' R, J. Campbell.
PSALM cxLv. 1 6 179
afterward it should come to pass that you let it slip, and never think of it again, yet the love and aspiration which once really existed live for ever before God, and in Him ye shall find the fruit thereof ; that is, to all eternity it shall be better for you than if you had never felt them.^
(2) The thing we desire in every object of desire is greater than we know ; it is greater than the object itself as that object now is. God enlarges our soul by means of the desire, and will give us vision by and by of the wonder and glory of the reality of which we have all the time been in search, though only dimly knowing what it was. The soul's desires are not illusory and ephemeral ; they are in essence spiritual and Divine, though we so often misdirect and degrade them.
^ The desire after God does not begin on our part. God has not hidden Himself from man for the purpose that He might allow His creature. His lost child, to cry after Him. We love God because He first loved us. If we desire God, it is because God hath first desired us. God asks for our heart as His taber- nacle; He surrounds us night and day with tender, pathetic appeals : He says, " If any man love me, I will come in, and make my abode in his heart." He plies us, as mother never plied her prodigal child, to come home again ; and there is not one word of grace, or pathos, or tender entreaty, which He has withheld from His argument, if haply He might find His way, with our glad consent, into our heart of hearts. Do you desire God ? It is because God first desired you. Do you feel kindlings of love towards Him? Your love is of yesterday. His love comes up from unbeginning time, and goes on to unending eternity ! ^
2. "Thou openest thine hand." — What does this bring home to us ? Does it not in the first place set forth the marvellous liberality of God ? This means that God's creatures do not wait upon Him in vain. He does not disappoint their need and their expectation. When the due season comes, His hand opens to fill their hearts with food and gladness. He does not give grudgingly or sparingly, but with full and open hand. Nor does He trim and carve His gifts according to the measure of our merit. If He were to do that we should fare badly, for we have all been un- dutiful children. He even gives us freely when we deserve not His goodness but His condemnation. ' Tauler's Life and Sermons (trans, by S. Winkworth), 294, - Joseph Parker.
i8o THE GOOD PROVIDENCE OF GOD
(1) "Thou openest thine hand." That is enough. But God cannot satisfy our deepest desires by any such short and easy method. There is a great deal more to be done by Him before the aspirations of love and fear and longing for righteousness can be fulfilled. He has to breathe Himself into us. Lower creatures have enough when they have the meat that drops from His hand. They know and care nothing for the hand that feeds. But God's best gifts cannot be separated from Himself. They are Himself, and in order to " satisfy the desire of every living thing " there is no way possible, even to Him, but the impartation of Himself to the waiting heart.
^ What means it to have a God, or what is God ? The answer is : God is one from whom we expect all good, and in whom we can take refuge in all our needs, so that to have God is nothing else than to trust and believe in Him with all our hearts ; as I have often said, that trust and faith of the heart alone make both God and Idol. If the faith and trust are right, tHen thy God is also the right God, and, again, if thy trust is false and wrong, then thou hast not the right God. For the two, faith and God, hold close together.^
(2) But we have to put our desires into words before God can satisfy them. " Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him." What then ? Why should we ask Him ? Because the asking will clear our thoughts about our desires. It will be a very good test of them. There are many things that we all wish, which we should not much like to put into our prayers, not because of any foolish notion that they are too small to find a place there, but because of an uncomfortable suspicion that perhaps they are not the kind of things that we ought to wish. And if we cannot make the desire into a cry, the sooner we make it dead as well as dumb the better for ourselves. The cry will serve, too, as a stimulus to the wishes which are put into words. Silent prayer is well, but there is a wonderful power on ourselves — it may be due to our weakness, but still it exists — in the articulate and audible utterance of our petitions to God.