what is the main though often impeded tendency and direction of the
present. The earnest of the 'inheritance' is the pledge until the full
redemption of 'God's own possession.' I wish, then, to draw attention to
these additional thoughts which are here attached to the main idea with
which we were dealing in the last sermon.

I. And I ask you to look with me, first, at the incompleteness of the
present possession.

I tried to show in my last sermon how those great thoughts of God's
having us, and our having God, rested upon the three ideas of mutual
love, mutual communication, and mutual indwelling. On His side the love,
the impartation, the indwelling, are all perfect. On our side they are
incomplete, broken, defective; and, therefore, the incompleteness on our
side hinders both God's possession of us, and our possession of Him; so
that we have but the 'earnest' and not the 'inheritance.' That is to
say, the ownership may be perfect in idea, but in realisation it is
imperfect.

And then, if we turn to the word in the other clause, 'the redemption of
the purchased possession,' that suggests the incompleteness with which
God as yet owns us. For though the initial act of redeeming is complete,
yet redemption is a process, and not an act. And we 'are having' it, as
the Apostle says in another place very emphatically, in continual and
growing experience. The estate has been acquired, but has not yet been
fully subdued. For there are tribes in the jungles and in the hills who
still hold out against the reign of Him who has won it for Himself. And
so seeing that the redemption in its fulness is relegated to some point
in the future, towards which we are progressively approximating, and
seeing that the best that can be said about the Christian experience
here is that we have an 'earnest of the inheritance,' we must recognise
the incompleteness to-day of our possession of God, and of God's
possession of us.

That is a matter of experience. We know that only too well. 'I have
God'--have I? I have a drop at the bottom of a too often unsteadily held
and spilling cup, and the great ocean rolls unfathomable and boundless
at my feet. How partial, how fragmentary, how clouded with doubts and
blank ignorance, how intermittent, and, alas! rare, is our knowledge of
Him. We sometimes go down our streets between tall houses, walking in
their shadow, and now and then there is a cross street down which a
blaze of sunshine comes, and when