Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. – 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 NIV
Here Paul sets out the secret of endurance.
(i) All through life it must happen that a man’s bodily strength fades away, but all through life it ought to happen that a man’s soul keeps growing. The sufferings which leave a man with a weakened body may be the very things which strengthen the sinews of his soul. It was the prayer of the poet, “Let me grow lovely growing old.” From the physical point of view life may be a slow but inevitable slipping down the slope that leads to death. But from the spiritual point of view life is a climbing up the hill that leads to the presence of God. No man need fear the years, for they bring him nearer, not to death, but to God.
(ii) Paul was convinced that anything he had to suffer in this world would be as nothing compared with the glory he would enjoy in the next. He was certain that God would never be in any man’s debt. Alistair Maclean, minister father of the author of H.M.S. Ulysses and the rest, tells of an old Highland woman who had to leave the clean air and the blue waters and the purple hills and live in the slum of a great city. She still lived close to God, and one day she said, “God will make it up to me, and I will see the flowers again.”
In Christmas Eve Browning writes of the martyr whose story was set out “on the rude tablet overhead.”
“I was born sickly, poor and mean,A slave; no misery could screenThe holders of the pearl of priceFrom Caesar’s envy,–therefore twiceI fought with beasts and three times sawMy children suffer by his law;At last my own release was earned;I was some time in being burned,But at the close a Hand came throughThe fire above my head, and drewMy soul to Christ, whom now I see.Sergius, a brother, writes for meThis testimony on the wall–For me, I have forgot it all.”
Earth’s suffering was forgotten in the glory of heaven.
It is a notable fact that in all the gospel story Jesus never foretold his death without foretelling his Resurrection. He who suffers for Christ will share his glory. God’s own honour is pledged to that.
(iii) For that very reason, a man’s eyes must be ever fixed, not on the things that are seen, but on the things that are unseen. The things that are seen, the things of this world, have their day and cease to be; the things that are unseen, the things of heaven, last forever.
There are two ways of looking at life. We can look at it as a slow but inexorable journey away from God. Wordsworth in his Ode on the Intimations of Immortality had the idea that when a child came into this world he had some memory of heaven which the years slowly took away from him.
“Trailing clouds of glory do we come,”
but,
“Shades of the prison house begin to close
About the growing boy.”
And in the end the man is earthbound and heaven is forgotten. Thomas Hood wrote with wistful pathos:
“I remember, I remember
The fir-trees dark and high.
I used to think their slender spires
Were close against the sky.
It was a childish ignorance
But now ’tis little joy
To know, I’m farther off from heaven
Than when I was a boy.”
If we think only of the things that are visible we are bound to see life that way. But there is another way. The writer to the Hebrews said of Moses: “He endured as seeing him who is invisible.” ( Hebrews 11:27 ). Robert Louis Stevenson tells of an old byreman. Someone was sympathizing with him about his daily work amidst the muck of the byre and asking him how he could go on doing it day in and day out, and the old man answered, “He that has something ayont (beyond) need never weary.”
