These touching words of St. Paul are based upon the grand truth to which Easter Day is a standing witness. “Therefore,” he says, or “for which cause, we faint not.” That cause is stated in the verse just before, “Knowing that He Which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also with Jesus, and shall present us with you.” The Apostle had just been giving a vivid description of the extreme strain, and almost mortal struggle, in which the work of his ministry involved him. “We are troubled,” he says, “on every side ... always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So then death worketh in us, but life in you.” The Apostle was undergoing a strain which was draining the very life of his body, in order to preach the Gospel which was bringing life to the souls of others; but he endured it in the knowledge that, even if it involved the sacrifice of his life, He Who raised up the Lord Jesus would raise him up also by Jesus, and present him in a new life at the day of the Resurrection. In this knowledge, his experience that his outward man was perishing did not make him faint, for he knew that his inward man was being renewed day by day. If he was daily dying, he was but experiencing the dying of the Lord Jesus; and thus, by entering into closer sympathy with his Lord, he was becoming united also with His life. Christ’s resurrection in glory was an assurance to him of his own resurrection, and the sufferings of the moment were as nothing to him in comparison with that glory. That affliction was, after all, light and momentary, when it was realized that it was working out for him, more and more exceedingly, an eternal weight of glory. The things which he saw and felt at the moment were, after all, but temporary, whereas the things which were not then visible were eternal. If the earthly frame, which was his present tabernacle, were dissolved by death, he knew that there was ready for him “a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens.”