t of My Father's hand.' No! But you can wriggle
yourself out of your Father's hand, if you will. And the security avails
only so long as you realise that you belong to God, and are living not
for yourself.

Possessing God we are rich. There is nothing that is truly our wealth
which remains outside of us, and can be separated from us. 'Shrouds have
no pockets,' says the Spanish proverb. 'His glory shall not descend
after him,' says the grim psalm. But if God possesses me He is not going
to let His treasures be lost in the grave. And if I possess Him then I
shall pass through death as a beam of light does through some denser
medium--a little refracted indeed, but not broken up; and I shall carry
with me all my wealth to begin another world with. And that is more than
you can do with the money that you make here. If you have God, you have
the capital to commence a new condition of things beyond the grave.

And so that mutual possession is the real pledge of immortal life, for
nothing can be more incredible than that a soul which has risen to have
God for its very own, and has bowed itself to accept God's ownership of
it, can be affected by such a transient and physical incident as what we
call death. We rise to the assurance of immortality because we have an
inheritance which is God Himself. And in that inexhaustible Inheritance
there lies the guarantee that we shall live while He lives, because He
lives, and until we have incorporated into our lives all the majesty and
the purity and the wisdom and the power that belong to us because they
are God's.

But we have to notice the two words that lie at the beginning of our
first text--'_In whom_ we were made an inheritance.' That opens up the
whole question of the means by which this mutual possession becomes
possible for us men. Jesus Christ has died. That breaks the bondage
under which the whole world is held. For the true slavery which
interferes with the free service and the full possession of God is the
slavery of self and sin. Jesus Christ has died. 'If the Son make you
free ye shall be free indeed.' That great sacrifice not only 'breaks the
power of cancelled sin,' but it also moves the heart, in the measure in
which we truly accept it, to the love and the surrender which make the
mutual possession of which we have been speaking. And so it is in Him
that we become an Inheritance, that God comes to His rights in regard to
each of us. And it is in Him that we, trusting