THE lesson taught by each present deliverance and kindness is that we shall be brought to His rest at last.
(a) Daily mercies are a pledge and a pattern of His continuous acts. The confidence that we shall be kept is based upon no hard doctrine of final perseverance, but on the assurance that God is always the same, like the sunshine which has poured out for all these millenniums and still rushes on with the same force. Consider--The inexhaustibleness of the divine resources. The steadfastness of the divine purposes. The long-suffering of the divine patience.
(b) Thus daily mercies should lead on our thoughts to heavenly things. They should not prison us in their own sweetness. We should see the great Future shining through them as a transparent, not an opaque medium.
(c) That ultimate future should be the great object of our hope. Surely it is chiefly in order that we may have the light of that great to-morrow brightening and magnifying our dusty to-days, that we are endowed with the faculty of looking forward and' calling things that are not as though they were.' So we should engage and enlarge our minds with it.
