, and it is in order that we may know Christ that
He lays his hand upon us.

'The power of His Resurrection.' Now, by that I understand a similar
knowledge, by experience, of the risen life of Jesus Christ flowing into
us, and filling our hearts and minds with its own power. The risen life
of Jesus is the nourishment and strengthening and blessing and life of a
Christian. Our daily experience ought to be that there comes, wavelet by
wavelet, that silent, gentle, and yet omnipotent influx into our empty
hearts, the very life of Christ Himself.

I know that this generation says that that is mysticism. I do not know
whether it is mysticism or not. I am sure it is truth; and I do not
understand Christianity at all, unless there is that kind of mysticism,
perfectly wholesome and good, in it. You will never know Jesus Christ
until you know Him as pouring into your hearts the power of an endless
life, His own life. Christ for us by all means,--Christ's death the
basis of our hope, but Christ in us, and Christ's life as the true gift
to His Church. Have you got that? Do you know the power of His
Resurrection?

'The fellowship of His sufferings.' Has Paul made a mistake, and
deserted the chronological order? Why does he put the 'fellowship of the
sufferings' after the 'power of the Resurrection'? For this plain
reason, that if we get Christ's life into our hearts, in the measure in
which we get it we shall bear a similar relation to the world which He
bore to it, and in our measure will 'fill up that which is behind in the
sufferings of Christ,' and will understand how true it is that 'if they
hate Me they will hate you also.' Brethren, the test of us who have the
life of Christ in our hearts is that we shall, in some measure, suffer
with Him, because 'as He is, so are we, in this world,' and because we
must in that case look upon the world, its sins and its sorrows, with
something of the sad gaze with which He looked across the valley to the
Temple sparkling in the morning light, and wept over it. So if we know
the power of His Resurrection we shall know the fellowship of His
sufferings.

And then Paul goes on, in his definition of the purpose for which Christ
lays hold upon men, apparently to say the same thing over again, only in
the opposite order, 'that I may be conformable to His death, if by any
means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead.' Both of these
clauses, I think, refer to the future, to the actual