as this text, and
fancy that the necessary discipline, which we have to go through
before we are ready for heaven, is necessary in anything like the
same sense in which it is necessary that a man should have faith in
Christ in order to be saved. The one may be dispensed with, the other
cannot. A Christian at any period of his Christian experience, if it
please God to take him, is fit for the kingdom. The life _is_ life,
whether it be the budding beauty and feebleness of childhood, or the
strength of manhood, or the maturity and calm peace of old age. But
'add to your faith,' that 'an entrance may be ministered unto you
_abundantly_.' Remember that though the root of the matter, the seed
of the kingdom, may be in you; and that though, therefore, you have a
right to feel that, at any period of your Christian experience, if it
please God to take you out of this world, you are fit for heaven--yet
in His mercy He is leaving you here, training you, disciplining you,
cleansing you, making you to be polished shafts in His quiver; and
that all the glowing furnaces of fiery trial and all the cold waters
of affliction are but the preparation through which the rough iron is
to be passed before it becomes tempered steel, a shaft in the
Master's hand.

And so learn to look upon all trial as being at once the seal of your
sonship, and the means by which God puts it within your power to win
a higher place, a loftier throne, a nobler crown, a closer fellowship
with Him 'who hath suffered, being tempted,' and who will receive
into His own blessedness and rest them that are tempted. 'The child,
though he be an heir, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be
lord of all; but is under tutors and governors.' God puts us in the
school of sorrow under that stern tutor and governor here, and gives
us the opportunity of 'suffering with Christ,' that by the daily
crucifixion of our old nature, by the lessons and blessings of
outward calamities and change, there may grow up in us a still nobler
and purer, and perfecter divine life; and that we may so be made
capable--more capable, and capable of more--of that inheritance for
which the only necessary thing is the death of Christ, and the only
fitness is faith in His name.

III. Finally, that inheritance is the necessary result of the
suffering that has gone before.

The suffering results from our union with Christ. That union must
needs culminate in glory. It is not only because the joy h