to die this instant, would no more have God for
ours, or belong to God, than we do now. It is our fault if the circle is
broken into so many segments, if the moments of mutual love, communion,
and indwelling are so rare and interrupted in our lives. The
incompleteness which is due to our earthly condition is nothing as
compared with the incompleteness which is due to our own sin.

But this incompleteness is one which may be progressively diminished,
and we may be tending moment by moment, and year by year, nearer and
nearer, and ever nearer, to the unreachable ideal of the entire
possession of, and being possessed by, our God. There is a continual
process of redemption of 'God's own possession' going on if a Christian
man is true to himself and to that Divine Spirit which is the 'earnest'
of the 'inheritance.' Mark that in my text, as it stands in our Bibles,
and reads 'until the redemption,' there seems to be merely a pointing
onwards to a future epoch, but that, in the more accurate rendering
which you will find in the Revised Version, instead of 'until' we have
'_unto_,' and that teaches us that the Divine Spirit, which in one
aspect is the 'earnest of the inheritance,' is also operating upon men's
hearts and minds so as to bring about the gradual completion of the
process of redemption.

So, dear brethren, seeing that by our own faults the possession is
incomplete, and seeing that in the incompleteness there is given to each
of us, if we rightly use it, a mighty power which is working ever
towards the completion, it becomes us day by day to draw into our
spirits more and more of that divine influence, and to let it work more
fully upon the sins and faults which, far more than the body of flesh,
or the connection with the world which it brings about, are the reasons
for the incompleteness of the possession. We have, if we are wise, the
task to discharge of daily enclosing, so to speak, more and more of the
broad land which is all given over to us for our inheritance, but of
which only so much as we fence in and cultivate, and make our own, is
our own.

The incompleteness is progressively completed, and it is our work as
much as God's work to complete it. For though in our text that
redemption is conceived of as a divine act, it is not an act in which we
are but passive. The air goes into the lungs, and that oxygenates the
blood, but the lung has to inflate if the air is to penetrate all its
vesicles. And so the Sp