AFFLICTIONS.
IT is a good sign when the Lord blows off the blossoms of our forward hopes in this life, and lops the branches of our worldly joys to the very root, on purpose that they should not thrive. Lord, spoil my fool’s heaven in this life, that I may be saved for ever!
Though you get strokes and frowns from your Lord, yet believe His love more than your own feeling. This world can take nothing from you that is truly yours; and death itself can do you no hurt. It is not your rock that ebbs and flows, but your sea.
Christ’s children must not expect always to lean upon His bosom. He sometimes sets them down on the cold, frosty side of the hill, and makes them walk, barefooted upon thorns. Yet does He keep His eye of love upon them all the while. Our pride must have winter weather to rot it.
Sickness hath this advantage, that it draweth our sweet Physician’s hand and His holy and soft fingers to touch our withered and leper skins. It is a blessed fever that fetcheth Christ to the bedside.
Christ’s cross is the sweetest burden that ever I bear; it is such a burden as wings to a bird, or sails to a ship, to carry me forward to my harbour.
When you are come to the other side of the water, and have set down your foot on the shore of glorious eternity, and look back again to the water, and to your wearisome journey, and shall see in that clear glass of endless glory nearer to the bottom of God’s wisdom, you shall then be forced to say, ‘If God had done otherwise with me than He hath done, I had never come to the enjoyment of this crown of glory.’
TEMPTATIONS.
In your temptations run to the promises; they be our Lord’s branches hanging over the water, that our Lord’s silly, half-drowned children may take a grip of them; if you let that grip go, you will fall to the ground.
Hold your face up the brae, and wade through temptations without fearing what man can do. The world thinketh that godliness may sleep in a bed of down till it come to heaven. But that will not do it. Heaven is a besieged castle; it must be taken with violence.
THE WORLD.
Set not your heart upon the world, since God hath not made it your portion—for you will not have an upper heaven and an under heaven too—let go your grip of this life.
Our fair morning is at hand; the day-star is near the rising, and we are not many miles from home; what matter, then, of ill entertainment in the smoky inns of this worthless world!
To be crucified to the world is not so highly accounted of by us as it should be: how heavenly a thing is it to be deaf and dead to this world’s sweetest music.
YOUTH.
I rejoice to hear that Christ has run away with your young love, and that you are so early in the morning matched with such a Lord. Be humble and thankful for grace, and judge it not so much by weight as by its truth. Christ will not cast water on your smoking coal; He never yet put out a dim candle that was lighted at the Sun of Righteousness.
Let the Lord have the flower of your age; the best sacrifice is due to Him. Oh, if ye knew Him, and saw His beauty, your love, your heart, your desires, would close with Him, and cleave to Him.
O fair sun, and fair moon, and fair stars, and fair flowers, and fair roses, and fair lilies, and fair creatures; but O ten thousand thousand times fairer Lord Jesus! Alas, I wronged Him in making the comparison this way! O black sun and moon, but O fair Lord Jesus; O, black flowers, and black lilies and roses, but O fair fair, ever fair Lord Jesus! O all fair things black and deformed, without beauty, when ye are beside that fairest Lord Jesus! I would seek no more to make me happy for evermore, but a thorough and clear sight of the beauty of Jesus, my Lord.