It is characteristic of all God’s operations in nature, providence and grace, that the more closely we look into them, the more they grow upon us in wonder, beauty and love. God’s designs for every human soul are inexpressibly more glorious and loving than we can possibly imagine. One thing is certain, that His purpose toward every single soul is the result of infinite, eternal love. When we become personally acquainted with God through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, it is impossible for us to conceive that He should do anything out of hatred, or personal resentment, or in a rash or severe spirit. And so all His dealings are with absolute impartiality and with infinite forethought and tenderness.  

It gives us a magnificent vision of the God of the Bible when we think that God is at this moment placing His complete attention upon every human being upon earth; that He has loved each one of all these millions, from all eternity; that He has formed in His unsearchable mind for each a definite design of mercy and grace and unspeakable future glory. He is weaving golden threads of individual, providential care around all these millions; He does not wish the death of any of them; but He longs to draw them all into a state of glory that they might each share the ineffable purity, sweetness and joy of Himself.  

In every act that God does toward us, His eye not only takes in all the details of the present, but sweeps far onward upon all the results for thousands and millions of years.  

When a mother is religiously teaching and correcting her child, she has her eye on the coming years when her little boy will be a man, moving amidst scenes of temptation or grave responsibility, and when she perhaps will be looking down upon him from Heaven. The little child, a mere bundle of restless playfulness, bent only on present gratification, and chafing under restraint, can have no conception of those great, loving, far-off designs, that fill his mother’s heart. In like manner we are all restless infants in the hands of God, and it is only when grace has wrought miracles of renewing, cleansing, and illuminating power within us that we begin to see, in dim outline, our Father’s enormous designs of blessings for us.  

The Lord blesses us by not permitting us to be the architect of His blessings. Were we allowed to measure off the kind of blessings we should have, we would invariably have them of too low an order and we would have them come prematurely. The very blessings would surfeit and ruin us, and render us utterly incapable of the deepest and sweetest joys for which we were created.  

We all live to see over and over again, that if many of even our religious wishes had been granted, it would have practically ruined us. It is a great blessing for our Heavenly Father to discipline us, to raise our prayers and wishes up to the level of His Word. It is by a thousand denials of our impetuous and short-sighted prayers that our choices and desires climb the rugged mountain, till at last we get to an altitude where the most passionate longings of the heart and the sweetest choices of the will are exactly what our Father wants to do for us. Hence if He had lowered His desires, He would not only have contradicted His own wisdom but spoiled us for our highest good.  

Another way in which God blesses us is by preparing us for the reception of special favors. He takes us under special personal discipline, and by using opposite agencies, and leading us through what seem to be perfectly contradictory experiences—outward providences, and inward dealings—He suddenly brings us to a sharp turn in the road, where the whole landscape of His strange operations lies stretched away in beauty and order at our feet, and a whole cluster of answered prayers seems to meet in a focus.  

We then see that God had been preparing us to appreciate His gifts and mercies, and that the long, lonely way was essential to form in us a state of heart to appreciate thoroughly what God was doing for us. And after all, the blessings of God are really in ratio to our appreciation of them.  

The more keenly and constantly we appreciate God’s mercies, the greater they are to us, and hence one of the principal ways for God to bless us is to give us the capacity to perceive them, and bring us around into an attitude of the most intense appreciation of His mercies. The sunshine that falls on a rock is the same as that which falls on my eye, but the rock knows nothing of it, but to my eye it is whole worlds of joy and comfort. The same is true of that soft, sweet light of eternal love that falls on stony hearts around us, unperceived and unreciprocated, and its glory and value to us is in proportion to the largeness and fineness of our vision. If God has led us through a painful operation of cutting the cataract from our eyes in order that we may get a glimpse of His beauty, He has made that very suffering an incalculable blessing.  

To make us appreciate the sweetness of His personal companionship, He crucifies the society element in us, shuts us away from other friends and companions, and only by this crucifixion the depth of personal communion with Him is learned.  

To make us prize His providing care in temporal blessings, He reduces us to great poverty in spite of our skillful financiering, and seems to tie our hands and feet with cords of penury to teach us a new type of faith and draw us to the primeval basis of faith of living, like the birds, from hand to mouth, only it is from His hand to our mouth. Those who are so circumstanced as to be compelled to live by faith for temporal supplies soon come to discover a Divine sweetness and beautiful appropriateness in little gifts and mercies which even the holiest of wealthy saints have no opportunity to experience.  

In matters of grace the Holy Spirit often leads us into a state of intense longing for some feature of the Christ-life. He could in a moment fill us to overflowing, but instead of that He keeps us pining and praying with many tears for a long time, for He is thereby deepening the channel of capacity in our spirit. He is sharpening our vision, and whetting our appreciation to a razor edge, and when at last the Heavenly fountains break upon us, our blessing is ten times larger than it otherwise would have been.  

Have we not all of us, who read the account of the Syrophoenician woman, often thanked our blessed Jesus for not answering her prayer at once? If He had, we should never have known the depths of her faith, or the utter humility and perseverance of her prayer. By His delay and seeming severity, He drew forth the capacity of the spirit and made her a preacher to praying ones all through the centuries. It is a great blessing to be enlarged in our capacity of appreciating blessings. God blesses us beyond our asking and thinking.  

If we notice carefully the answers to our prayers we can always detect some item, or some feature of blessing, that we had not the forethought to mention in our prayers. God’s fatherly and motherly thought anticipates needs and graces and comforts which escape our attention. They are so numerous and complex and minute that we cannot comprehend them. As parents taking their little children on a long journey are ever and anon bringing forth from some basket or bundle some article of food or clothing or some toy which the children would never have thought to prepare, our Father is ever bringing forth from His loving forethought, multiplied mercies, which He planned for us. In the answer to every one of my prayers there is in some way connected with it the “exceeding abundant” which is spoken of by the Apostle.  

Again, He not only blesses us beyond our thinking, but in many ways beyond His own promises. The promises are couched in human language, which represent human thoughts, but God puts a meaning into His promises beyond what the cold words express to us; and so He delights to go beyond His own promise, both in the operations of grace in this life and in the dazzling rewards of glory in the life to come.  

Punishment is God’s strange work. He postpones it as long as He can and then makes it as light as He can, but mercy is His fond and eternal predilection. He loves to bless those who love Him; and He loves to choose for them the blessings which are the best in His sight. The Bible does not tell us that God punishes sinners up to the full merits of their sins, but it does teach us that He so delights in rewarding the righteousness of His saints that He gives “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over.” He seems so bent on blessing His children that He promises an eternal reward for the trifling act of giving a cup of cold water in His Name. Jesus Himself represents that in the last day the saints will be astonished at the largeness of their rewards.  

Finally, all of God’s blessings are arranged with infinite skill to conduce to our salvation and then to making us just as advanced in grace as possible. Just as He had made the world for man, but made man for Himself, so every blessing that flows from His hand is intended to lead us from the natural to the supernatural, from the fleshly to the spiritual, and from mere creature happiness to the spotless joys of God Himself.  

God’s whole aim has been to subdue us as fast as possible without crushing us, to illuminate us as fast as possible without blinding us with excessive light. How many times He has caught us on His wings, and seemingly let us drop to teach us to fly, but caught us before we sunk in the sea! Every step has been to bring us to Himself. He makes each one of our lives to seem the center of a vast system, and makes us see a significance in His dealings with us which no one else can see, so that reading our lives in the light of the Holy Ghost is like the biography of some of the patriarchs. Our individual history is so pervaded with the interferences of our Heavenly Father that it seems like adding another page to the Old Testament.  

What a wonderful God is ours! He never for one moment lets up His design for us, but in a thousand ways works along both recognized and unrecognized lines, to teach us the nothingness of ourselves and His all-sufficiency. The blessing of all blessings is quietly and sweetly to leave ourselves and go forth into Christ, to live His life, to think His thoughts, to work His works, to love His loves, to enjoy His joys, and to realize that He Himself is our exceeding and great reward.