And so, brethren, just as that great gift is the illuminating fact in reference to the divine heart, so is it the interpreting fact in reference to the divine dealings.  Only when we keep firm hold of Christ as the gift of God, and the Explainer of all that God does, can we face the darkness, the perplexities, the torturing questions that from the beginning have harassed men’s minds as they looked upon the mysteries of human misery.  If we recognise that God has given us His Son, then all things become, if not plain, at least lighted with some gleam from that great gift; and we feel that the surrender of Christ is the constraining fact which shapes after its own likeness, and for its own purpose, all the rest of God’s dealings with men.  That gift makes anything believable, reasonable, possible, rather than that He should spare not His own Son, and then should counterwork His own act by sending the world anything but good.

III.  And now, lastly, take one or two practical issues from these thoughts, in reference to our own belief and conduct.

First, I would say, Let us correct our estimates of the relative importance of the two sets of gifts.  On the one side stands the solitary Christ; on the other side are massed all delights of sense, all blessings of time, all the things that the vulgar estimation of men unanimously recognises to be good.  These are only makeweights.  They are all lumped together into an ‘also.’  They are but the golden dust that may be filed off from the great ingot and solid block.  They are but the outward tokens of His far deeper and true preciousness.  They are secondary; He is the primary.  What an inversion of our notions of good!  Do you degrade all the world’s wealth, pleasantness, ease, prosperity, into an ‘also?’ Are you content to put it in the secondary place, as a result, if it please Him, of Christ?  Do you live as if you did?  Which do you hunger for most?  Which do you labour for hardest?  ’Seek ye first the Kingdom and the King, and all ‘these things shall be added unto you.’

Let these thoughts teach us that sorrow too is one of the gifts of the Christ.  The words of my text, at first sight, might seem to be simply a promise of abundant earthly good.  But look what lies close beside them, and is even part of the same triumphant burst.  ’Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?’ These are some of the ‘all things’ which Paul expected that God would give him and his brethren.  And looking upon all, he says, ‘They all work together for good’; and in them all we may be more than conquerors.  It would be a poor, shabby issue of such a great gift as that of which we have been speaking, if it were only to be followed by the sweetnesses and prosperity and wealth of this world.  But here is the point that we have to keep hold of—­inasmuch as He gives us all things, let us take all the things that come to us as being as distinctly the gifts of His love, as is the gift of Christ Himself.  A wise physician, to an ignorant onlooker, might seem to be acting in contradictory fashions when in the one moment he slashes into a limb, with a sharp, gleaming knife, and in the next sedulously binds the wounds, and closes the arteries, but the purpose of both acts is one.