men, to overcome them with an argument, to wring the confession from them that we are right and they wrong. Now Christ our Master must have seen in every man He met a very great deal more to be fought and extirpated than we can possibly see in one another. Yet He largely left that alone, and addressed Himself rather to the sparks of nobility He found, and fostered these to a strong life, which from within overcame the badness of the man,--the badness which opposition from the outside would but have beaten into harder obduracy. We must ever remember that we are not warriors but artists,--artists after the fashion of Jesus Christ, who came not to condemn life because it was imperfect, but to build life up to the image of God. So He sends us to be artists; as it is written, _He gave some apostles, and some prophets, and some pastors and teachers_. For what end? For convincing men, for telling them what fools they mostly are, for crushing them in the inquisition of their own conscience, for getting the better of them in argument?--no, not for these combative purposes at all, but for fostering and artistic ones: _for the perfecting of the saints, for the building up of the body of Christ; till we all come unto a full grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ_. He who, in his Service of Man, practises such a temper towards the breaking and the fading, shall never himself break or fade, as this prophecy implies when it uses the same verbs in verses _three_ and _four_. For he who is loyal to life shall find life generous to him; he who is careful of weakness shall never want for strength. IV. THE POWER BEHIND SERVICE. There only remains now to emphasize the power that is behind Service. It is, say verses _five_ and _six_, the Creative Power of God.