you within the promise of everlasting happiness and blessedness.
2. The second gift. WAITING patiently on God is a gift which brings you within the promise of everlasting happiness and blessedness. And he who has but a waiting frame of heart, has that which God will eternally own and crown: Isa 30:18, "Blessed are all those who wait for him." Truly, it is no iniquity to pronounce them blessed, whom God pronounces blessed. It is no piety—but cruelty and inhumanity, for any not to be as merciful to themselves, as God is merciful to them; not to have as sweet and precious thoughts of their present condition, as God has. If God says the waiting soul is blessed, who dares judge, who dares say it is not blessed? "Let God be true, and every man a liar," Rom 3:4; Isa 64:4, "For since the beginning of the world, men have not heard nor perceived by the ear, neither has the eye seen, O God, besides you, what he has prepared for the one who waits for Him." Prov 8:34, "Blessed is the man that hears me, watching daily at my gates, and waiting at the posts of my doors." Isa 49:23, They shall not be ashamed, who wait for me;" that is, I will never fail the waiting soul; I will never put him to blushing by frustrating his patient waiting on me. The waiting soul shall carry away the crown at last.
Truly, God's glorious love and power is as much seen in keeping up a poor soul in a patient waiting on God—as it was in raising Christ from the grave, and as it is in bringing souls to glory. Nothing can make the waiting soul miserable. Hold out faith and patience but a little, and he who shall come will come, and bring his reward with him," Rev 22:11-12.
3. The third gift. HUNGERING and THIRSTING AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESS is a gift which brings the soul within the compass of the promise of everlasting happiness and blessedness: Matt 5:6, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled"; or as it runs in the Greek, "Blessed are those who are hungering and thirsting," intimating that wherever this is the present disposition of men's souls, they are blessed, and may expect spiritual repletions.