Scripture: Romans 8:18
Faith is the journey of the soul between the realized and the unrealized. It is ever leaving the actual behind and reaching forth to the ideal, never satisfied until it finds in the ideal the Eternal Seal.
It is a mathematical sum. “I consider,” he says. And it must be admitted that no man that ever lived was more capable of working out this sum than this Apostle. On the one hand, he has given us, in the eleventh chapter of his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, a sketch of his own sufferings, such as, perhaps, the experience of no other mortal man could match. On the other hand, he had held personal converse with the Lord Jesus Christ; he is able to tell of “the abundance of his revelations.” Already he had been “caught up into Paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.” Who, then, was so fit as the Apostle Paul, in the wonderful contrast of his unparalleled life, to put the two together, and to decide the contrast?
In sufferings, who has come up to the Apostle? In revelations of the things which God has prepared for them that love Him, who has been equally honored? When he wrote of the sufferings of this present time, he was not reclining on the couch of luxury and imagining the lot of the afflicted. He was in and surrounded by those very sufferings. In perils from his own countrymen, and in perils from false brethren, he was working with his own hands for his daily bread in the wealthy and dissolute Corinth. He bore about with him that thorn in the flesh, which, however difficult it may be for us to assign its nature, we know was the messenger of Satan to buffet him: which, with all his zeal, all the wonders and signs of an Apostle wrought by him, rendered his bodily presence weak, and his speech contemptible. Day by day he entered deeper than other men into that inward conflict between the good which he would do but could not, and the evil which he would not do but did. Of a character wonderfully susceptible and habitually introspective, he had, besides, his spiritual faculties penetrated and intensified by the abiding and indwelling Spirit of God, given him for his apostolic work. Mighty was He that wrought in him—weak and frail the earthen vessel by which that energy must be sustained. We hear him speak of bearing about death, of daily dying; we hear him crying out, “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). Truly, in sufferings, without and within, but One ever surpassed him—that Divine Master whom he followed, and of whom he says in his fervor that he fills up that which is lacking of His sufferings for the sake of the Church which is His body.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 