THE GREATER THE NEED, THE GREATER THE SUPPLY
THE GREATER THE NEED, THE GREATER THE SUPPLY
You cannot have too great a sense of your responsibilities to your family and to others, provided you have at the same time a deeper sense that God cares for you. The failure, as with Moses when his father-in-law suggested to him that “this thing is too heavy for thee” (Exodus 18: 18) is, that we think we are to perform our duty ourselves alone. It is quite true that the duty rests on you to meet every claim, but if the many claims awaken in your soul a deeper sense of God’s care and succour, your very need and pressure becomes an occasion for acquainting you with the greatness of your resources; so that the greatness of the need only becomes an opportunity for disclosing the greatness of the supply. It was the vessels to receive the oil which failed with the poor widow (2 Kings 4: 6) and not the oil. The supply only ceases when the need or the place of it no longer exists; so that need or responsibility, if used as a vessel, is only an occasion or opening for the mercy and goodness of God. A rich man is one who has not a want that he cannot meet. If he never had a want he would not know the use of money. The use of it is learned in spending it, laying it out properly. No one dislikes wants, if he has plenty of means to [p. 144] supply them. There is a known pleasure in using one’s means in providing something which is desired - wants often increase with men as means to meet them increase.
With you, as the pressure or responsibility increases, so do the means to meet it increase, if your heart is simply dependent on God. Our springs are in God. The more you require, the more you take in when you reach the spring. The whole point (if the springs are sufficient for our travelling through the desert) is whether we are at the springs. If we are, and if they are inexhaustible, it only remains that we take in abundantly, even like a camel that can take in for eight days! You would not mind feeling in need, or a desire for help, when there was abundance beside you. The point we all fail in, is not in feeling our inability to discharge our duties fully, but in trying to journey on through this great sandy desert, without finding or reaching the springs. Let us learn from the birds of the air; they discharge their duties by going in quest of material for the nest first, and then for food. They have nothing of their own. They go and look for it, and they look until they find it, and this is just what you have to do. You feel your responsibilities; well, you have no means or power in yourself to meet them; but, like the parent bird, you go in quest of means; only with this great difference, that the bird does not know where to find it, and you do.
When Mary and Martha felt their powerlessness (John 11: 3) they sent for Jesus. Send for Him to bear you company in your responsibilities; and then your responsibilities will only be occasions for you to know more of His love for you, and of the fertility and greatness of His resources. If you want anything, fly off to Him, and the oftener you fly to Him the more you will get, and the more you will find that the need is a great occasion of blessing, because of the way He meets you in every need. As you use His love, you learn what it is. If you use it not, you cannot know [p. 145] what it will or would do for you. Your experience will be, the more I need the more I get. To the house of Joseph it was said, “Thou art a great people”, and therefore “the mountain shall be thine” (Joshua 17: 17, 18). The large family got the large inheritance. Settle with the Lord that He can do everything, and then you will soon come to this, He doeth all things for me.
May the Lord comfort your heart, and assure it that duties and responsibilities are never to depress you, but that the greater they are, and the more you feel them, the more help and property you are entitled to, and therefore the richer you are in grace, because of your need of it.