God only satisfies the soul.  It is only the ’bread which came down from Heaven,’ of which if we eat our souls shall live, and be filled as with marrow and fatness.  That One is all-sufficient in His Oneness.  Possessing Him, we know no satiety; possessing Him, we do not need to maim any part of our nature; possessing Him, we shall not covet divers multifarious objects.  The loftiest powers of the soul find in Him their adequate, inexhaustible, eternal object.  The lowest desires may, like the beasts of the forest, seek their meat from God.  If we take Him for our own and live on Him by faith, our blessed experience will be, ’I am full:  I have all and abound.’

III.  The godless life is one of futile defences.

‘Ye clothe you, but there is none warm.’  The clothing was to guard against the nipping air that blew shrewdly on their hills, and it failed to keep them from the weather.  We may be indulging in fancy in this application of our text, but still raiment is as needful as food, and its failure to answer its purpose points to a real sorrow and insufficiency of a life lived without God.  In it there is no real defence against the manifold evils which storm upon all of us.  When the bitter, biting weather comes, what have you to shelter you from the cold blast?  Some rags of stoical resignation or proverbial commonplaces?  ‘What is done cannot be helped’; ‘What cannot be cured must be endured’; ‘It is a long lane that has no turning,’ and the like.  But what are these?  You may have other occupations to interest you, but these will not heal, though they may divert your attention from, your gaping wounds.  You have friends, and the like, but though you have all these and much beside, these will not avail.  ’The covering is shorter than that a man can wrap himself in it.’  Naked and shivering, exposed to the pelting and the pitiless storm, with rags soaked through, and chilled to the bone, what is there but death before the man in the wild weather on some trackless moor?  And what is there for us if we have to bear the storms and cold of life without God?  No doubt most of us struggle through somehow.  Time heals much; work does a great deal; to live is so much, that no living being can be wholly miserable.  Other cares and other occupations blossom and grow, and the brown mounds get covered with sweet springing grass.  But how many lie down and die?  How many for the rest of their lives go crushed and broken-spirited?  How many carry about with them, deep in their hearts, a sleepless sorrow?  How many have to bear passionate paroxysms of agony and bursts of angry grief, all of which might have been softened and soothed and made to gleam with the mellow light of hope as from a hidden sun, if only, instead of defiantly and weakly fronting the world alone, they had found in the man Christ the refuge from the storm and the covert from the tempest.  How can a man face all the awful possibilities and the solemn certainties of life without God and not go mad?  It is impossible to work without Him; it is impossible to rejoice without Him; but more impossible still, if that could be, is it to endure without Him.  It is in union with Jesus Christ, and with Him alone, that we shall receive ’the pure linen, clean and white,’ which is a surer defence than the warrior’s mail, and ’being clothed we shall not be found naked.’