EXERCISE OF SOUL IN TRIAL

EXERCISE OF SOUL IN TRIAL

It is one thing to be silent and passive under suffering, and quite another to be conscious of its needs be, and (though at first it may be only in a very partial way) to derive such real good and help from it, that instead of lamenting, one is owning to God His wisdom and thoughtfulness in putting one through such necessary discipline. Now this latter can never be reached but through exercise ^[p. 150] of soul. The trial one feels much ought to exercise one much before God. If I am assured that His love is as great as His power, and neither knows measure nor end, then must I not be exercised before Him as to why in His love He should allow me to be so afflicted? The very exercise engages and connects my soul with Him, and this nearness acquires for me help and instruction about many other things. The waiting of the soul on God in the time of affliction, or because of affliction, is requited with a growth and strength in the knowledge of God which tends to relieve one of the suffering that was the original cause of waiting on Him; and the soul once truly habituated to wait on God learns so to value it that it never can again do without it. And then it learns to say, “All my springs are in thee” (Psalm 87: 7). The fact of the desolation which one feels here when a beloved one has been removed, and the hesitancy with which one refuses to submit to it proves that the heart required the trial in order to discover to itself that it had rested and hoped in something outside of God. And the exercise of soul consequent on the affliction leads to that nearness and waiting on God which supplies what was before unknown. Most blessed when it has this, its true and intended effect. I do hope, dear ————, that all this sorrow may lead your soul to the solid rest and resources which can only be found near the Lord, and from Him. Beware of being sentimental in divine things; I mean by sentimental, your thoughts of Christ centring in yourself. The tendency is to make oneself the centre of everything passing, how it pains or cheers oneself, ever musing on oneself as if one were the one solitary object for the sunshine or the cloud to rest on, watching every alternation as it falls on or visits oneself. Jacob was of this order of mind at Shalem. A soul in the strength of Christ regards everything as He would regard it, and therefore he regards it with reference to God, and not to man. This throws one out of self into the wise and grand purpose of His present counsel and work. My interests and concerns fit in, in the great circle of His interests and concerns, and I see my own in connection and relation with all His. When affliction occurs I accept it as a call to me, and as an aid from Him, to be more separate ^[p. 151] from self — a check, a breaking-off of some unknown or unperceived growth of self, and hence redounding to a deeper and fuller abiding altogether in Him. If I am a hero to myself, or a martyr, I am sentimental. My thoughts are occupied about myself, and I look at and regard divine things as they suit my thinkings about myself, and not as answering to what He is thinking of me. I am confining the Lord to myself instead of rising up and seeing myself lost in Him, and then following Him in all the greatness and blessedness of His work and ways down here.