'Thou shalt bring them in and plant them in the mountain
of Thine inheritance....'--EXODUS xv. 17.
I. 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.