"I WAS BROUGHT LOW, AND HE HELPED ME"
“I WAS BROUGHT LOW, AND HE HELPED ME”
He who loves you infinitely more than any of us is making your bed in your sickness. As we wait on Him we learn what His purpose is in the suffering - the wisdom of it. It comes from the deepest love; but the delay with us is in being able to see the wisdom of it. Jacob is crippled before he meets Esau; he is a self-reduced man before he is a triumphant one, through God’s own ordering. Joseph comes from a prison in Egypt to nearly the highest position there. “I was brought low, and he helped me”. The great gain in discipline is the helplessness which discloses the vanity of natural resources, but at the same time separates our hearts to God. Then we are “partakers of his holiness”. In Jordan “the living God” was known; and in the tediousness and irksomeness of illness there is a sense of the emptiness of everything, and the measure of one’s real resource in God is found out. I have said to a dear brother before now, surrounded by his family and natural comforts, ‘You enjoy the word and the Lord in your present circumstances, but I should like to know how much real spiritual enjoyment in the Lord you would have if these happy surroundings were broken up’. They were broken up afterwards, and no doubt with very great blessing to him.
In sickness one loses the power to enjoy, while in bereavement one loses the object to be enjoyed. I believe one learns differently in each. In illness I am occupied with myself, there the grievance is, and while there is life there is hope. It is my resourcelessness as to power that is impressed on me; while in bereavement it is my resourcelessness as to the place; I am lonely. My very health makes me the more keenly to feel like [p. 411] a tree with its branches torn off, which can never be restored. There is an end of hope in bereavement. In the one case myself is lost for a time to me; in the other, the stay of my heart may have gone for ever. Thus the Lord is the One who heals us in the one; and He only can fill up the blank in the other.