, and as if, in the
ecstasy of prayer, Paul had forgotten the limits that separate the
creature from the Creator, as well as the experience of sinful and
imperfect men, and had sought to 'wind himself too high for mortal life
beneath the sky.' And yet Paul's prayers are God's promises; and we are
justified in taking these rapturous petitions as being distinct
declarations of God's desire and purpose for each of us; as being the
end which He had in view in the unspeakable gift of His Son; and as
being the certain outcome of His gracious working on all believing
hearts.

It seems at first a paradoxical impossibility; looked at more deeply and
carefully it becomes a possibility for each of us, and therefore a duty;
a certainty for all the redeemed in fullest measure hereafter; and,
alas! a rebuke to our low lives and feeble expectations. Let us look,
then, at the petition, with the desire of sounding, as we may, its
depths and realising its preciousness.

I. First of all, think with me of the significance of this prayer.

'The fulness of God' is another expression for the whole sum and
aggregate of all the energies, powers, and attributes of the divine
nature, the total Godhead in its plenitude and abundance.

'God is love,' we say. What does that mean, but that God desires to
impart His whole self to the creatures whom He loves? What is love in
its lofty and purest forms, even as we see them here on earth; what is
love except the infinite longing to bestow one's self? And when we
proclaim that which is the summit and climax of the revelation of our
Father in the person of His Son, and say with the last utterances of
Scripture that 'God is love,' we do in other words proclaim that the
very nature and deepest desire and purpose of the divine heart is to
pour itself on the emptiness and need of His lowly creatures in floods
that keep back nothing. Lofty, wonderful, incomprehensible to the mere
understanding as this thought may be, clearly it is the inmost meaning
of all that Scripture tells us about God as being the 'portion of His
people,' and about us, as being by Christ and in Christ 'heirs of God,'
and possessors of Himself.

We have, then, as the promise that gleams from these great words, this
wonderful prospect, that the divine love, truth, holiness, joy, in all
their rich plenitude of all-sufficient abundance, may be showered upon
us. The whole Godhead is our possession; for the fulness of God is no
far-off rem