y,
"Increase our faith," and He says, "Exercise the faith you have." We
must exercise the lower power before we attain to the higher. Suppose
there is a powerful steam-engine which is able to do for you a year's
work in a day: it is a reservoir of power, but the power is conditioned
upon the exercise of a lower power; you must bring coals and fetch
water and make up fire, and by and by the power becomes accessible to
you. He that is faithful in least is faithful also in much; we must be
faithful to the light already given us, faithful to our powers of love,
thought, and obedience, if we are to be brought to the reception of the
power in which saints have walked.

Using the marginal suggestion, we have the _right_ given us to be
children of God. We hear much nowadays of people standing on their
rights,--on rights real and rights imagined; we have our rights against
the enemy of souls; oh! that we would insist on them, and that we would
realise how the powers of darkness fly when we look to God bravely and
confidently for the promised help.

What is involved in thus becoming a child of God? Well, for one thing,
God is pledged to love us just as much as He loves Christ. We
sometimes get the idea into our minds that God loves us in a sort of
afterthought manner, as a superfluous or unnecessary part of creation.
I have found out that He loves us just as much as He loves Christ;
Jesus Himself said--"Father, Thou hast loved them as Thou hast loved
Me."

Was Christ's consciousness of the love of God a mere wavering thing,
perhaps known only at critical times; or was it not rather His vital
breath and native air? "I will that they also whom Thou hast given Me
may be with Me where I am"; and "the only-begotten Son is in the bosom
of the Father."

Another side of this privilege is that we may be kept from sin. Three
passages I call to mind in which the children of the Highest are spoken
of: one is in Matt. v. 45: "That ye may be the children of your Father
which is in heaven." It goes on--"Be ye therefore perfect, even as
your Father in heaven is perfect." Another is in 2 Cor. vi. 18; "I
will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be My sons and My daughters,
saith the Lord God Almighty." It goes on--"Having these promises,
dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the
flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of the Lord." The
third is in 1 John iii. 1: "Behold what manner of love the Fa