"Thou, Lord, wilt bless the righteous." - Psalms 5:12.

Having bestowed righteousness, thou wilt express thy pleasure in that righteousness. We should not need a revelation from heaven to tell us this. It ought to be an unquestionable, self-evident axiom, that God who has all gifts at his disposal, will bestow his best, gifts upon those who please him most.

But there is none righteous, no, not one. Well, in the absolute sense of the word, Christ is the only righteous one that ever sojourned on this earth. He knew no sin. But they that believe on him, their faith is counted to them for righteousness. They receive of his fullness. Through him the unjust are justified. And having been brought nigh to God, what is to hinder that they should obtain deliverance from sin? They ask and receive. They are changed into the image of Christ, God blesses them by bringing their wills into coincidence with his own; and then their ulterior blessedness becomes a thing as inevitable as the eventual triumph of the will of God,

It is because a man has no goodness of his own on which to build any hope, that he is enabled so assuredly to anticipate the very highest measure of blessedness of which it is possible to conceive. For consider, the righteousness on which his hopes are founded, is an infinite righteousness; the merit of all heavenly beings added together would make nothing approaching it. While a man clings to the idea of his own merit, he shrivels up his destiny into nothing; when he loses that idea and knows nothing but the merit of Christ, crucified for sinners, the Lord of all, his destiny expands into a roll like that of the illimitable heavens, all written over with words of beauty and of wealth.

" Thou Lord, wilt bless the righteous." It does not become a sovereign to bestow little favors. As God has shown forth his eternal power and Godhead in creation, so in what he will do for the righteous, he will take care that there be a magnificent and all-eclipsing display of his regard for righteousness.

What we need is, ever to believe that God ever remembers this purpose of his; and to say, in every situation of life, God is blessing me, by preparing me for future blessing. While Christ is preparing for me a place in heaven, he is preparing me on earth for that place in heaven. There is, therefore, a connection of the most intimate and necessary kind between the disappointments, humiliations, losses, sorrows, afflictions of the believer on earth, and the dignity, felicity, purity, splendor, power, to be found by him at the right hand of Christ.