THE LORD'S SYMPATHY
THE LORD’S SYMPATHY
The Lord is “touched with the feeling (or sympathises with) our infirmities”. Will is sin. Infirmity is not a sin, though it might lead to one — as Sarah, when from fear she told a lie! Fear is not a sin in itself. I may be a timid nature. The Lord had more sensibility than any man but He never gave way to it unduly. He could say ‘the floods of ungodliness made me afraid’. If I am weak or in pain He feels with me as to the suffering, but the gain to me is that I know how He feels for me, apart from my will, and how His grace would lead me to feel in the suffering. If He did not feel with me He could not help me; He does feel with me, but He meets it divinely; I meet it, as a rule, selfishly. He could say under great trial, “I thank thee, O Father” (Matthew 11: 25). He says to me as it were, I feel it as much as you do, or a great deal more. When He was here He felt things far more deeply than the disciples did. He felt the storm, and the indifference of the Pharisee. He knows and understands my feelings, and when I am conscious of this I am not swayed by them. I can go through the [p. 75] sorrow divinely however weighed down by it, God is more before me than my feelings. I do not deprive Him of His due, “the tithes”, in my sorrow. My very suffering, which the Lord enters into, leads me, when enjoying His sympathy to learn His way in them, and thus I have advanced in the knowledge of Himself in the trial. When I am relieved of the trial I may rejoice, but the sympathy which I have known in it increases and enhances my knowledge of Him.
There is one thing which one learns in constant company with the Lord that could not be learned any other way and that is sensibility. I see how He feels every incongruity, but I see how He treats it, not as it affects Himself, but as it affects God. This is the way Paul learned to treat the “thorn”; your trial is I doubt not of this order; you may be sure the more you feel it the more there is grace for you to bear it. Feeling is nothing without the grace. Feeling in our Lord drew out the grace that was in Him because there was nothing but good in Him. In me the feeling tends to draw out temper, etc., but when I have His sympathy I am sure to have His divine way of answering to the feeling.
How slowly one learns that His sympathy is not expressed in removing the affliction but in raising one above it to Himself, so that He becomes so endeared to the heart that He is more an object to the heart than oneself.