for God, the degree of entrance into the obedience and knowledge of Him, these will put the difference between one and another there. But we hasten to a close: and in doing so, we come back to the simple words of our text, "for ever with the Lord;" and we would leave on your minds the impression that these, after all, furnish the best key to the employment of the blessed in heaven. If they are fit companions for the Lord, then must they be like Him as He is there; and thus we seem to have marked out an employment alone sufficient for eternity. Look at it in its various aspects. What is, what will be, the Lord doing in that state of blessedness? Will He be idle like the gods of Epicurus, sitting serene above all, and separate from all, created things? No, indeed, no such glorified Lord is revealed to us in Holy Scripture. "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." The created universe will be then as much beholden to His upholding hand as it is now. If they are to be for ever with Him, attending and girding His steps, they, too, will doubtless be fellow-workers with Him there, as they were here. And in this, only consider how much of His creation was altogether hidden from them here! Look abroad on a starry night--behold a field of employment for those who shall be ever with the Lord. The greater part of His works never came within sight of this our mortal eye at all. These are only hints, it is true, which we have no power of following out: but they may serve for finger-posts to point to whole realms of possible blessed employment. Then, again, there is more in the words "for ever with the Lord" than even this. Who can tell what past works, not of creation only, but of grace also, the blessed may have to search into--works wrought on themselves and others which may then be brought back to them by memory entirely restored, and then first studied with any power to comprehend or to be thankful for them? Then, again, the glory of God Himself, then first revealed to them,--the redeeming love of Christ,--the glory of the mystery of the indwelling of the Spirit,--dry and lofty subjects to the sons of men here, will be to them when there as household words and as daily pursuits. It seems to me, my brethren, when we look at all these sources of blessed employment, though we are unable from our present weakness to follow them out into detail,--and when we think that perhaps after all in our earthly blindness we may be omitting some which shall there constitute the chief, it seems to me, I say, as if we should have to complain not of insufficient employ for the ages of eternity, but of an infinite and inexhaustible variety, for which even endless ages of limited being hardly seem to suffice. Such, then, beloved, are the thoughts which have occurred to us on a subject of which I pray that it may be one of personal interest to every one here present.