You see it every day, but have you, I wonder, ever thought what it really is? Even in this we may see the wonderful power of God’s life working, and how He has placed this at the service of man.

We said that heat can change solids to liquids and liquids to gases or vapours. This is proved to us very often by what we can see of its motion upon water. In the winter when the water is very cold, it takes the solid form that we call ice. But when the warmer weather comes the solid ice is changed by the sun’s heat into liquid flowing water.

But when it becomes warmed still more, like everything else it expands, spreads out and gets lighter, with the heat, until at last it evaporates, becomes so thin and light that it passes into the air and rises up to form the great billowy clouds that float there over our heads, through which God waters and refreshes the earth.

In the power of the great sun working upon the waters of the ocean, warming and drawing them up into the sky in this way, it is easy for us to see God’s hand, and to know that it is His power working. But He wants us to learn from this to see the same thing everywhere, and to recognise His power wherever we see it at work.

We have learned how fire and water come from God through the sun and the clouds, and all the power that is in them is the power of God’s life. Men see the fire, the heat with which God supplies the earth through the sun, to warm the water which flows to us from Him.

Then through the laws of His life which are working in both the water and the fire, some of the power, the heat that is in the fire, passes into the water and it expands into steam (of the wonderful power of which we will tell you move another time). This power is used to work all kinds of heavy and intricate machinery, to drive the engines which draw long train-loads of people at immense speed over the land, and to push, the huge steamboats across the ocean.

But whose is the power that is doing all this? It is the power of God, whose life is in the water, and from whom comes the heat that changes it into the form of vapour steam. Man cannot create or make power, but can only use the power which God is giving him in all these things.

Men use their talents to find out how best to control a small portion of the power with which God has filled the earth, to supply their own wants. But how few there are who recognise in it all that “power belongeth unto God,” and that “there is no power but of God.” So they do not “glorify Him as God,” but “become vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart is darkened.”

May you, little children, be kept so “pure in heart that you may see God”—see Him working everywhere and in all things, and so learn to “Fear God, and give glory to Him.”