God can give us a great many things that we do not wish, but He cannot
give us His best gift, and that is Himself, unless we desire it. He
never forces His company on any man, and if we do not wish for Him He
cannot give us Himself, His Spirit, or the gifts of His Spirit. For
instance, He cannot make a man wise if he does not wish to be
instructed. He cannot make a man holy if he has no aspiration after
holiness. He cannot save a man from his sins if the man holds on to his
sin with both hands, like some shellfish with its claws when you try to
drag it out of its cleft in the rock. He cannot give the oil unless we
bring the vessels of our hearts opened by our desires.
If God could He would. 'Ye have not because ye ask not.' But we are
never to forget that God is not led to begin His giving because we
petition Him, but that the infinitude of His stores, and the endless,
changeless, unmotived, perfect love of His heart, make
self-communication--I was going to use a very strong word, and I do not
know that it is too strong--necessary to the blessedness of the blessed
God, and, long before we ever thought of Him, or sought anything from
Him, there was pouring out from Him all the fulness of His love: just
as we may conceive of the sunshine raying out before the orbs that were
to circle round it had been completely shaped, but were still diffused
and nebulous.
But, while God is always giving, our capacity to receive determines the
degree of our individual possession of Him. Or, to put it in the
plainest words--we have as much of God as we can take in; and the
principal factor in settling how much we can take is--how much we wish.
Measure the reality and intensity of desire, and you measure capacity.
As the atmosphere rushes into every vacuum, or as the sea runs up into
and fills every sinuosity of the shore, so wherever a heart opens, and
the unbroken coast-line is indented, as it were, by desire, in rushes
the tide of the divine gifts. You have God in the measure in which you
desire Him.
Only remember that that desire which brings God must be more than a
feeble, fleeting wish. Wishing is one thing; _willing_ is quite
another. Lazily wishing and strenuously desiring are two entirely
different postures of mind; the former gets nothing and the latter gets
everything, gets God, and with God all that God can bring.
But the wish must not only rise to intensity and earnestness, but it
must be steadfast. Suppose these two little boys of the widow had held
their vessels below the spout of the oil-pot with tremulous hands,
while they looked away at something else, sometimes keeping the vessels
right under, and sometimes shifting them on one side, it would have
been slow work filling the unsteadily held vessels. So it is in regard
to receiving God's best gift. Our desires must be unwavering. A cup
held by a shaking hand will spill its contents, or will never receive
them. 'Let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the
Lord.' The steadfast wish is the wish that is answered.
Is it not a strange indifference to our true good that we who have
learned, as most of us have learned only too well, that in this world
to wish is not to have, should turn away from the possibility that lies
before us each, of passing from this disappointing world of vain
longings into a region where we cannot wish anything that we do not
get? There is only one thing about which it is true that, if you want,
and as much as you want, you will have; and that thing is found when we
turn away our wishes from the false, fleeting, and surface
satisfactions of earth, and fasten them upon God, 'Who is able to do
exceeding abundantly above all that we ... think.' Wish for Him, and
you have what you have wished. Wish for anything else, and you may have
it or you may not, but depend upon it the fish is never half as big
when it is out of the water as it felt to be when it was tugging at the
hook.
II. Another vessel that we have to bring is the vessel of our
expectancy.
Desire is one thing; confident anticipation that the desire will be
fulfilled is quite another. And the two do not certainly go together
anywhere except in this one region, and there they do go, linked arm in
arm. For whatsoever, in the highest of all regions, we wish, we have
the right without presumption to believe that we shall receive.
Expectation, like desire, opens the heart.
There are some expectations, even in lower regions, that fulfil
themselves. Doctors will tell you that a very large part of the
curative power of their medicine depends upon the patient's
anticipation of recovery. If a man expects to die when he takes to his
bed, the chances are that he will die; and if a man expects to get
better, Death will have a fight before it conquers him. There are
hundreds of cases, in all departments of life, where he who sets
himself to a task with assured persuasion that he is going to do such
and such a thing will do it. 'Screw your courage to the sticking-place,
and we'll not fail,' said the heroine in the tragedy; and there is a
great truth in her fierce encouragement.
All these illustrations fall far beneath the Christian aspect of the
thought that what we expect from God we receive. That is only another
way of putting 'According to thy faith be it unto thee.' It is exactly
what Jesus Christ said when He promised, 'Whatsoever things ye ask when
ye stand praying believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.'
I am afraid that a great many of us often have expectations fainter
than desires; and that we should be very much surprised if the thing
that we ask for, in the prayers that we so often repeat by rote, were
granted to us. You will hear men praying for holiness, for clean
hearts, for progress in the Christian life, for a hundred other such
blessings. They do not expect that anything is going to come in
consequence, and they would be mightily at a loss what to do with the
gift if it did come. The absence of expectancy in our public petitions
is to me one of the saddest features in the Christian life of this day.
If you expect little, you will get little; and we do expect far less
than we ought. We cannot raise our confident expectations too high; for
'He is able to do for us exceeding abundantly above all that we ask' as
well as 'think.' The Apostle has set the limit of our expectations, in
the same context, and here it is: 'That we may be filled with all the
fulness of God.' There are two limits: one is the boundless
illimitableness of God's perfection, and the possibilities of our
possession of Him are not exhausted until we have reached that infinite
completeness. But then, there is a practical, working limit for each of
us; and that is--what do you desire? and what do you expect? God can
give more than we can ask or think, but He cannot at the moment give
more than we expect or desire.
True, the vessels that we bring to be filled with the oil are not like
the vessels that the fatherless boys brought. These were of a definite
capacity; and the little cup when it was filled was filled, and there
was an end of it. But the vessels that we bring are elastic, and widen
out. The more that is put into them the more they can hold, so that
there is no bound to the capacity of a heart for the reception and
inrush of God; and there will not be a bound through all the ages of a
growing possession of Him in eternity. But for to-day, desire and
expectancy determine the measure of the gift.