to give you the Kingdom.' Do you think He will not give you bread and
water on the road to it? Will He send out His soldiers half-equipped;
will it be found when they are on their march that they have been
started with a defective commissariat, and with insufficient
trenching tools? Shall the children of the King, on the road to their
thrones, be left to scramble along anyhow, in want of what they need
to get there? That is not God's way of doing. He that hath begun a
good work will also perfect the same, and when He gave to you and me
His Son, He bound Himself to give us every subsidiary and secondary
blessing which was needed to make that Son's work complete in each of
us.

Again, this great blessing draws after it, by necessary consequence,
all other lesser and secondary gifts, inasmuch as, in every real
sense, everything is included and possessed in the Christ when we
receive Him. 'With Him,' says Paul, as if that gift once laid
in a man's heart actually enclosed within it, and had for its
indispensable accompaniment the possession of every smaller thing
that a man can need, Jesus Christ is, as it were, a great Cornucopia,
a horn of abundance, out of which will pour, with magic affluence,
all manner of supplies according as we require. This fountain flows
with milk, wine, and water, as men need. Everything is given us when
Christ is given to us, because Christ is the Heir of all things, and
we possess all things in Him; as some poor village maiden married to
a prince in disguise, who, on the morrow of her wedding finds that
she is lady of broad lands, and mistress of a kingdom. 'He that
spared not His own Son,' not only 'with Him will give,' but in Him
has 'given us all things.'

And so, brethren, just as that great gift is the illuminating fact in
reference to the divine heart, so is it the interpreting fact in
reference to the divine dealings. Only when we keep firm hold of
Christ as the gift of God, and the Explainer of all that God does,
can we face the darkness, the perplexities, the torturing questions
that from the beginning have harassed men's minds as they looked upon
the mysteries of human misery. If we recognise that God has given us
His Son, then all things become, if not plain, at least lighted with
some gleam from that great gift; and we feel that the surrender of
Christ is the constraining fact which shapes after its own likeness,
and for its own purpose, all the rest of God's dealings with men.
Th