SYMPATHY AND CORRECTION

SYMPATHY AND CORRECTION

What a wondrously blessed thing it is to know that we have our Lord’s sympathy in the trials we pass through. I am sure when we know that we have it we are not eager or impatient for deliverance, but alas! with some of us, our trials are so often the fruits of our own unsubduedness, that we cannot look for His sympathy in the things themselves, though of course we may and should know His sympathy, the moment we accept His way for us in them.

In the sorrows of unfaithfulness we cannot expect His sympathy except as we retrace our steps. The Lord could sympathise with Lot leaving Sodom, but not as to his loss and trials in it.

I think the reason why Mary (John 11) knew more of the Lord’s sympathy was because she leaned on Him ^[p. 103] more — leaned, if I may so say, on His love more than on His power.

It is quite true that we are made in different ways, and at different times to realise the wilderness. I have been thinking what is the law of discipline, I mean what is the unerring and unvarying rule by which it is administered, and with this I have a thought in my mind (though it is not yet matured into a meditation), that holiness is the only refuge for widowhood though it leads to widowhood. I think the widow, who gave all she had for the temple (Luke 21), God’s testimony on the earth, is a striking and lovely example for us. She was not seeking to amend her own condition, though to a Jewess her condition was the most sad one, but to expend her last to maintain what remained for God on the earth. If we realised our place as sent into the world for Him we should not only be above the world in spirit, but we should carry such joy in our hearts, because of our nearness to God, that we should not be detained by anything here. A real blank cannot be filled up, and doubtless it ought to remain as the witness to the heart here of what this life is, but the more so, the more there ought to arise out of the dreariness of the blank, the beacon-light to the day of reunion and glory.

I have been much helped by seeing that the true way to assure one’s heart of any desired or promised condition is seeing our Head in it first; then there is nourishment ministered.

Those chapters in Numbers which you refer to are all very instructive and magnificent. What a spirit was Balaam’s, willing to compromise truth in order to meet the carnal mind, and this for his own gain! What real relief and strength to the heart there is in looking by faith to that wondrous moment when our Lord shall present us to Himself.