God can be God and fearless, but we can scarcely be creatures and fearless. Still less is it likely that sinful creatures should be fearless. It is more than the Father looks for under the present mode of our existence. But when the fearful thing is coming down, or when the children see it looming in the distance and are frightened, and they catch the Father's countenance, and see that He is not frightened, it wonderfully reassures the poor children to see a fearlessness on the Father's face. Heaven is full of "Fear nots." And if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, it will break out of your midnight, and up from your deepest valley too, that voice of the Father, the All-in-all.
I. Of course the meaning of the word is, in the first place, that God is our All-sufficiency, and not disrelated but related to us. God, the Creator, who has related the universal deficiency to His own universal all-sufficiency, from a blade of grass up and up and up to immortal spirits, and Himself the Father, is Himself nearer to you than any other thing which He has made. Behold that blade of grass. Is it not bathed every moment with what it needs? Does it not touch it? Does not the atmosphere press sweetly round about its edge and ask to be received, and give itself into the myriads of little mouths of the blade of grass that it may lift itself up and be strong? So can we lie in God's bosom. We are His children. It only needs to be quiet enough to feel the throbbing of the eternal heart against me, and the instreaming of the fountain spirit through all the avenues and channels of my being.
II. Consider the use the children should make of this sufficiency of their Father. See what liberties we take with God's earth. We get stones wherever we like. They are not our stones. And we get gold wherever we like, and we get iron wherever we like, and we get coal wherever we can. I hope the day will come when, even without thought or intention, we shall, from the new nature of our being, take up God as easily as the blade of grass takes up atmosphere and light. Let us enter our home enter and be comforted, as all helpless things are, to find their source of supply so near. And let us not leave our nest and then fret that our rest is gone, but abide encircled by the everlasting strength.
J. Pulsford, Penny Pulpit,No. 729.
References: Isaiah 41:10. Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times," vol. vii., p. 1; A. Maclaren, Old Testament Outlines,p. 201; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xvi., No. 930, vol. xiii., No. 670; Ibid., Morning by Morning,p. 357; A. M. Brown, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xv., p. 353; Preacher's Monthly,vol. x., p. 351.