en our
petitions and expectations when He tells us that we are to find the
measure of God's working for us, not in the impoverishment of our
present possessions, but in the exceeding riches of the power that
worketh in us--that is to say, that we are to look for the limit of the
limitless gift in nothing short of the boundless energy of God Himself.
In the Epistle to the Colossians Paul uses the same illustration with an
individual reference to his own labours. In our text he associates with
himself all believers, as being conscious of a power working in them,
which is really the limitless power of God, and heartens them to
anticipate that whatever limitless power can effect in them will
certainly be theirs. God does not leave off till He has done and till He
can look upon His completed work and pronounce it very good.

III. This boundless grace is in each individual case bounded for the
time by our own faith.

When I lived near the New Forest I used to hear much of what they called
'rolling fences.' A man received or took a little piece of Crown land on
which he built a house and put round it a fence which could be
judiciously and silently pushed outwards by slow degrees and enclosed,
year by year, a wider area. We Christian people have, as it were, our
own small, cultivated plot on the boundless prairie, the extent of which
we measure for ourselves and which we can enlarge as we will. We have
been speaking of the various aspects under which the boundlessness of
the gift is presented by the Apostle, but there is another 'according
to' in Christ's own words, 'According to your faith be it unto you,' and
that statement lays down the practical limits of our present possession
of the boundless gift. We have as much as we desire; we have as much as
we take; we have as much as we use; we have as much as we can hold. We
are admitted into the treasure house, and all around us lie ingots of
gold and vessels full of coins; we ourselves determine how much of the
treasure should be ours, and if at any time we feel like empty-handed
paupers rather than like possible millionaires, the reason lies in our
own slowness to take that which is freely given to us of God. His word
to us all is, 'Ye are not straitened in Me, ye are straitened in
yourselves.' It is well for us to keep ever before us the boundlessness
of the gift in itself and the working limit in ourselves which
conditions our actual possession of the riches. For so, on the