are that we are receiving, they will soon be healed. The tribulation
4. He expects us to be separate from the world.—The prospect on which our eye is fixed is not carnal nor earthly. It belongs, indeed, in some measure, to earth, for it takes in the "new earth" as well as the "new heavens." But still it has nothing in common with that world out of which we were delivered. It is of God; and he that gazes on it is, in the very act of gazing, drawn nearer to God, and separated from all objects and scenes in which God is not. We gaze as those who are "seeking the better, even the heavenly country." We gaze as those who are not "mindful of that country whence they came out," or seeking an "opportunity to return;" and the longer that we gaze we feel more and more satisfied with the step of separation—more and more willing to be strangers upon earth, whoso tie to this world is broken, but whose tie to the world to come is becoming stronger every hour.
5. He expects us to "glory in tribulation."—For sharp as the wounds are that we are receiving, they will soon be healed. The tribulation that lays us down on a sick-bed, quickens our anticipations of the land where "the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick." The tribulation that robs us of a beloved face, but opens another vista into the abiding heritage. The tribulation that throws down our earthly dwelling, that gives us poverty for riches, that makes home a desert, that estranges friends, that lowers our good name—does but the more effectually disentangle us from snares which might have been fatal, and "set our feet in a large room." That tribulation that disenchants the world to us, and makes "the world to come" our all, is surely to be "gloried in."
6. He expects our faith to grow.—For just as our faith lays hold of the prospect, so does that prospect in return by hold of and increase our faith. The belief of what is false destroys faith; in eats into its very core. The belief of what is true is self-rewarding, by invigorating the very faith which receives it. There is an innate healing power in truth just as there is an inherent corrosive power in falsehood; so that the more we let our faith spread itself out over the region of the true, the more do we find that faith gaining strength and rising into maturity,