Life Before Increase

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Matthew 13:11-12

He answered and said to them, Because it is given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.…

A dead post which we saw in the ground twenty years ago is the same post still, no bigger, no smaller, and only altered by becoming rotten underground; but the tree which you saw twenty years ago, what a difference there is in it. It was then a sapling which you could bend, but now it has become as an iron pillar, and there is no moving it. So ought it to be with us, and we must aspire to have it so.

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