RECOVERY THROUGH THE VALLEY OF ACHOR

RECOVERY THROUGH THE VALLEY OF ACHOR

What is divine is never lost; it may be covered with the plaster of this world, but whatever has been written on the fleshy tables of the heart will never be effaced. You will certainly sing again as in the days of your youth, but then you must be brought to the valley of Achor. Achor is sorrow; it is morally the death of all that which turned away the heart from God, and this can take place without actual bereavement here. It is renunciation in sorrow. It is a condemning to death the natural attractions which stole the heart away from the bright line in which God has set it; and this is known by the consciousness the heart has of returning to where it had left off. Like one long absent from a loved home returning to it, or the hound returning to the lost scent, which delights and commands all the energies of his existence. There is a sense of renewed connection with the light once enjoyed and the path once trodden; and there is the self-condemnation and repudiation of the imaginary pleasures which had diverted one from it. There must be in some way a discovering of the worthlessness of everything, to set one in the path of life with God. This Peter learned when everything was favourable to him in this scene (Luke 5). Christ in the ship, he doing His will, blessed with abundance of fish; but all these could not meet the need of his soul in the presence of God, and hence the One who did meet it, who thus proved His superiority over everything gratifying to a man, commanded ^[p. 59] and secured all the heart of Peter. He brought his ship to land, left all, and followed him. It is not an easy thing; it is, on the contrary, the moment of moral death, and therefore Achor, because then one denounces as vain all that has caused the heart to swerve. One must either see the net or find out that it is a net. “In vain is spread the net in the sight of anything which hath wings” (Proverbs 1: 17). If we see the net, we are not taken in it; but if we are taken in it (and this is the way most common with us), we are drawn away by the false glitter of the present thing; and then we are often, like the lion in the net, unable to extricate ourselves, and dependent on the wearing of circumstances, like that of the nibbling of the mouse to cut the knots. It is very gracious of the Lord when He gives desires after Himself in the soul; for surely, somehow or other, they will be satisfied.