colonia_, to be perfectly consistent, must mean, in
one measure or another, to suffer; it must mean to encounter
"adversaries," such open adversaries, probably, as those who had
dragged Paul and Silas to the judgment seat and the dungeon, ten years
before. How were they to meet that experience, or anything resembling
it? Not merely with resignation, nor even with resolution, but with a
recognition of the joy, nay of the "_gift_," of "suffering for His
sake."

Circumstances infinitely vary, and so therefore do sufferings. The
Master assigns their kinds and degrees, not arbitrarily indeed but
sovereignly; and it is His manifest will that not all equally faithful
Christians should equally encounter open violence, or even open shame,
"for His sake." But it is His will also, definitely revealed, that
suffering in some sort, "for His name's sake," should normally enter
into the lot of "all that will live godly in Christ Jesus." Even in
the Church there is the world. And the world does not like the
allegiance to Christ which quite refuses, however modestly and meekly,
to worship its golden image. To the end, pain must be met with in the
doing here on earth of the "beloved will of God."

But this very pain is "a gift" from the treasures of heaven. Not in
itself; pain is never in itself a good; the perfect bliss will not
include it; "there shall be no more pain." But in its relations and
its effects it is "a gift" indeed. For to the disciple who meets it in
the path of witness and of service for his Master amongst his fellows,
it opens up, as nothing else can do, the fellowship of the faithful,
and the heart of JESUS.

[1] Observe the aorist infinitive, _to apothanein_, of _the crisis_,
dying, contrasted with the present infinitive, _to zen_, of _the
process, living_.--It may be noticed that the renderings of Luther,
_Christus ist mein Leben_, and Tindale, _Christ is to me lyfe_, are
untenable, though expressing as a fact a deep and precious truth. The
Apostle is obviously dealing with the characteristics, not the source,
of "living."

[2] _Sunechomai_: literally, "I am confined, restricted from the two
(sides)"; as if to say, "I am hindered as to my choice, whichever side
you view me from."

[3] Literally, "having the desire"; not "a desire," which misses the
point of the words. He means that his _epithymia_ lies in one
direction, his conviction of call and duty in the other. _The_ desire,
the element of