aping of the harvest. They
do not pray for deliverance from the broad road, but they desire that
this broad road terminate at the gate of Heaven instead of at the gate
of destruction. Had this man said that he desired to escape hell
everybody could have sympathized with him. But that is not his desire.

What he said was entirely different. "I long," he says, "to share in
the sufferings of Christ; I long to weep as He wept; I long to
sympathize as He sympathized; I long to travel life by His road; I long
to pass through His Gethsemane and to climb His Calvary and to share in
my finite way in His Cross." It is an amazing desire. What is its
secret?

Why could Paul truly say such a word as this? In the first place, he
could not say it because it was natural for him. There had been a time
when he had given utterance to such a statement it would have been
grossly false. When Paul rode out from Jerusalem on his way to
Damascus, for instance, he longed for anything else more than he longed
to share in the sufferings of Christ. It required a marvelous change.
It required an absolute transformation to bring Paul to the place where
he was able to give utterance to this high and heroic sentiment. He
was not possessed of such a longing by nature.

Nor did Paul long to share in the sufferings of Christ because he
looked upon these sufferings as trivial. Few men have ever understood
the sufferings of Christ as did Paul. He had an appreciation of their
intensity and of their bitterness far beyond most other men. He
understood as few have ever understood the physical agonies of the
Cross. Paul was a great physical sufferer himself.

But he knew what we sometimes forget, that infinitely the deepest pain
of Jesus was not physical. Had there been nothing involved in His
crucifixion but physical agony then we are forced to acknowledge that
many of His followers have endured the same kind of pain with a
fortitude to which He was a stranger. His agony was from another
source. He suffered because He was made "to be sin for us, who knew no
sin." He suffered in that "he was wounded for our transgressions and
bruised for our iniquities." It was this fact that wrung from Him that
bitterest of all cries, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Nor did Paul possess this desire because he longed for pain in itself.
Paul was not a calloused soul. Few men have ever been more sensitive
to pain. He had no more fondness f