SORROW AND TRIAL (5)

SORROW AND TRIAL (5)

It is one thing to be silent and passive under suffering, and quite another to be conscious of its ‘needs be’; and though it may be only in a very partial way at first, to derive such real good and help from it that, instead of lamenting, one is owning to the Lord His wisdom and thoughtfulness in putting one through such necessary discipline. Now this can never be reached but through exercise of soul. The trial which one feels much ought to exercise one much before God. If I am assured that His love is as great as His power, and knows neither measure nor end, must I not be exercised before Him as to why, in His love, He should allow me to be so afflicted? The very exercise engages and connects my soul with Him; and this nearness acquires for me help and instruction about many other things. The waiting on God in the time of affliction, or because of it, is requited with a growth and a strength in God, which tends to relieve of the suffering which was the original cause of waiting on Him; and the soul, once truly habituated to wait on Him, learns so to value it, that it never again can do without it and then it can say, “All my springs are in thee” (Psalm 87: 7). The fact of the desolation which one feels here when a beloved one has been removed, and the reluctance with which one refuses to submit to it, proves that the heart required the trial, in order to discover to it that it had rested and hoped in something outside of God; and the exercise of soul, consequent on the affliction, leads to that nearness and waiting on Him,

^[p. 431] which supplies what was before unknown. Most blessed it is when the trial produces this, its true effect, the one intended for us by our gracious God, whose heart is set on our blessing.