THE HEART'S PSALM - "I WAS BROUGHT LOW, AND HE HELPED ME"
THE HEART’S PSALM — “I WAS BROUGHT LOW, AND HE HELPED ME”
I hope you are now quite convalescent, and that you have written, not with pen, but in your heart, a psalm; that is, a record of the way the Lord has led you: “I was brought low, and he helped me”. A psalm is very much like what I think our feeling at the judgment-seat of Christ will be: we are brought into remembrance of all the way which the Lord thy God hath led thee. However great our crookedness and failure, the psalm will be — Goodness and mercy have followed me all the days of my life. I think often a severe illness has been a great crisis in one’s life; we may not know the cause for it, but it is the exercise in consequence of it which yields so much blessing. It is a great thing to be practically conscious that all on this side is death — like Abraham going up Mount Moriah. I am much attracted by his moral dignity, because of his faith in God, as he ascended that mount. He was prepared [p. 114] to put out all natural light with his own hand. “They that sow in tears shall reap in joy” (Psalm 126: 5). Oh! our lack is that we do not accept death on our side because so assured of life — of Himself in resurrection on His own side. Abraham could never forget that journey. I dare say there has been much in your illness as to the exercises of your soul that you will never forget. It is true that in the mind of God we are always over Jordan, but though in the wilderness the joys of heaven are ours, like the grapes of Eschol, the reality of being over is never known until by faith we accept it as having died with Christ, and that therefore heaven is our place, and we know it to be our place, and that this side is not our place, and we know that it is not. The more you are with the Lord on the other side, the less disappointed you will be here, for when you are there you import new joys and new hopes into this old world, from an entirely new one, and you therefore in every way surpass the inhabitants of this old world. May this be more and more your happy song.