Auckland
8th September 1980
My dear friends,
Since I wrote last I have flown over the Tasman Sea and I am now in New Zealand. The transition from one country to another is easy where one meets with persons likeminded in the Gospel, and where one finds the worship of God’s sanctuary carried on in the same way as at home. Here in Auckland, where the late Rev. D.M. MacLeod laboured for the last ten years of his life, I have met many who are warmly attached to the Gospel of God’s grace and to the testimony of our Church. I have little doubt that the same will be true in other parts of New Zealand which I have still to visit before returning to Australia for the month of October. By the time this is in your hands, it is likely, the Lord willing, that I will have arrived back in Scotland after a three months’ absence.
The Psalmist had to say, “From the end of the earth will I cry unto Thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I.” Psalm 61:2. Here in New Zealand which is literally at the other end of the world from the home country, these words may have their own significance. Yet it is to their spiritual significance we must turn. We do not need to go to the other side of the world to be at the end of the earth. Poor sinners awakened to a sense of their lostness, and the people of God when beset by many enemies, and exposed to many trials, or under the hiding of the light of the Lord’s countenance, can find themselves in their experience at the end of the earth. At such times their heart is overwhelmed. For the Lord’s people no trial can be so great as the Lord hiding His face from them. Their language is then, “Oh that I knew where I might find Him.” Other trials can, in a measure, be borne, but this trial quite overwhelms them. How much more so, when there is added to this trial the reproaching scorn of the enemy — “Where is Thy God now gone?”
The Lord has His own wise ends in view of bringing poor sinners to know their sin and guilt. It is not only that they may know the enormity of their offence against an infinitely holy God, but that He may ultimately lead them on further to discover that where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.
So far as His people are concerned, the Lord has His own wise ends, too, in bringing them into straits. Oftentimes it is in the way of chastisement for their sins; for “whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth and scourges every son whom He receiveth.” However hard it may be for the soul to bear chastisement — and especially the hiding of the light of the Lord’s countenance in chastisement — yet the Lord means it for good. The Apostle had to say: “We have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live? For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure; but He for our profit, that we might be partakers of His holiness.” Heb. 12:9,10.
Sometimes the Lord brings His people into straits, and even hides His face from them, only for their trial. The graces of the Spirit implanted in the soul of the believer are to be tried. The dross in the believer is to be separated from the true grace of God in them, and they are to come forth as gold — more separated than they ever were before to the fear of God and to holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord. In the midst of the trial the believer may be ready to say with Jacob, “All these things are against me.” But in the end he will have to agree with Joseph’s words that, “God meant it unto good.”
When the soul of the believer or of the awakened sinner is overwhelmed, where does he or she turn? Certainly not to the world. There is no succour for them there. It is to the Lord at a throne of grace that the soul turns in its extremity, crying out with the Psalmist: “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.” As the magnet turns towards the north, so does the needy soul turn toward Christ, and the living soul towards the One in whom is all its delight. There it finds refuge; there it finds succour; there it finds rest. Nor can it be otherwise, for the One to whom the soul turns is the One who Himself has said: “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matth.11:28-30.
Your sincere friend,
The Editor.