If we suffer with Christ, we shall also reign with Him. Suffering comes in as the consequence of our adoption into the family of God. It was quite different from sorrow, as a man connected with the first Adam. Paul desiring to be spent in filling up sufferings for Christ, was suffering on quite another ground from Adam-suffering.
There never was a higher life, there never were higher motives, nor higher hopes, than those in the apostle Paul! And all came out practically in the life of a man like this; his whole practice was correspondent with his heavenly position. His thought was, " God has given me as a sort of bell- bearer to His flock.” God bethought Himself of His people, and gave Paul for a pattern to guide and help them on, and they were to follow him as he followed Christ.
It becomes a very solemn question in a day like this, in which the name of Christ is taken up very easily, whether we are following after Christ, whether the cross is before the mind as that which Crucifies the world to us. A very solemn question "in connection with what the throbbing of the pulse of the inward life is, in those who are Christ's-do they know the cross? or do they show forth the spirit of the world? Is it in their hearts? Take any one passing through the street-the world is all about him, but is it in his heart, or is he living out of it? It is a blessed thing to say, We have naught to think of or to seek but heavenly things. " Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God;" that is our profession.
If there is a place strange to me, it ought to be this place where my Lord was crucified; and if it is not so, what is it but a place where I have been walking In the flesh-satisfied to have passed through the Red Sea, and that is all.