1. When you review your _mercies_, consider how you are affected by them. It is easy, I know, to say, and to say so far truly, "Thank God for them!" Yet the whole spirit in which they are possessed may be intensely selfish. We may have been seeking our life in them to the very exclusion of God from our hearts, forgetting that "a man's life," says our Lord, "consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." What things? Any creature things whatever! To make these our _life_, that is, our happiness, or to esteem them as essential to our happiness, is, as our Lord adds, for a man "to lay up treasures for himself, and not to be rich towards God." This is that "covetousness which is idolatry,"--the worship of _Self_, through what ministers to Self. 2. As you remember your _sorrows_, remember not only how you were sustained and comforted under them, but, what is of incomparably more importance, consider how far you have been realising God's purpose in sending them. That purpose may have been to perfect you by trial; or to prove your loyalty to Him; or to _prevent_ evil in yourselves and others. But never forget that the lesson of all lessons is, that we or others should find _life_, and life eternal--that is, as I have said, life in the knowledge and in the love of God, which will satisfy and endure for ever; or, if this is already found by us, that we should possess it "more abundantly." Now, whatever tends to make us realise that what we often call and think to be "our life" is yet no life--that money, friends, or earthly enjoyments cannot fill the immortal soul, or be its portion for ever;--whatever awakes us from this dream and dispels the delusion, and makes us know the excellence and reality of true life in God, must be a blessing of the highest and richest kind. Yet what has such a tendency to do all this as sorrow, and the very trials which we so much deplore? The pain is no doubt great--often agony--a very cutting off a right hand, or plucking out a right eye; but the gain intended by the operation is incalculable and endless. Yet, what if all the good is lost through our blindness, ignorance, hardness of heart, pride, self-will, and unbelief? Alas! alas! if we too "go away sorrowful" from Christ when He threatens to take away our "much riches," though He does so in order only through this very discipline to induce us to follow Himself, and by the cross to gain life eternal! Alas! when it can be said of us, "Yet the Lord hath not given you an heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, unto this day; that ye might know that I am the Lord your God." And what is their punishment? "They have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel to anger, they are gone away backward. _Why should ye be stricken any more?_ Ye will revolt more and more!" What a real loss of friends would this be! For by separating ourselves through unbelief from Christ, we thereby for ever separate ourselves