them?  My faith is the condition; Christ is the Giver.  If I ally myself to Him by my faith, He gives to me.  If I do not, with all the will to do it, He cannot bestow His best gifts any more than a man who stretches out his hand to another sinking in the flood can lift him out, and set him on the safe shore, if the drowning man’s hand is not stretched out to grasp the rescuer’s outstretched hand.

Brethren, God is infinitely willing to give the choicest gifts of His love to us all, to gladden, to enrich, to adorn, to make stable and erect.  But He cannot give them unless you will trust Him.  ’It pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell.’  That alabaster box is brought to earth.  It was broken on the Cross that ‘the house’ might be ‘filled with the odour of the ointment.’  Our faith is the only condition; it is only the condition, but it is the indispensable condition, of our being anointed with that fragrant anointing.  He, and He only, can give us the fullness of God.

THE SOURCES OF HOPE

’We rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3.  And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also:  knowing that tribulation worketh patience; 4.  And patience, experience; and experience, hope.’—­ROMANS v. 2-4.

We have seen in a previous sermon that the Apostle in the foregoing context is sketching a grand outline of the ideal Christian life, as all rooted in ‘being justified by faith,’ and flowering into ’peace with God,’ ‘access into grace,’ and a firm stand against all antagonists and would-be masters.  In our text he advances to complete the outline by sketching the true Christian attitude towards the future.  I have ventured to take so pregnant and large a text, because there is a very striking and close connection throughout the verses, which is lost unless we take them together.  Note, then, ’we rejoice in hope,’ ‘we glory in tribulation.’  Now, it is one word in the original which is diversely rendered in these two clauses by ‘rejoice’ and ‘glory.’  The latter is a better rendering than the former, because the original expression designates not only the emotion of joy, but the expression of it, especially in words.  So it is frequently rendered in the New Testament by the word ‘boast,’ which, of course, has unpleasant associations, which scarcely fit it for use here.  So then you see Paul regards it as possible for, and more than possibly characteristic of, a Christian, that the very same emotion should he excited by that great bright future hope, and by the blackness of present sorrow.  That is strong meat; and so he goes on to explain how he thinks it can and must be so, and points out that trouble, through a series of results, arrives at last at this, that if it is rightly borne, it flashes up into greater brightness the hope which has grasped the glory of God.  So then we have here, not only a wonderful designation of the object around which Christian hope