a Father's hand. Dear brother and sister, can you
say, 'Now am I a child of God!' Then you may patiently and peacefully
front that dim future.

II. Now I come to the second point, namely, that we remain ignorant of
much in that future.

That happy assurance of the love of God resting upon me, and making me
His child through Jesus Christ, does not dissipate all the darkness
which lies on that beyond. 'We are the sons of God, _and_,' just because
we are, 'it does not yet appear what we shall be.' Or, as the words are
rendered in the Revised Version, 'it is not yet made manifest what we
shall be.'

The meaning of that expression, 'It doth not yet appear,' or, 'It is not
made manifest,' may be put into very plain words. John would simply say
to us, 'There has never been set forth before men's eyes in this earthly
life of ours an example, or an instance, of what the sons of God are to
be in another state of being.' And so, because men have never had the
instance before them, they do not know much about that state.

In some sense there has been a manifestation through the life of Jesus
Christ. Christ has died; Christ is risen again. Christ has gone about
amongst men upon earth after Resurrection. Christ has been raised to the
right hand of God, and sits there in the glory of the Father. So far it
has been manifested what we shall be. But the risen Christ is not the
glorified Christ, and although He has set forth before man's senses
irrefragably the fact of another life, and to some extent given glimpses
and gleams of knowledge with regard to certain portions of it, I suppose
that the 'glorious body' of Jesus Christ was not assumed by Him till the
cloud 'received Him out of their sight,' nor, indeed, could it be
assumed while He moved among the material realities of this world, and
did eat and drink before them. So that, while we thankfully recognise
that Christ's Resurrection and Ascension have 'brought life and
immortality to light,' we must remember that it is the fact, and not the
manner of the fact, which they make plain; and that, even after His
example, it has not been manifested what is the body of glory which He
now wears, and therefore it has not yet been manifested what we shall be
when we are fashioned after its likeness.

There has been no manifestation, then, to sense, or to human experience,
of that future, and, therefore, there is next to no knowledge about it.
You can only know facts when the facts are co