Not to the prophet alone has God manifested his presence and aid, but to all his dear children as they sit and sigh under the tree where the prophet slept. Not that, when we are cast down and desolate, we actually feel a hand touching us, and see before us the cruse of water and the cake upon the coals; but we find the same deliverance, and the rustic table is virtually set before us and served by a spirit hand. In the appointed means of grace we find the aliment that sustains our souls. The divine ordinances seem to us more precious than ever while we sit under the juniper-tree. In the sweet promises of the word of God, in the dawn of Sabbath hours, in the tender and timely lessons of the sanctuary, in the Bethel seasons of prayer, in these means afforded to us, we find the cruse of water and the cake that will refresh us. We may lightly esteem them in a time of ease and plenty; we may think little of a cruse of water and a cake when we repose in abundance; but in the wilderness, when hunger and faintness come over us, and the juniper boughs are our only covering, then they are as sweet to us as to the weary Tishbite. When spiritual famine is gnawing at our hearts, and all is desolate and forsaken around us; when sickness has prostrated us, or death has cut down our companions around us, till the world seems empty, and a hue of decay and death tinges all the objects which we look at; when darkness and disappointment and disaster all weigh upon our spirits, and God is all that is left to us--how should we live were it not for the cake and the water cruse? How do we grasp the very means which we before had too often slighted. We call up the neglected promises, and there is life in them. Our troubled thoughts find vent in earnest prayer; and whether we lie stretched on the bed of languishing, or wrestle in the closet, or meditate in the sanctuary, we find the water cruse is beside us, and we are kept from fainting. Oh, it is when, under the load of crushing sorrow and dejection, the wanderer sinks down by the shrub of the desert, it is then he prizes the cruse and the cake. Many of you, I doubt not, were you to call to mind the season when you valued most the presence of the Master, when you wrestled nearest the mercy-seat and experienced the most surprising deliverances, would point to the days of sore trial and weariness, when you gave up all hope, and when, turned out from the world, you sat alone and sighed under the juniper and waited for death. There you fed upon the bread of life. And though you felt that you were pilgrims in the desert, you still felt that you were not forsaken.