THE SYMPATHIES OF CHRIST
THE SYMPATHIES OF CHRIST
“We have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities”, Hebrews 4: 15.
The subject is the infirmities, not your sins; weakness from any cause; the pressure of cares, or illness, or the greatest of all, bereavement; still, it is pressure you are weak, and ready to droop under it. Do not give up! Our Priest in heaven sympathises with us. He is outside of everything here; He has gone through every pressure. He knows what the circumstances are; He sympathises with us in them: He bears us company in the pressure.
Take the case of a person in bereavement; no pressure - severe illness or great pain - is equal to the agony of bereavement; there can be no alleviation of the blank, for no one can repair the blank, but the One who has caused it. Now the marvellous grace is, though it be little understood, that the Lord uses the blank as the opportunity for making Himself known in the tenderest way. As you see with Mary in John 11 He walked with her, and impressed her with the assurance, as He wept beside her, that if she had lost a brother, she had found “a friend that sticketh closer than a brother” (Proverbs 18: 24) in Himself; that she had really gained. You may think it impossible; but the Lord is so much to you that you are borne up and drawn to Him, The word ‘support’ will not fully express it; He who is made higher than the heavens bears your company.
The sense of His nearness as One above it all, but having passed through it, endears Himself to you in a peculiar way. It is not that He removes the pressure, but He so supports you that you are raised above it by His sympathy, that instead of drooping under the pressure you come boldly to the throne of grace. But I would press on you, and I trust the Lord will lead you to apprehend, that whatever the pressure is, the Lord would come to you, that He would be more endeared to you than ever before. When He relieves you, things are easier for you here, but when He bears you up above the pressure, you will never forget it. The Lord can come close beside us in our sorrow, and share with us in it, and so lift us above the pressure to the height of Himself. It is to make the Lord, who is not here, so dear to your heart that you will be drawn away from this place to Him who has so endeared Himself to you that He is indispensable. Everyone can speak of a mercy; but can you speak of being lifted above the pressure in company with the Lord who sympathises with you?