d into the
endurance of Christ. Still more, sin has biassed our hearts, and kept us
from going along the way. Thus we need nothing short of a Divine
direction. If the Lord does not make straight our way home we never shall
arrive there.

How does our Lord direct our hearts? First, by constant and
ever-increasing experience of His love. "God is love," and as it is of the
essence of love to communicate itself, God is ever revealing to our hearts
and bestowing upon them His own Divine love. Along the straight pathway He
guides the soul into deeper and fuller experience of His unchanging,
unerring, and unending love.

He also guides by bestowing upon us an ever-fuller experience of the power
of Christ. Patient endurance is not learned all at once, and the Lord
leads us as we are able to bear His disclosures and His discipline. Every
lesson of testing brings with it a fresh experience of grace, and every
call to endure carries with it the assurance of sufficient strength and
power.

The means used for our direction, as we have already seen, are three in
number, but the truth is so important that it needs renewed emphasis. The
Lord directs us _by His Word_. Its examples, its counsels, its promises,
its warnings, it anticipations, its incentives all come with force and
blessing upon the heart, impelling it to go the right way home. He also
directs us _by His Holy Spirit_ dwelling within us. The Divine Spirit
possesses and purifies our thoughts, cleanses and clarifies our motives,
freshens and fertilises our soul, sanctifies and sensitises our
conscience, guides and guards our will; and thus "every virtue we possess,
and every victory won, and every thought of holiness" are the work of the
Holy Spirit of God in guiding and directing our hearts into the love of
God and into the patience of Christ.

The Lord also guides _by His Providence_. He uses the circumstances of our
daily life to indicate His will. The discipline, the thousand and one
little events and episodes, the ordinary experience of daily duty, the
shadows and the sunshine, are all part of His providential guidance as He
leads us along the pathway home into the love of God. All things are
continually working together for good to them that love God.

Now we pass to consider the second and complementary prayer.

3. THE GIFT.

In this concluding prayer of the Epistle the Apostle sums up by speaking
of that which is in some respects the greatest gift of God in