It is, however, with the psalmist’s second reason for his faith we have most to do.  “I will bless the Lord, who hath given me counsel:  my reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”  This man held close communion with God.  Is it not great to find the testimony of a brother man coming down all through those ages, from that dim and distant past, clear and sure as to this, that he had God’s counsel and that God kept communion with him?  God had spoken to this man and shown him His will.  Yes, he had received what we call inspiration and revelation, and had proved the truth of these in his life.  They had led and they had lifted him.  Nor had they come to him as many men falsely suppose revelation and inspiration exclusively have come to mankind, by means, namely, that were extraordinary and miraculous.  The psalmist tells us of no vision of angels, of no voice from heaven.  The Lord had not appeared to him in dreams nor by any marvelous signs; on the other hand, he tells us simply that the divine counsel of which he was so sure, and which he passes on to us, came to him through the workings of his inner spiritual life.  That is what he means by the emphatic statement “yea, my reins instruct me in the night seasons,” which he adds parallel with the thought, “I will bless the Lord, who hath given me counsel.”  According to the primitive physiology of this man’s nation and times, the reins of a man fulfil the same intellectual function which we, with our larger knowledge, know are discharged by the brain.  This was how God’s revelation came to this brother of ours, through the working of his mind and conscience, but it was in the night seasons that they worked, not in the day and in the sunshine, but in the night when a man is left to himself with only this advantage to his thought:  that like the blind he is yet undistracted by the influences which are seen.  When he lies down he thinks soberly and quietly about himself and about life and about God, and about the great hidden future that is waiting for him.  He was communing with God, who had made his brain and used it as an instrument of revelation.  In these thoughts God was communing with man through his reason and through his conscience.  You and I are always contrasting God’s providence and His grace.  We are always attempting to oppose reason and revelation; to this man they were one.  God’s great grace had come to him through God’s own providence, and God’s revelation was ministered to him through the reason with which he had endowed the creature He had made in His own image.  This psalmist’s chief and practical help to us men and women today is that he became sure of God not because of any miracle or supernatural sign, on his report of which we might be content indolently to rest our faith, but in God’s own providence in his life and in God’s quiet communion with him through the organs God Himself has created in every one of us.  For all time, whether before or after Christ, these are the chief grounds and foundations of faith