THE SOLACE OF CONFIDING OUR SORROW TO THE LORD
THE SOLACE OF CONFIDING OUR SORROW TO THE LORD
NO. 1 I was glad to get your letter before I left ———— telling me of your sorrow, not that I was glad of your sorrow, I need not say, but that you counted on my sympathy in [p. 69] your sorrow. It is far easier to tell of our joys than of our sorrows. The former elates you, the latter in a way diminishes you. “I was brought low, and he helped me” (Psalm 116: 6). There is peculiar solace in confiding our sorrows to the Lord. We can do it to Him in a way and in a fulness that we cannot to any one else. A touching line in a hymn may have occurred to you, ‘My sorrow lies too deep for human sympathy’. The one who has passed through the most sorrow is the one who feels every fresh sorrow the most....
... I preached to a very interesting company last evening. I was seeking to set forth that not only is all the misery and judgment on the sinner removed to God’s glory, but God’s love is satisfied in the nearness in which He sets us.
NO. 2 It is a relief to me that your present sorrow, though so near you, is not in your own immediate circle. It is not only that we suffer most where we feel most, but where there is most natural vitality there the death must come. I believe that in the end there is less suffering in surrendering than in losing by death. I am sure that if each sorrow here drove us to Christ for solace, and if His hand had drawn us from the sorrow, and this place — the scene of it, to Himself where there is none, we should be gaining much. May this be your gain, thus out of the eater comes forth meat.
If when we are under pressure here we had any sense of being so near to the Lord that He absorbs us, how blessedly we should gain from the pressure. It is incomparable the sense that His presence not only relieves us from our pressure, but that near Him we become more attached to Him. They say love possesses its object, and surely there is great satisfaction of heart in loving one whose love so exceeds ours.