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There is no end to the variety of these orchids of God. A missionary wife and mother who was preparing to sail for Africa found something she will never forget in an unusual text. She and her family are not very good sailors, and she was “a little bit anxious about having to travel third class this time. It was one morning, one of our last mornings at home. While I was praying there came the words, And He was in the hinder part of the ship, and I knew they were from Him to me; and after that the hinder part was the only place in the whole boat for me, and the inward comfort was complete.”
“Pure olive oil beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always” (that the lamp may lift up its flame continually, as Rotherham has it) came to me once on a dark evening. Olive berries, bruised, crushed out of semblance of berries; oil beaten out, pure oil; their flame lifted up continually, living flame. It is clear picture-language, a figure of the true.
And with those words came this, Ye are they which have continued with Me in My temptations. It is the word above all others, I think, that we should most dearly love our Lord to say to us. And He answers the thought of the heart before it forms in words: “Everyone when he is perfected shall be as his Master.” “I am that maketh thee to long: I it am, the endless fulfilling of all true desires.”