IV.  The unuttered longings are sure to be answered.

He that searcheth the heart knows the meaning of the Spirit’s unspoken prayers; and looking into the depths of the human spirit interprets its longings, discriminating between the mere human and partial expression and the divinely-inspired desire which may be unexpressed.  If our prayers are weak, they are answered in the measure in which they embody in them, though perhaps mistaken by us, a divine longing.  Apparent disappointment of our petitions may be real answers to our real prayer.  It was because Jesus loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus that He abode still in the same place where He was, to let Lazarus die that He might be raised again.  That was the true answer to the sisters’ hope of His immediate coming.  God’s way of giving to us is to breathe within us a desire, and then to answer the desire inbreathed.  So, longing is the prophecy of fulfilment when it is longing according to the will of God.  They who ’hunger and thirst after righteousness’ may ever be sure that their bread shall be given them, and their water will be made sure.  The true object of our desires is often not clear to us, and so we err in translating it into words.  Let us be thankful that we pray to a God who can discern the prayer within the prayer, and often gives the substance of our petitions in the very act of refusing their form.

THE GIFT THAT BRINGS ALL GIFTS

   ’He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up
   for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give
   us all things?’—­ROMANS viii. 32.

We have here an allusion to, if not a distinct quotation from, the narrative in Genesis, of Abraham’s offering up of Isaac.  The same word which is employed in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, to translate the Hebrew word rendered in our Bible as ‘withheld,’ is employed here by the Apostle.  And there is evidently floating before his mind the thought that, in some profound and real sense, there is an analogy between that wondrous and faithful act of giving up and the transcendent and stupendous gift to the world, from God, of His Son.

If we take that point of view, the language of my text rises into singular force, and suggests many very deep thoughts, about which, perhaps, silence is best.  But led by that analogy, let us deal with these words.

I. Consider this mysterious act of divine surrender.

The analogy seems to suggest to us, strange as it may be, and remote from the cold and abstract ideas of the divine nature which it is thought to be philosophical to cherish, that something corresponding to the pain and loss that shadowed the patriarch’s heart flitted across the divine mind when the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world.  Not merely to give, but to give up, is the highest crown and glory of love, as we know it.  And who shall venture