It has just struck me that we may continually observe all absence in the Lord to merely please His disciples. He never did that; nay, I am sure that He passed by many little opportunities of gratifying them, as we speak, or of introducing Himself to their favor. I am sure that He did not seek to please; and yet He bound them deeply and intimately to Himself. This was very blessed: and the same thing in any one is always a symptom of moral power.
If we seek to please, we shall scarcely fail to do so. That is true, I doubt not; but nothing can be morally lower. It makes our fellow-creature supreme; and we deal with him as though " his favor was life" to us-which God's is, but Ills only. But to bind one in full confidence to us-to draw the heart-to have ourselves in the esteem and affections of others, without ever in one single instance having that as our object-this, is morally great: for nothing can account for this but that constant course of love which, by necessity of its own nature, tells others that their real interests and prosperity (blessing) are, in deed and in truth, the purpose and desire of our hearts.
And this was the Lord. Nothing that He did told them that He sought to please them; but everything that He did told them that He sought to bless them. And again I say, I believe He passed by many little opportunities of gratifying them, or of introducing Himself into their favor. And yet He met them graciously and tenderly on many occasions which might have been resented. And both of them, the one as well as the other, came from those springs and sources of moral perfection which took their rise in Him. For if vanity had no part in Him, to put Him to an effort to please, malice had no part in Him, to make Him quick to resent. He would not be flattered into graciousness, nor provoked into unkindness.