‘Faith cannot be so difficult, surely,’ says William Guthrie in his Saving Interest, ‘when it consists of so much in desire.’  Now, both its exceeding difficulty and its exceeding ease also just consist in that.  Nothing is so easy to a healthy man as the desire for food; but, then, nothing is so impossible to a dead man, or even to a sick man, as just desire.  Desire sounds easy, but how few among us have that capacity and that preparation for Christ and His salvation that stands in desire.  Have you that desire?  Really and truly, in your heart of hearts, have you that desire?  Then how well it is with you!  For that is all that God looks for in him who comes to the poor man’s market; indeed, it is the only currency accepted there.  Isaiah’s famous invitation is drawn out just to meet the case of a man who has desire, and nothing but desire, in his heart.  All the encouragements and assurances that his evangelical genius can devise are set forth by the prophet to attract and to win the desiring heart.  The desiring heart says to itself, I would give the whole world if I had it just to see Christ, just to be near Christ, and just, if it were but possible, that I should ever be the least thing like Christ.  Now, that carries God.  God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, cannot resist that.  No true father could, and least of all a father who loves his son, and who has such a son to love as God has in Christ.  Well, He says; if you love and desire, honour and estimate My Son like that, I cannot deny Him the reward and the pleasure of possessing you and your love.  And thus, without any desert in you—­any desert but sheer desire—­you have made the greatest, the easiest, the speediest, the most splendid purchase that all the poor man’s market affords.  No, William Guthrie; faith is not so very difficult to the sinner who has desire.  For where desire of the right quality is, and the right quantity, there is everything.  And all the merchandise of God is at that sinner’s nod and bid.

Ho, then, he that hath no money, but only the desire for money, and for what money can, and for what money cannot, buy, come and buy, without money and without price.  Instead of money, instead of merit, even if you have nothing but Rutherford’s only fitness for Christ, ’My loathsome wretchedness,’ then come with that.  Come boldly with that.  Come as if you had in and on you the complete opposite of that.  The opposite of loathsomeness is delightsomeness; and the opposite of wretchedness is happiness.  Yes! but you will search all the Book of God and all its promises, and you will not find one single letter of them all addressed to the abounding and the gladsome and the self-satisfied.  It is the poor man’s market; and this market goes best when the poor man is not only poor, but poor beyond all ordinary poverty:  poor, as Samuel Rutherford always was, to ‘absolute and loathsome wretchedness.’  Let him here, then, whose sad case is best described in Rutherford’s dreadful words, let him come to Rutherford’s market and make Rutherford’s merchandise, and let him do it now.  Ho, he that hath no money, he that hath only misery, let him come, and let him come now.