| The Ministry of Comfort |
Chapter 9 |
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It is the same with God. There are many people who receive countless blessings from Him and who rest on His promises, who yet do not get to know God Himself in a personal way. There are many who for a time trusted Christ and found great comfort in the assurances of His love, but who at length, in some season of trial, entered into close relations of personal friendship with Him. In this revealing they found treasures of love, of sympathy, and of comfort, far surpassing the best they had ever experienced before. In seeking, therefore, for help in sorrow, we should never be content with the gifts of God alone, or with the comforts which come in His words of promise; we should pass through all these to God Himself and seek satisfaction in the infinite blessedness of His love.
It is thus that the Scriptures represent God. He is ever, with lavish hand, dispensing His mercies and benefits, but He would not have us content with these. “He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.” But He desires to manifest Himself to His children as He does not to the world. The great Bible saints found their satisfaction and their help, not in God’s gifts, but in God himself. Thus the reason for David’s sublime assurance, “I shall not want,” was not because he had great stores of God’s gifts laid up, but because “the Lord is my Shepherd.” His confidence was not in the wealth which God had given him, which would cover all his wants for the future, but in God Himself. In another psalm the writer’s intense longing is not for any mere tokens of divine goodness, any mere benefits or favours, but for God Himself. “My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.” His thirst was unappeasable in any way but in fellowship with God. Nothing that God could have given him of the richest of His gifts, of the sweetest blessings of His hand, would have satisfied him. It was for God Himself, the living God that he thirsted. The human soul was made for God, and God alone can meet its need.
The only heart filling comfort, therefore, in time of sorrow is that which is in God Himself. It is thus, too, that our Father desires to bless us; He asks for our fullest trust, and He would reveal Himself to us in tenderest personal ways. After Horace Bushnell’s death there were found, dimly penciled on a sheet of paper, laid in his Bible, these words: “My mother’s loving instinct was from God, and God was in her love to me first – which love was deeper than hers and more protracted. Long years ago she vanished, but God stays by me still, embracing me in my grey hairs as tenderly and carefully as she did in my infancy, and giving to me as my joy and the principal glory of my life, that He lets me know Him, and helps me, with real confidence, to call Him my Father.”
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