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June 24 - July 6, 2021
Sin destroyed the perfect harmony of the universe. The relationship of man with God and of human beings with each other was fractured. Man now knows that he is alone. His aloneness is no longer an experience only of solitude (not by any means a bad thing in itself) but also of deprivation.
The human companionship, which in the divine plan was the answer to man’s aloneness, no longer suffices. Disobedience ruined it.
Without a foothold, without an awareness of being a part of something grander and greater than themselves, it will not be enough.
To know God, or even to begin to know Him, is to know that we are not alone in the universe. Someone else is out there. There is a hint that there may be a refuge for our loneliness. To stop our frantic getting, spending, and searching, and simply to look at the things God has made is to move one step away from despair. For God cares. The most awesome seascape can reveal a care which is actually tender.
we may believe that an aching heart does not escape His notice.
But safety, as the Cross shows, does not exclude suffering. All that was of course beyond me when I was a child, but as I began to learn about suffering I learned that trust in those strong arms means that even our suffering is under control. We are not doomed to meaninglessness. A loving Purpose is behind it all, a great tenderness even in the fierceness.
So we had to talk about God’s idea of “good”—very different from mere utilitarianism.
That is where faith begins—in the wilderness, when you are alone and afraid, when things don’t make sense. She must hang on to the message of the Cross: God loves you. He loved you enough to die for you. Will you trust Him?
a pure faith would be worth far more to God than all the service she had hoped to render if poor health had not interrupted her plans.
It is one of the terms of being human (which means that although we cannot do anything about it, there is something very important that we can do with it—but more of that later).
In the wilderness of loneliness we are terribly vulnerable. What we want is OUT, and sometimes there appear to be some easy ways to get there. Will we take Satan up on his offers, satisfy our desires in ways never designed by God, seek security outside of His holy will? If we do, we may find a measure of happiness, but not the lasting joy our heavenly Father wants us to have. We will “gain the world,” but we’ll lose our souls. Jesus knew that His joy lay in only one direction: the will of the Father. And so does ours. Pain, as C. S. Lewis said, is God’s megaphone (“He whispers to us in our
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Perhaps there is no more bitter loneliness than that of rejection. Not only must he learn to do without someone he had come to feel he could not live without, but he must endure dagger-thrusts to the heart, such as: You deserved to be rejected. You are not worthy to be loved. You will never be loved. Who would want you? You are condemned to loneliness forever, and nobody cares.
Fear and anger arise. If I turn to God He might reject me. How can I turn to Him anyway? He could have prevented this from happening. What else is He likely to do to me? The devastating conclusion is reached: I am alone.
He gave back his life, restored the light of his life, opened his heart, laid down life’s glory. That spells surrender, which can only come of trust. His blindness and rejection proved to be for George Matheson the very means of illuminating the Love of God. He may have asked the age-old question, Why?, but God’s answer is always Trust Me. Matheson turned his thoughts away from the woman he had lost, away from the powerful temptations to self-pity, resentment, bitterness toward God, skepticism of His Word, and selfish isolation which might so quickly have overcome him, and lifted up his “weary
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Matheson understood that there was something he could do with his suffering. It was the great lesson of the Cross: surrender.
The power of the Cross is not exemption from suffering but the very transformation of suffering.
Jesus suffered “not that we might not suffer,” wrote George MacDonald, “but that our sufferings might be like His.”
Joyful surrender and denying muself
God never denies us our heart’s desire except to give us something better. With what misgivings we turn over our lives to God, imagining somehow that we are about to lose everything that matters. Our hesitancy is like that of a tiny shell on the seashore, afraid to give up the teaspoonful of water it holds lest there not be enough in the ocean to fill it again. Lose your life, said Jesus, and you will find it. Give up, and I will give you all. Can the shell imagine the depth and plentitude of the ocean? Can you and I fathom the riches, the fullness, of God’s love?
he might have felt as I sometimes do: I will not relinquish this misery, not right now. God has taken away what I most wanted. I have a right to feel sorry for myself. I have been wronged, I will refuse, for a while at least, any offer of comfort and healing. Don’t speak to me of joy. You pour salt in my wounds. Let me lick them for a while. If any such quite natural thoughts entered Matheson’s mind, God understood, for He too had been a man. In His mercy, He helped him to put them away and to write, I cannot close my heart to Thee. There is the response of a humbled heart, one that admits its
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Happy isn’t the word, really. It’s joy, a far better thing. Not sentiment, not mere “feeling good,” but something that can never be taken away.
“Happy the race of men, if that love were to rule your hearts which rules the heavens!” wrote Boethius from the dungeon where he awaited his death in the fifth century.
I kept most of them to myself, however, determined to bare my feelings to no man until he had proposed—and even then to be extremely cautious, for an emotional striptease leads to a physical one far more quickly than most of us are prepared for.
Christ can be known only in the path of obedience.
Obedience proves love, and love opens the heart to knowledge. Never a day goes by that does not bring fresh opportunities to know Him—if only we will do what He says.
I began to see that there is a sense in which everything is a gift, even my widowhood.
In awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the “lord of terrible aspect,” is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a
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Thy will be done. The coming of this transcendent authority into one’s life is bound to be an active thing, an immense disruption at times. This was one of those times. He had done more than merely “allow” a thing to “happen” to me. I do not know any more accurate way of putting it than to say that he had given me something. He had given me a gift—widowhood.
I have come to understand even suffering, through the transforming power of the Cross, as a gift, for in this broken world, in our sorrow, He gives us Himself; in our loneliness, He comes to meet us, as in George Matheson’s He came as the Love that would never let him go.
Thus the worst thing that ever happened became the best thing that ever happened. It can happen with us. At the Cross of Jesus our crosses are changed into gifts.
Lord, I do once more acknowledge, with all my heart, that I am Thine. No claim have I upon this life, past, present, or future. I am all, all Thine own. Thou hast said, “Fear not; for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine. . . . I will be with thee. . . . I am the LORD thy God. . . . I have loved thee. . . . I am with thee” (Isa. 43:1–5 KJV). Therefore, O dear Lord and Master, Redeemer, Lover, Friend, Beloved, do Thou work out Thine entire will in my life henceforth at any cost, in the time that is left to me on this earth. How short that may be I do not know at
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In some ways all single people are misfits in society, just as someone who has lost a leg is handicapped. God meant for everybody to have two legs apiece. We don’t notice them when they are both there, but if one is missing, it’s noticeable.
Like the border collies that my friend Vergil Holland trains to herd sheep, I did not understand the pattern. The dogs have no idea what the master is up to with the flock. They only know one thing: obedience. I felt confused and insecure about my “place” now.
God in His sovereign will had given me a new place. I could accept that place, with all its new responsibilities and bafflements, assured that “the Lord himself goes at your head; he will be with you; he will not fail you or forsake you. Do not be discouraged or afraid” (Deut. 31:8 NEB). That strong promise cheered me on. The Auspices under which I worked had not changed. For each day’s demands, I found that the old rule, inscribed in an ancient parsonage in England, was my salvation: Doe the Nexte Thinge.
Through the last year I have come to know the reality of a much bigger family than my own natural family, dear as they are to me. My larger family are those who also know Christ in an intimate way. They are the ones who have listened to my cries and at the same time encouraged me to consider issues larger than myself. They are the ones whom God has used not only to relieve my loneliness, but to deepen my love for the kingdom. As I find my place of service within the community of God’s people, there is little time left to feel lonely!
My joy is becoming less dependent upon my own immediate circumstances and more attached to what He is doing. As limited as my understanding is now, I know that He is a God who never loses, a God who has taken the ultimate humiliation and defeat and turned it inside out. Somehow my ruined plans fit into His larger plans. And so in the moments when I am forced to face my own loneliness, I find that I am not really alone at all!
Might God sometimes take from us our love because we love too much? I don’t think so. Surely it is impossible to love “too much,” for love is from God, who is Love. Usually we love too little and too sentimentally. Our love, God-given though it be, is usually mixed up with possessiveness and selfishness. It needs strengthening and purifying.
If God is not first, other loves, even those which are in no sense sexual, easily turn into self-gratification and therefore destroy both the love and the beloved.
Lewis helped Vanauken to see that his very agony was the mercy of God. In His mercy God stands silently by and permits us to agonize. We simply cannot turn to Him until we have nowhere else to turn.
“All which I took from thee I did but take, Not for thy harms, but just that thou shouldst seek it in My arms, All which thy child’s mistake fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home; Rise, clasp My hand, and come!”
The Bible is a book about the mysterious ways of God with individual men. It shows us on every page that there is a Controller. We have a tendency to dismiss the possibility of mystery in our own lives, even when we are faithful readers and professed believers of the Bible, with remarks like, “Oh, but that was back then.” Jesus Christ is the same. Yesterday. Today. Forever. We have innumerable promises that the Seen is not the whole story. The Unseen is where it is to be finally unfurled.
How shall we be sure that the word “not for thy harms” is true? How shall we fix our eyes on things unseen? There is no answer but faith, faith in the character of God Himself. That and no other is the anchor for our souls.
Yet I find that events do not change souls. It is our response to them which finally affects us.
While I understood that in so great a loss God surely must have some great gain in mind, I was not nearly saintly enough always to see the little needling trials of the day as my “marching orders,” the very process itself through which God’s great gain would be realized. I was to march, not to leap and bound. It was left, right, left, right.
Deeper and deeper must be the dying, for wider and fuller is the lifetide that it is to liberate—no longer limited by the narrow range of our own being, but with endless powers of multiplying in other souls. Death must reach the very springs of our nature to set it free: it is not this thing or that thing that must go now: it is blindly, helplessly, recklessly, our very selves. A dying must come upon all that would hinder God’s working through us—all interests, all impulses, all energies that are “born of the flesh”—all that is merely human and apart from His Spirit.
Loneliness is one kind of “dying” most of us learn about sooner or later. Far from being “bad” for us, a hindrance to spiritual growth, it may be the means of unfolding spiritual “blossoms” hitherto enfolded.
Nothing is ever wasted. Dead leaves, dead flesh, natural wastes of all kinds, enrich the soil. In God’s economy, whether He is making a flower or a human soul, nothing ever comes to nothing.
Young adulthood is a new life, eagerly welcomed, yet seldom entered upon without some pangs of nostalgia, not to mention qualms about the future. So it is a death as well. One is jolted by the realization that he is no longer protected and cared for; he is on his own and has obligations he never had before. It dawns on him, for example, that he is single, although he has never been anything else. What does it mean? Death to self-will, a new life of acceptance of suffering, a serious seeking of the will of God concerning marriage.
Thus the cycle goes on—life out of death, gain out of loss. This is what the Crucified Life is all about. The Cross is a sign of loss—shameful, humiliating, abject, total loss. Yet it was Jesus’ loss that meant heavenly gain for the whole world. Although secured in a tomb with a heavy stone, a seal, and posted guards, He could not be held down by death. He came out of the grave as the Death of Death and Hell’s Destruction.
His death was a new beginning. Those who accept that truth receive not only the promise of heaven, but the possibility of heaven on earth, where the Risen Christ walks with us, transforming, if we allow Him to, even an empty nest.
Who knows what he is getting into when he decides to follow Christ with no turning back?
