So then two things follow. If we pray after the pattern of this prayer, 'Be Thou to me what Thou art,' then a great many foolish and presumptuous wishes will be stifled in the birth, and, on the other hand, a great many feeble desires will be strengthened and made confident, and we shall be encouraged to expect great things of God. Have you widened your prayers, dear friend!--and I do not mean by that only your outward ones, but the habitual aspiration and expectation of your minds--have you widened these to be as wide as what God has shown us that He is? Have you taken all God's revelation of Himself, and translated it into petition? And do you expect Him to be to you all that He has ever been to any soul of man upon earth? Oh! how such a prayer as this, if we rightly understand it and feel it, puts to shame the narrowness and the poverty of our prayers, the falterings of our faith, and the absence of expectation in ourselves that we shall receive the fulness of God. God owns that plea: 'Be ... what Thou art.' He cannot resist that. That is what the Apostle meant when he said, 'He abideth faithful, He cannot deny Himself.' He must be true to His character. He can never be other than He always has been. And that is what the Psalmist meant when he goes on, after the words that I have taken for my text, and says, 'For Thy Name's sake lead me and guide me,' What is God's Name? The collocation of letters by which we designate Him? Certainly not. The Name of God is the sum total of what God has revealed Himself as being. And 'for the sake of the Name,' that He may be true to that which He has shown Himself to be, He will always endorse this bill that you draw upon Him when you present Him with His own character, and say 'Be to me what Thou art.' III. Lastly, we have here the plea with God drawn from what we have taken Him to be to us. That is somewhat different from what I have already been dwelling upon. Mark the words: 'Be Thou to me a strong Rock, for Thou art _my_ Rock and _my_ Fortress.' What does that mean? It means that the suppliant has, by his own act of faith, taken God for his; that he has appropriated the great divine revelation, and made it his own. Now it seems to me that that appropriation is, if not _the_ point, at least one of the points, in which real faith is distinguished from the sham thing which goes by that name amongst so many people. A man by faith encloses a bit of the common for his very own. When God says that He 'so loved the world that He gave His ... Son,' I should say, 'He loved _me_, and gave Himself for _me_.' When the great revelation is made that He is the Rock of Ages, my faith says: '_My_ Rock and _my_ Fortress.' Having said that, and claimed Him for mine, I can then turn round to Him and say, 'Be to me what I have taken Thee to be.'