II
The text means that those of us who are Christians shall show by our very faces that we are on the king's business and that it is solemn business.
One day a man knocked at the door of my study, was admitted, sat down on the couch in the room and began to sob. He did not need to tell me why he had come. I knew, but finally when he sobbed it out this was his message: "I have come to ask you to bury my wife, and to ask if you will not go with me to comfort the children, for they are heartbroken." I knew by the very look of his face that he had lost a loved one. Do you think for a moment that those who gaze at us would imagine that we had the least conviction that people away from Christ were lost? I am sure they would not.
The text also means that we shall be desperately in earnest. A father and his boy heard a minister preach a sermon on the judgment and as they went to their home the father said, "My boy, it was a great sermon and you must think about it." And the boy did. He made his way to his room and threw himself on his bed only to hear his father downstairs laughing and singing; and he said to himself, "It is not true, for if my father believed I was in danger of the judgment he could not laugh and he would not sing." That day was the turning point in the boy's life. He became a man of renown but never a believer in Jesus Christ as we accept him.
The text also indicates how we should pray, with an eye single to his glory but with a purpose that cannot be shaken. Pray as the Shunammite prayed, pray as the woman besought the unjust judge; such prayer brings victory.