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The trouble with us is that in our everyday life we do not make our faith vital enough. We bring the ways of the world into the Church, instead of taking the ways of the Church into the world. We find doubt, and temptation, and difficulty, and sin at the very threshold of our being, and we try to drive these foes out of our nature by the weapons which we find lying scattered around us in our mixed social life, instead of rising to the height of our privilege and our calling aa followers of Christ and children of our Father in heaven.

I. The common weapon of our moral life is DUTY — the sense of our moral obligation to a principle of right which is ruling us. It is a grand principle; it brings forth great moral results, but it is not the highest motive in the armoury of character. It is like the sure and faithful study of the primary school, which acts as a strong basis for the after education to rest upon. But the primary school can never be the university, and the mere sense of duty can never bring out of your nature the highest results of which you are capable A sense of duty is fine in a son and in a father, in a wife and in a husband; but there are higher motives in human nature than this primary motive of duty, and these higher motives bring about the higher results. A sense of duty is a fine element in an artist, in a poet, in a musician; but you know perfectly well that any genius, any nature with a soul and with a great executive capacity, will scorn this rudimentary germ of motive power. It is a primary motive; it is an clementary principle. It is like the ruled copy book to the child who is trying to write; it is like the transparent slate to the child who is learning to draw. You make use of it; you are trained and developed by it, and then you pass it by; it has done its formative work in the matter of your education.

II. The other motive is FAITH — grasp upon God — the privilege of service — the faculty of spiritual apprehension. We do our duty to believe in God: we believe in God, and as a result of this we do our duty. After all that we may say about it in the brisk and brilliant intellection of our younger days, a living God is better than an uncertain conscience; privilege is always a higher motive than duty, and the grasp of your nature upon divine things through the faculty of spiritual apprehension will be a surer and more intuitive guide than your hastily gathered deductions from the decalogue. Over our fears, over our failures, over our shortcomings and wrongdoings, the borrowed light of duty will at times be powerless to force its way. But the cry of the rejoicing prophet of old, as with a new belief in the God of their fathers the captives came back from the land of their exileship, will again and again be realized with us as we stand face to face with the hard problem put before us — "Who art thou, O great mountain?" etc. If you live for earth, for gain, for pleasure, or for self, you may gain your end, but you will lose your very soul. But if God is a reality, if the spiritual life has any meaning to you, if beneath all the rubbish of dogma and cant in religion, you get your feet once upon that rock which is the Rock of Ages — God above us — God in us — God in Christ — God in human life — God in immortality — then that instinct of the awakened soul, that hunger of the spiritual nature for the Being who created it, will generate its own motive power — a power fourfold greater than the mere sense of duty — and the problems of life which before had been too hard for you will be made easy when, like this far-off, honest doubter of our psalm to-day, you see the meaning of life as by a flash, when you stand in the presence, not of duty merely, but in the presence of God!

(W. W. Newton.)

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KJV: Behold, these are the ungodly, who prosper in the world; they increase in riches.

WEB: Behold, these are the wicked. Being always at ease, they increase in riches.