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.

Oh how we miss this ministry of ennoblement!  We reap a harvest of insignificance from the seeds of sorrow sown in our hearts.  We let our cares dishonour us.  The little cares rasp and fret and sting the manliness and the womanliness and the godlikeness out of us.  And the great cares crush us earthward till there is scarcely a sweet word left in our lips or a noble thought in our heart.  A man cannot save his soul in the day of trouble.  He cannot by himself make good the wear and tear of anxieties and griefs.  He can hold his head high and hide his secret deep, but he cannot keep his life sweet.  Only Christ can teach a man how to find the nameless dignity of the crown of thorns.  The kingship of suffering is a secret in the keeping of faith and love.  If a man accepts this deliverance of his God folded in flashes of understanding, ministries of explanation, revivals of faith, and gifts of endurance, he shall find the honour that is to be won among life’s hard and bitter things.

With long life will I satisfy him, and show him My salvation. We have seen a grey-headed libertine, and we have missed from among the clean-hearted and the faithful some brave young life that was giving itself vigorously to the holy service.  But perhaps we have had the grace not to challenge the utter faithfulness of God.  The measure of life is not written on a registrar’s certificates of birth and death.  There is something here that lies beyond dates and documents.  Life here and hereafter is one, and death is but an event in it.  Who lives to God lives long, be his years many or few.  It is reasonable to expect some relationship between godliness and longevity.  But we are nearer the truth when we see how that faith and prayer discover and secure the eternal values of fleeting days.