1. " GOD is love, for so it is written. Faith, therefore, says; God is love. You say so, for you have faith; and you say so as to every detail even of your sorrow and anguish down here. You say it, though you have to add, as the antidote to sense's surmisings, Let God be true, and every man a liar.' He was love when He put the cup into the hand of His only begotten Son. Be is love when He gives to us to drink of fellowship of His sufferings. Faith is not feeling, much less is it fallen nature's feeling."
2. " Can I read love in this your present trial? I may be stupid and unable to do so, or I may be able to read part of it aright, and I think I can. There is large love to you in it, the expression of a jealousy on His part toward you, that you should learn how to walk blind like His servant; an expression, too, of His jealousy to have your heart, as His Son's was, able to say, Not my will but thine be done' He loves you, and wants His will to be all your satisfaction; wants you to find your all in Him and in His Son; He will not let you share your heart's best affections between Him and even your mother. All this is His love to you. His good pleasure that you should be like Jesus, Lord of all. He thinks that, if all His pleasure is found in the Son of His love, He can make that Son of His love enough for you when all else is gone. He so loves you in Him, that He is making every affection in you, every thought in you, to find the Lord Jesus as its center.
" Oft it requires a broken heart as a prelude to this blessing, but His love broke my heart to make room for Christ; and I know it was love that did it; till then I never knew either the creature's need of Christ, nor Christ's sufficiency for a broken heart."
3. " Christ Jesus is quite enough to satisfy your heart and mind-yea, to enable you to count all else but loss, for the excellency of the knowledge of Him. The more
think of it, the more it seems to me that it is love alone which is to be seen in this sorrow to you-the jealousy of love divine, which purposes that you should know and own the sufficiency there is in Christ to satisfy your heart, as He has satisfied God's heart these 1800 years and upwards.
" If you still find you cannot pray, try whether you can write-write, as it were, a letter for your Lord to present to His Father. It may be, that, as I have known before, this might help you. I have known when reading, or trying to read Sacred Scripture brought no profit; but writing it out did; and I have met cases in which prayer was impossible, save with paper and ink. We are strange in our littlenesses, as strange as He in all His greatnesses.
" I pray for you, and HE prays for you too."
4. " Love-the Lord's love to you-makes me think again and again by day and by night, There is..... in her full taste of sorrow.' Ah! if He makes me, in my impatience, think of you, it is because He wears you on His heart, and is jealous in His love over you, and over your thoughts and affections. He wants them all for Himself, every one.
" I find often, when I cannot pray, that hymns, which are the expression of my thoughts when in vigor, become their railroad when I am in weakness. You will find the truth of Hymn 76* too, and after sorrow's taste (79), Rest of the Saints above.' "
(* "Rise, my soul, thy God directs thee.)
5. "Many long years ago I was wounded with a wound, which has been green ever since. The Lord be praised for that blow. Through eternity it will proclaim His love to me."
6. " In a letter I read lately, there was one expression which struck me; it was to this effect, that His people, amid the sorrows and sense of bereavements, would find that Christ made His own sympathy to flow in through the kind sympathies of His members upon earth, and that was sweet. I am sure that the Lord has stirred up many of His in heart and mind to you, that our thoughts and affections are in unwonted play toward you, because His are, who is our life."
7. " Do not try to answer Satan, or to stop his slanders of you. Bunyan found that Satan could say, Sell Him, sell Him, sell Him,' faster than he could say, Not for a thousand worlds, not for ten thousand worlds. George Herbert's was a better way: Thou Lord shalt answer for me.' Jesus Christ knows that He keeps you, and that you do not keep Him. He told Peter that He did not confide in Him, but that he (Peter) might trust Him (Christ). John 13, last verse, and xiv. 1.
" The discovery that it is Satan who worries is an immense boon; for if he worries me, it is because I am Christ's, and this oft has comforted me in the hour of temptation.
" We all have to learn the contrasts between our little. ness, and the fullness of that which is ours in Christ. I, like Job, may oft have not been able to discern between God and Satan. Yet Christ loves us because the Father, His own Father, gave us to Him. How should He but love and look with intense delight on that which His Father gave Him, and gave to Him, too, as the expression of His confidence, that He was able to do with it as He the Father wished, and bring it to glory, spite of all its pitifulness."
8. " The Lord is blessing you, I know, I am sure of it; and you will say so too. Even that all this year's march has been in His love."
9. " Unbelief, or the feeling of mere nature in you, would say on awaking this morning, " She is gone and left the earth to solitary me.' But Faith would say:
And yet I am not alone, for the Father and Son are with me here.' And more than that, as to herself. She is only gone from this place, where circumstances impeded your constantly realizing her presence with you, to be there where your spirit and soul are already with your Lord. I refuse to say of myself bereaved,' when the Lord has won another to His presence. I will not say of myself bereaved ' when another is gone to be with Him. Surely, if I love Him, I must unselfishly resign all I love to Him; surely, if I love her, I must rejoice at her great gain-and she is now in spirit where I would always be; and if so, I would ever realize her blessed with the Lord.' "
10. " I woke in the night with another thought' Lord, thou wilt remember that solitary one in all her infirmity;' and then again-' Lord, thou hast remembered, dolt remember, and wilt remember her that is in trial.' I have full assurance that He is with you, not that you fully feel it new, but that He has said, Fear not; it is I.' I heard Him myself, if you did not, and you will find He is near. Remember that word, ' This is mine infirmity, I will remember the years of the right hand of the most High.' Well I pray for you, and I know in whose hand you are, and if the jealousy of His all absorbing love barks and lays bare lost nature to us, the eternal, divine nature only is strengthened. Read 2 Cor. 1"
March, 1864.
14 March, 1864.
With a conscience set free by faith in a risen and ascended Lord, and with the flow of joy which the ungrieved Spirit of God gives to a heavenly man who is a son of God, what is the fever of disease, what the clammy feel of the body, when its life is flickering in the socket, and the eternal life within centering the heart and mind upon the person of the Lord Jesus Christ himself. Yes, but there is a coffin before us! There rests the body of an aged and devoted saint! happy in His love, and full of His love to His saints-and now gone! Aye, but gone whither? To the Lord Jesus. Is He not worthy to have
His saints with Him, and has He forestalled God's counsel in calling this one home, home to Himself-Himself the home? Not so; the words, If ye loved me, ye would rejoice that I said, I go to my Father, for my Father is greater than I,' may be quoted here as true in this case also Oh, have we no love for those that go? No love save for our own selves? No willingness to see them blessed, if their blessing will cost us any privation? It is will, wretched selfishness, which forgets God's joy and Christ's joy in welcoming to His presence a soul that leaves us, and which hinders, too, our thinking of its great gain. Well may you, who are thus full of your own selves, forgetting God and Christ, and the friends you profess to have loved, well may you be indignant with your own selfishness and your own narrow-hearted love of self I But there is a jealousy of love in God. He wills that your hearts should know the sufficiency of Christ to satisfy you amid all the wrestlings of the wilderness. He wills in that jealousy of love that you should think of Him to whom He has espoused you, and of His joy over those that sleep in Him, and that you should learn how to think and feel according to that sphere in which Christ is the center.
What can I tell you concerning the blessedness of the departed? I can only answer by another question. What do you know of the blessedness of being with the Lord? For if self and selfishness fill you, why then, they find their aliment in this world; and if you are full of yourself, your likes and dislikes, your gains and your losses, you will not profit much from the doctrine of the blessedness of those absent from the body, and present with the Lord. It does not fill you in your selfishness, and so you may not like it! What did the thief know of Paradise? Probably nothing at all. But he had made a new friend in One whose fellow was not to be found. Faith had revealed to him the blessedness of the Lord. Faith had opened his heart to holiness and to confession, and to trust in his Judge, and had drawn into it the sweetness of inseparableness from that Savior.
Thou shalt be with me.' With Him! that was enough. This throws us on the measure of our appreciation and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. Those who know and make much of Him will find much in the thought of being with Him. To a saint there is nothing like presence with the Lord. If self rules, we must have circumstances and details, so as to be able to pick up what suits man thinking of himself and his circumstances.
There is a monstrous abortion of unbelief in many minds now, that because earthly ties and relationships cease in Heaven, persons will not be known, or our mutual interest be sustained. I know and love, and am known and loved by many who have been either my masters or my servants upon earth. The relationship may be passed, but, thank God, not the mutual love and esteem which our hearts formed in it. A child, when married, ceases to be child in the house-is, he or she is, according to God, absolved from the tie, but the love and interest go on; or does a married daughter cease to be loved because she has taken headship under another, and has not the tie and responsibility of the child in the house? Paul's former tie with the Thessalonians may cease, but not his love for them, or theirs for him, as found when on Earth. They will be around him in glory, his crown of joy and rejoicing. " For what is our hope, or joy or crown of rejoicing.? Are not even ye, in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ at His coming?"