You come to listen to me on Sunday, and I have nothing to say that adds vigour to faith, or fervour to love, or that enlarges your knowledge of duty or of God. It is plain that during the week I have had no clear vision of spiritual truth, or that, if I have, the vision has faded away. You are naturally disappointed, perhaps discontented. It is partly my fault. But is it not possible that the fault is as much yours as mine? If you had prayed for me with earnestness and faith, might not the vision of God bare come to me, and the revelation of spiritual truth and the baptism of fire? In the absence of your intercessions, God may have given me truth for myself, but not for you. Suppose that in the course of a few weeks after the Ephesian Christians received this Epistle Paul had been called to appear before the Roman emperor, and that his courage had failed, or that, if his courage had not failed, no wise and vigorous and penetrating words had occurred to him in defence of the honour of Christ and in illustration of the glory of the Christian redemption. The Ephesian Christians, when they heard of his failure, would have wondered how it could have happened that the great apostle had even momentarily lost his fearlessness and his power. But if they had forgotten to pray that “utterance” might be given to him “to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel,” the apostle’s failure might have been the result of their neglect. (R. W. Dale, LL. D.)
