us process by which from the root there come 'the blade,
and the ear, and the full corn in the ear.' Given the sonship--if it
is to be worked out into power and beauty, there must be suffering
with Christ. But unless there be sonship, there is no possibility of
inheriting God; discipline and suffering will be of no use at all.

The chief lesson which I wish to gather from this text now is that
all God's sons must suffer with Christ; and in addition to this
principle, we may complete our considerations by adding briefly, that
the inheritance must be won by suffering, and that if we suffer with
Him, we certainly shall receive the inheritance.

I. First, then, sonship with Christ necessarily involves suffering
with Him.

I think that we entirely misapprehend the force of this passage
before us, if we suppose it to refer principally or merely to the
outward calamities, what you call trials and afflictions, which
befall people, and see in it only the teaching, that the sorrows of
daily life may have in them a sign of our being children of God, and
some power to prepare us for the glory that is to come. There is a
great deal more in the thought than that, brethren. This is not
merely a text for people who are in affliction, but for all of us. It
does not merely contain a law for a certain part of life, but it
contains a law for the whole of life. It is not merely a promise that
in all our afflictions Christ will be afflicted, but it is a solemn
injunction that we seek to know 'the fellowship of His sufferings,
and be made conformable to the likeness of His death,' if we expect
to be 'found in the likeness of His Resurrection,' and to have any
share in the community of His glory. In other words, the foundation
of it is not that Christ shares in our sufferings; but that we, as
Christians, in a deep and real sense do necessarily share and
participate in Christ's. We 'suffer with Him'; _not_ He suffers
with us.

Now, do not let us misunderstand each other, or the Apostle's
teaching. Do not suppose that I am forgetting, or wishing you to
account as of small importance, the awful sense in which Christ's
suffering stands as a thing by itself and unapproachable, a solitary
pillar rising up, above the waste of time, to which all men
everywhere are to turn with the one thought, 'I can do nothing like
that; I need to do nothing like it; it has been done once, and once
for all; and what I have to do is, simply to lie down before Him