_I will be with him in trouble._ Trouble is that in life which becomes to us a gospel of tears, a ministry of futility. This is because we have grasped the humanity of the word and missed the divinity of it. We are always doing that. Always gathering the meaning of the moments and missing the meaning of the years. Always smarting under the sharp discipline and missing the merciful design: 'With Him in trouble.' That helps me to believe in my religion. Trouble is the test of the creeds. A fig for the orthodoxy that cannot interpret tears! Write vanity upon the religion that is of no avail in the house of sorrow. When the earthly song falls on silence we are disposed to call it a pitiable silence. Not so. Let us say a divinely opportune silence, for when the many voices grow dumb the One Voice speaks: 'I will be with him in trouble,' and the man who has lost the everything that is nothing only to find the one thing that is all knows what that promise means. _I will deliver him._ What a masterful, availing, victorious presence is this! How this promise goes out beyond our human ministries of consolation! How often the most we can do is to walk by our brother's side whilst he bears a burden we cannot share! How often the earthly sympathy is just a communion of sad hearts--one weak hand holding another! 'I will deliver him.' That is not merely sympathy, it is victory. The divine love does not merely condole, it delivers. You cannot add anything to this promise. It is complete. The time of the deliverance is there, the manner of it is there, the whole ministry of help is there. You say you cannot find anything about time and manner. You can only find the bare promise of deliverance. My friend, there are no bare promises in the lips of the Heavenly Father. In the mighty, merciful leisure of omnipotence, in the perfect fitness of things, in a way wiser than his thinking and better than his hoping and larger than his prayer, 'I will deliver him.' _And honour him._ It will be no scanty, obscure, uncertain deliverance. There shall be light in it, glory in it. The world battles with its troubles and seems sometimes to be successful, until we see how those troubles have shaken its spirit and twisted its temper; and see, too, how much of the beautiful and the strong and the sweet has been lost in the fight. 'I will deliver him' with an abundant and an honourable deliverance--he shall come forth from his tribulations more noble, tender, and self-possessed. Hereafter there shall be given him the honour of one whom the stress of life has driven into the arms of God.