above all'--there are four of them--'all that we can ask or
think.' Yes, in all forms language is but faint and feeble, weak and
poor in the presence of that great miracle of a love that passeth
knowledge and that we may know the heights and depths. And so says our
Apostle, 'All things that pertain to life, all things that pertain to
godliness.' The whole circle all round, all the 360 degrees of it, God's
love will come down and lie on the top of it as it were, superimposed,
so that there should not be a single gift where there is a flaw or a
defect. Everything you want of life, everything you want for godliness.
Yes, of course, the gift must bear some kind of proportion to the giver.
You do not expect a millionaire to put down half a crown to a
subscription list if he gives anything at all. And God says to you and
me, 'Come and look at My storehouses, count if you can those golden
vases filled with treasure, look at those massive ingots of bullion,
gaze into the vanishing distances of the infiniteness of My nature and
of My possessions, and then listen to Me. I give thee Myself--Myself,
that ye may be filled with all the fulness of God. All things that
pertain to life, all things that pertain to godliness. But I cannot pass
on from this part of my subject without venturing one more remark. It is
this: I do not suppose it is too minute, verbal criticism. This great
encyclopaediacal gift is represented in my text, not as a thing that you
are going to get, Christian men and women, but as a thing that you have
gotten. And any of you that are able to test the correctness of my
assertion will see I have thought the form of language used in the
original is such as to point still more specifically than in our
translation, to some one definite act in the past in which all that
fulness of glory and virtue of life and godliness was given to us men.
Is there any doubt as to what that is? We talk sometimes as if we had to
ask God to give us more. God cannot give you any more than He gave you
nineteen hundred years ago. It was all in Christ. Get a very vulgar
illustration which is altogether inadequate for a great many purposes,
but may serve for one. Suppose some man told you that there was a
thousand pounds paid to your credit at a London bank, and that you were
to get the use of it as you drew cheques against it. Well, the money is
there, is it not? The gift is given, and yet for all that you may be
dying, and half-dead, a pauper.