spirits. You can
take a porous pottery vessel, wrap it up in waxcloth, pitch it all
over, and then drop it into mid-Atlantic, and not a drop will find
its way in. And that is what we can do with ourselves, so that
although in Him 'we live and move and have our being,' and are like
the earthen vessel in the ocean, no drop of the blessed moisture will
ever find its way into the heart. There must be man's faith before
there can be God's filling.

Further, this relation of the two things suggests to us that a
consequence of a Christian man's faith is the direct action of God
upon him. Notice how the Apostle puts that truth in a double form
here, in order that he may emphasise it, using one form of
expression, involving the divine, direct activity, at the beginning
of his prayer, and another at the end, and so enclosing, as it were,
within a great casket of the divine action, all the blessings, the
flashing jewels, which he desires his Roman friends to possess. 'The
God of hope fill you ... through the power of the Holy Ghost.' I wish
I could find words by which I could bear in upon the ordinary type of
the Evangelical Christianity of this generation anything like the
depth and earnestness of my own conviction that, for lack of a
proportionate development of that great truth, of the direct action
of the giving God on the believing heart, it is weakened and harmed
in many ways. Surely He that made my spirit can touch my spirit;
surely He who filleth all things according to their capacity can
Himself enter into and fill the spirit which is opened for Him by
simple faith. We do not need wires for the telegraphy between heaven
and the believing soul, but He comes directly to, and speaks in, and
moves upon, and moulds and blesses, the waiting heart. And until you
know, by your own experience rightly interpreted, that there is such
a direct communion between the giving God and the recipient believing
spirit, you have yet to learn the deepest depth, and the most blessed
blessedness, of Christian faith and experience. For lack of it a
hundred evils beset modern Christianity. For lack of it men fix their
faith so exclusively as that the faith is itself harmed thereby, on
the past act of Christ's death on the Cross. You will not suspect me
of minimising that, but I beseech you remember one climax of the
Apostle's which, though not bearing the same message as my text, is
in harmony with it, 'Christ that died, yea, rather, that is ris