, first, that God will fulfil every desire that
longs for goodness. He is scarcely deserving of being called good who
does not desire to be better. Aspiration must always be ahead of
performance in a growing life, such as every Christian life ought to be.
To long for any righteousness and beauty of goodness is, in some
imperfect and incipient measure, to possess the good for which we long.
This is the very signature of a Christian life--yearning after
unaccomplished perfection. If you know nothing of that desire that
stings and impels you onwards; if you do not know what it is to say,
'Oh! wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this
death?' if you do not know what it is to follow the fair ideal realised
in Jesus Christ with infinite longing, what right have you to call
yourself a Christian? The very essence of the Christian life is yearning
for completeness, and restlessness as long as sin has any power over us.
We live not only by admiration, faith, and love, but we live by hope;
and he who does not hunger and thirst after righteousness has yet to
learn what are the first principles of the Gospel of Christ.

If there be not the desire after goodness, the restlessness and
dissatisfaction with every present good, the brave ambition that says,
'Forgetting the things that are behind, I reach forth unto the things
that are before,' there is nothing in a man to which God's grace can
attach itself. God cannot make you better if you do not wish to be
better. There is no point upon which His hallowing and ennobling grace
can lay hold in your hearts without such desire. 'Open thy mouth wide
and I will fill it.' If, as is too often the case with hosts of
professing Christians, you shut your mouths tight and lock your teeth,
how can God put any food between your lips? There must, first of all, be
the aspiration, and then there will be the satisfaction.

I look out upon my congregation, or, better still, I look into my own
heart, and I say, If I, if you, dear brethren, are not worthy of the
vocation wherewith we are called, we have not because we ask not. If
there be no desire after goodness in our hearts, God cannot make us
good. Our wishes are the mould into which the molten metal from the
great furnace of His love will run. If we bring but a little vessel we
cannot get a large supply. The manna lies round our tents; it is for us
to determine how much we will gather.

And in like manner, says Paul, God wi