Our worst trials are in the sphere of feeling.
"Is desolate;" or, is full of amazement; astonishes itself; seeks to comprehend the mystery of its sufferings, and is ever beaten back upon itself in its perplexity; is dispirited. "How poor a judgment can be formed of a man's state from the considerations of comfort only!" There are trials which are wholly kept in the physical sphere. There are aches and pains of body, and disabilities of bodily organs, which have no direct connection with sin, and so no bitterness through witnessing conscience; and which arouse no feeling save the simple feeling of enduring. There are trials which have no relation to the outer world of circumstances; they belong wholly to the inner world of feeling.
I. TRIALS THAT KEEP IN THE BODILY SPHERES HAVE MANY RELIEFS. Especially may be noticed those that come by sympathy. Others can understand and estimate these trials. The comfortings they present are kin with the trials. There is no secrecy about these trials; they who suffer under them need not be lonely. And of God it can be said, "He knoweth our frame," and can be in closest sympathy with us. A grief that we can tell to another is not our worst grief.
II. TRIALS THAT GET INTO THE SPHERE OF FEELING HAVE FEW RELIEFS. SO mysterious is human nature; so complex are the relations of body and mind; so strangely possible is it for a man to live an interior life distinct from bodily conditions and relations,—that it is possible for a man to have trials wholly in the sphere of feeling. And these are the worst trials, because for them we can get little or no human sympathy. They put us apart from our fellow-men in loneliness. Our Lord suffered bodily on the cross; but the sufferings in feeling were his real sufferings. Yet even in these worst trials we are not separated from God. Indeed, as these belong to the spirit-region, they belong more especially to the sphere in which God works most freely. When the "heart" is desolate, there is the more need for its filling and comforting with that sense of God which may be so fully realized.—R.T.
God our first Hope and our Last.
The hunger and thirst after righteousness is ultimately a thirst for God. "Observe how he binds himself to God alone, cuts off every other hope from his soul, and, in short, makes his very need a chariot wherewith to mount up to God." "I remember the days of old;" "I spread forth my hands unto thee."
I. GOD ALWAYS HAS BEEN OUR HOPE. A good man is here speaking in the name of good men. They can never look back over life, and estimate its scenes of trial and strain, without clearly seeing that their hope was in God, and that God had ever met and satisfied their hope. One thing man has to learn over and over again in the experience of life. It is the untrustworthiness of things and people, and the safe foundation of hope that a man has in God. It is not usually long after a man enters on what may be called a personal experience that he discovers there is no hope to be placed in man. One of the most humiliating and depressing experiences of life is finding our most trusted friend fail us in the hour of need. Then we learn that God is our first and only Hope. Then God does not fail. We may trust him. We find him the "Strength of our heart and our Portion for ever." That experience is repeated again and again as life unfolds.
II. GOD ALWAYS WILL BE OUR HOPE. Estimate aright the painful experiences through which we may now be passing; times when our life-erections seem to lie in ruins about us; times when trusted friends fail us; times when the outlook before us is dark; times when the sense of loneliness oppresses us, we look to the right hand and to the left, but there is no helper;—they are all times in which we are recovering and re-establishing our hope in God. It is well to remember that we always have that. The soul's deep rest is in him who is "the same yesterday, and today, and for ever;" always the "Friend of the friendless and the faint." Life rightly viewed is a liberating us from every bond that would keep us from restful, strengthening hope in God.—R.T.