ection power of God will be manifested.
And remember those precious words in the 11th of John: "Said I not unto
thee"--when did Christ say that? It was at the grave of Lazarus--"that if
thou believest, thou shalt see the glory of God?" Where shall I see the
glory of God most brightly? Beside the grave. Go down into death believing,
and the glory of God will come upon thee, and fill thy heart.

Dear friends, we want to die. If we are to live in the rest, and the peace,
and the blessedness of our great Boaz; if we are to live a life of joy and
of fruitfulness, of strength and of victory, we must go down into the grave
with Christ, and the language of our life must be: "I am a crucified
man. God be praised, though I have nothing but sin in myself, I have an
everlasting Jesus, with His death and His life, to be the life of my soul."

How can I enter into this fellowship of the cross? We find an illustration
in the story of the penitent thief. Thomas said, before Christ's death,
"Let us go and abide with Him." And Peter said, "Lord, I am ready to go
with Thee to prison, or to death." But the disciples all failed, and our
Lord took a man who was the offscouring of the earth, and he hung him upon
the cross of Calvary beside Himself, and He said to Peter, and to all: "I
will let you see what it is to die with Me." And He says that word to-day,
to the weakest and the humblest; if you are longing to know what it is to
enter into death with Jesus, come and look at the penitent thief. And what
do we see there? First of all, we see there the state of a heart prepared
to die with Christ. We see in that penitent thief, a humble, whole-hearted
confession of sin. There he hung upon the cursed tree, and the multitudes
were blaspheming that man beside him, but he was not ashamed publicly to
make confession: "I am dying a death that I have deserved; I am suffering
justly; this cross is what I have deserved." Here is one of the reasons why
the Church of Christ enters so little into the death of Christ; men do not
want to believe that the curse of God is upon everything in them that has
not died with Christ. People talk about the curse of sin, but they do not
understand that the whole nature has been infected by sin, and that the
curse is on everything. My intellect, has that been defiled by sin?
Terribly, and the curse of sin is on it, and therefore my intellect must go
down into the death. Ah, I believe that the Church of Christ suffers more