‘Faith abides,’ says Paul, yonder, as here.  Now, there is a common saying, which I suppose ninety out of a hundred people think comes out of the Bible, about faith being lost in sight.  There is no such teaching in Scripture.  True, in one aspect, faith is the antithesis of sight.  True, Paul does say ‘We walk by faith, not by sight.’  But that antithesis refers only to part of faith’s significance.  In so far as it is the opposite of sight, of course it will cease to be in operation when ‘we shall know even as we are known’ and ’see Him as He is.’  But the essence of faith is not in the absence of the person trusted, but the emotion of trust which goes out to the person, present or absent.  And in its deepest meaning of absolute dependence and happy confidence, faith abides through all the glories and the lustres of the heavens, as it burns amidst the dimnesses and the darknesses of earth.  For ever and ever, on through the irrevoluble ages of eternity, dependence on God in Christ will be the life of the glorified, as it was the life of the militant, Church.  No millenniums of possession, and no imaginable increases in beauty and perfectness and enrichment with the wealth of God, will bring us one inch nearer to casting off the state of filial dependence which is, and ever will be, the condition of our receiving them all.  Faith ‘abides.’

Hope ‘abides.’  For it is no more a Scriptural idea that hope is lost in fruition, than it is that faith is lost in sight.  Rather that Future presents itself to us as the continual communication of an inexhaustible God to our progressively capacious and capable spirits.  In that continual communication there is continual progress.  Wherever there is progress there must be hope.  And thus the fair form, which has so often danced before us elusive, and has led us into bogs and miry places and then faded away, will move before us through all the long avenues of an endless progress, and will ever and anon come back to tell us of the unseen glories that lie beyond the next turn, and to woo us further into the depths of heaven and the fulness of God.  Hope ‘abides.’

Love ‘abides.’  I need not, I suppose, enlarge upon that thought which nobody denies, that love is the eternal form of the human relation to God.  It, too, like the mercy which it clasps, ‘endureth for ever.’

But I may remind you of what the Apostle does not explain in our text, that it is greater than its linked sisters, because whilst faith and hope belong only to a creature, and are dependent and expectant of some good to come to themselves, and correspond to something which is in God in Christ, the love which springs from faith and hope not only corresponds to, but resembles, that from which it comes and by which it lives.  The fire kindled is cognate with the fire that kindles; and the love that is in man is like the love that is in God.  It is the climax of his nature; it is the fulfilling of all duty; it is the crown and jewelled clasp of all perfection.  And so ’abideth faith, hope, love, and the greatest of these is love.’