What was true of Him is true for evermore. His servant now, in this restless close of the nineteenth age, is to find in Him this wonderful double secret still. He is to be, in Christ, by the very nature of his faith, the most practical and the most willing of the servants of his fellow-men, in their mortal as well as immortal interests; while also disengaged internally from a bondage to the seen and temporal by his mysterious union with the Son of God, and by his firm expectation of His Return. [Sidenote: Ver. 11.] =And this,= this law of love and duty, let us remember, let us follow, =knowing the season,= the occasion, the growing crisis (καιρόν); =that it is already the hour for our awaking out of sleep,= the sleep of moral inattention, as if the eternal Master were not near. =For nearer now is our salvation,= in that last glorious sense of the word "_salvation_" which means the immortal issue of the whole saving process, nearer now =than when we believed,= and so by faith entered on our union with the Saviour. (See how he delights to associate himself with his disciples in the blessed unity of remembered conversion; "when _we_ believed.") [Sidenote: Ver. 12.] =The night,= with its murky silence, its "poring dark," the night of trial, of temptation, of the absence of our Christ, =is far spent,[228] but the day has drawn near;= it has been a long night, _but_ that means a near dawn; the everlasting sunrise of the longed-for _Parousia_, with its glory, gladness, and unveiling. =Let us put off therefore,= as if they were a foul and entangling night-robe, =the works of the darkness,= the habits and acts of the moral night, things which _we can_ throw off in the Name of Christ; =but let us put on the weapons of the light,= arming ourselves, for defence, and for holy aggression on the realm of evil, with faith, love, and the heavenly hope. So to the Thessalonians five years before (1, v. 8), and to the Ephesians four years later (vi. 11-17), he wrote of the holy Panoply, rapidly sketching it in the one place, giving the rich finished picture in the other; suggesting to the saints always the thought of a warfare first and mainly defensive, and _then_ aggressive with the drawn sword, and indicating as their true armour not their reason, their emotions, or their will, taken in themselves, but the eternal facts of their revealed salvation in Christ, grasped and used by faith. [Sidenote: Ver. 13.] =As by day,= for it is already dawn, in the Lord, =let us walk[229] decorously,= becomingly, as we are the hallowed soldiers of our Leader; let our life not only be right in fact; let it _shew_ to all men the open "_decorum_" of truth, purity, peace, and love; =not in revels and drunken bouts; not in chamberings,= the sins of the secret couch, =and profligacies,= not--to name evils which cling often to the otherwise reputable Christian--=in strife and envy,= things which are pollutions, in the sight of the Holy One, as real as lust itself.