Comfort Restored

Sorrow is faced differently by the strong and by the weak. But the strength of the strong must come from proper knowledge of and proper relationship with God. Godly wisdom is needed to face or accept or deal with sorrow.
Bereavement from the departure of beloved blood relations or genuine friends as well as sorrow from the abandonment of treacherous and  deceitful friends have to be dealt with the right perspective. As time goes on, one will see that life continues after the storm; the loving and faithful Hand of God has sustained His people. Lessons have been learned, forgiveness has been given, one can even laugh off the injuries suffered from false friends. We realize that God has never left us, but underneath is His everlasting Arms.
For God’s will is best in all circumstances both in wounding us and comforting us.
Time may contribute in forgetting but it is the Lord who heals us in our afflictions. Only the Lord comforts us and delivers us in every kind of bereavement. After the dark clouds have cleared, we find freedom and joy and victory in Him.

"Drop the last year into the limbo of the past. Let it go for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go." Brooks Atkinson

Psalms 139:17,18

“How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee."

We have here the utterance of God's thoughts to the bereft mourner. He who looked down of old on bondaged Israel, and thus unlocked the thoughts of His heart, "I know their sorrows"—He who, in a later age, watched from the mountain-side the frail bark tossed in the midst of Tiberias, and hastened to the rescue of faithless disciples—says to each poor afflicted one, 'My thoughts are upon you. I have appointed your trial. I have decreed that early, or that unlooked-for grave. Let faith trust Me in this dark hour, when fainting human nature may fail to comprehend the mystery of My dealings.'

The successive clauses of this verse form a beautiful gradation. God "sees," He "heals," He "leads," He "comforts!"

God SEES. He knows all my case, my character, my circumstances. He alone can judge as to the "needs-be" of trial. He has some wise reason for His discipline.

God HEALS. He comes with the balm of His own heavenly consolation. When the wave of sorrow has answered the end for which it was sent, He says, "Thus far shall you go, and no farther!"

God LEADS. He does not inflict the heavy blow, and then forsake. He does not leave the shorn lamb to the untempered winds of trial. "The Lord shall guide you continually, and satisfy your soul in drought"—guidance and provision, the two pilgrim necessities—and that, too, "in drought,"—when the world's provisions fail!

God COMFORTS. The mother's love for her child is manifested, not at the moment only when it receives some severe injury, but in the subsequent nights of patient, tender care, and unwearying watchfulness. "As one whom his mother comforts, so," says God, "will I comfort you!"

In the hour of sorrowing bereavement many a precious revelation is made of a before unknown or hidden God. In wrestling like Jacob with the covenant Angel, the soul is often brought to feel for the first time, in that struggle-hour, His touch—the consciousness of a Presence, before dimly recognized, is now felt. Like 'Israel,' we may go 'halting' to our graves. But the place of affliction is called by us to the last "Peniel;" for there "we saw God face to face;" and from that hour we have journeyed on, sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.

Let us cleave to this thought of sustaining comfort. Other thoughts of other hearts may have perished. Others that used to think of us, and to interchange thoughts with us, may now only greet us with mute smiles from their portraits on the wall. The parent's arms that comforted us may be mouldering in the dust. The brook that once sang along its joyous music may be silent and still—we gaze upon a dry and waterless channel. But 'Jehovah lives!' Towards the mourner there is ONE heart ever throbbing with thoughts of unalterable love. Weeping one! you can say, in the midst even of intensest loneliness, and through anguished tears, "As for me, I am poor and needy, but the Lord is thinking about me right now. You are my helper and my Savior. Do not delay, O my God." Psalm 40:17

Isaiah 57:18

“I have seen his ways, and will heal him: I will lead him also, and restore comforts unto him and to his mourners.” 

John MacDuff, 1864, "The Thoughts of God" 

(Comfort for the Bereaved)

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Beloved (Octavius Winslow)

Jude 1:24

“Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen."

Beloved, soon, O how soon! all that now 
loads the heart with care, and wrings it with sorrow; 
all that dims the eye with tears, and renders the 
day anxious and the night sleepless, will be as 
though it had never been! 

Emerging from.... 
the entanglement, 
the dreariness, 
the solitude, 
the loneliness, and 
the temptations of the wilderness, 
you shall enter upon your everlasting rest, 
your unfading inheritance, where there is.... 
no sorrow, 
no declension, 
no sin, 
no sunset, 
no twilight, 
no evening shadows, 
no midnight darkness, 
but all is one perfect, cloudless, eternal day, for 
JESUS is the joy, the light, and the glory thereof! 

"And now, all glory to God, who is able to keep 
you from stumbling, and who will bring you into 
His glorious presence innocent of sin and with 
great joy! All glory to Him, who alone is God our 
Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Yes, glory, 
majesty, power, and authority belong to Him, in 
the beginning, now, and forevermore! Amen." 
Jude 1:24-25 

Octavius Winslow, "The Lord, the Keeper of His People"

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The Loneliness of the Christian (A.W. Tozer)

The loneliness of the Christian results from his walk with God in an ungodly world, a walk that must often take him away from the fellowship of good Christians as well as from that of the unregenerate world. His God-given instincts cry out for companionship with others of his kind, others who can understand his longings, his aspirations, his absorption in the love of Christ; and because within his circle of friends there are so few who share his inner experiences he is forced to walk alone. The unsatisfied longings of the prophets for human understanding caused them to cry out in their complaint, and even our Lord Himself suffered in the same way.

The man [or woman] who has passed on into the divine Presence in actual inner experience will not find many who understand him. He finds few who care to talk about that which is the supreme object of his interest, so he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shoptalk. For this he earns the reputation of being dull and over-serious, so he is avoided and the gulf between him and society widens. He searches for friends upon whose garments he can detect the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces, and finding few or none he, like Mary of old, keeps these things in his heart.

It is this very loneliness that throws him back upon God. His inability to find human companionship drives him to seek in God what he can find nowhere else.

"And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death." -Revelation 12:11

The Saint Must Walk Alone 

Most of the worlds GREAT SOULS have been lonely. Loneliness seems to be one price the saint must pay for his saintliness.

Enoch, Noah, Abraham and Moses all walked a path quite apart from their contemporaries even though many people surrounded them.

The prophets of pre-Christian times differed widely from each other, but one mark they bore in common was their enforced loneliness.

Jesus died alone in the darkness hidden from the sight of mortal man and no one saw Him when He arose triumphant and walked out of the tomb, even though many saw Him afterward and bore witness to what they saw.

The cheerful denial of loneliness proves only that the speaker has never walked with God without the support and encouragement afforded him by society. The sense of companionship that mistakenly attributes to the presence of Christ may and probably does arise from the presence of friendly people. Always remember: you cannot carry a cross in company. Though a vast crowd surrounds a man, his cross is his alone and his carrying of it marks him as a man apart. Society has turned against him; otherwise he would have no cross. No one is a friend to the man with a cross. “They all forsook Him and fled.”

The loneliness of the Christian results from his walk with God in an ungodly world, a walk that must often take him away from the fellowship of good Christians as well as from the unregenerate world. His God-given instincts cry out for companionship with others who can understand his longings, his aspirations, and his absorption in his love for Christ; and because within his circle of friends there are so few who share his inner experiences he is forced to walk alone.

The man who has passed on into the divine Presence in actual inner experience will not find many who understand him. A certain amount of social fellowship will of course be his as he mingles with religious persons in regular activities of the church, but true spiritual fellowship will be hard to find.

The truly spiritual man is indeed something of an oddity. He lives not for himself but to promote the interests of Another. He seeks to persuade people to give all to his Lord and asks no portion or share for himself. He delights not to be honored but to see his Saviour glorified in the eyes of men. His joy is to see Jesus promoted and himself neglected. He finds few who care to talk about that which is the supreme object of his interest, so he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shoptalk. For this he earns the reputation of being dull and over-serious, so he is avoided and the gulf between him and society widens. He searches for friends upon whose garments he can detect the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces, and finding few or none he, like Mary of old, keeps these things in his heart.

It is this very loneliness that throws him back upon God. His inability to find human companionship drives him to seek in God what he can find nowhere else. He learns in inner solitude what he could not have learned in the crowd-that Christ is All in All.

Two things remain to be said about the man that is in this state of loneliness. First, he is not a haughty man, he is not holier-than-thou, and he is not an austere saint. He is likely to feel that he is the least of all men and is sure to blame himself for his loneliness. He wants to share his feelings with others and to open his heart to some like-minded soul who will understand him, but the spiritual climate around him does not encourage it, so he remains silent and tells his grief to God alone.

The second thing is that the lonely saint is not the withdrawn man who hardens himself against human suffering and spends his days contemplating the heavens. The opposite is true. His loneliness makes him sympathetic to the approach of the brokenhearted and the fallen and the sin-bruised. Because he is detached from the world he is all the more able to help it.

The weakness of so many modern Christians is that they feel too much at home in the world. In their effort to achieve restful “adjustment” to an unregenerate society they have lost their pilgrim character and become an essential part of the very moral order against which they are sent to protest. The world recognizes them (modern Christians) and accepts them for what they are. This is the saddest thing that can be said about them. They are not lonely, but neither are they saints.

The Genuine Christian is a Lonely Soul

The Christian, the genuine Christian, realizes that he is indeed a lonely soul in the middle of a world which affords him no fellowship. I contend that if the Christian breaks down on occasion and lets himself go in tears, he ought not to feel that he is weak. It is a normal loneliness in the midst of a world that has disowned him. He has to be a lonely man!

Those to whom Peter wrote were strangers in many ways and first of all because they were Jews. They were Jews scattered among the Romans and they never could accept and bow to the Roman ways. They learned the Greek tongue in the world of their day, but they never could learn the Roman ways. They were Jews, a people apart, even as they are today.
Besides that, they had become Christian believers so they were no longer merely Jews. Their sense of alienation from the world around them had increased and doubled. They were not only Jews—unlike the Gentiles around them—but they were Christians, unlike the Jews as well as unlike the Gentiles!

This is the reason that it is easily possible for a Christian believer to be the loneliest person in the world under a set of certain circumstances. This sense of not belonging is a part of our Christian heritage. That sense of belonging in another world and not belonging to this one steals into the Christian bosom and marks him off as being different from the people around him. Many of our hymns have been born out of that very loneliness, that sense of another and higher citizenship!

Citizenship is in heaven

That is exactly the thing that keeps a Christian separated—knowing that his citizenship is not on earth at all but in heaven above, and that he looks for the Savior to come. Who is there that can look more earnestly for the coming of the Lord Jesus than the one who feels that he is a lonely person in the middle of a lonely world?
Peter loved the Lord Jesus Christ and his letters to suffering believers clearly reveal that great and sweeping changes had come into his life. He had become stable, he had become solid, he had become the steady and dependable servant of Christ. Now he was able to see that suffering for Christ is one of the privileges of Christian life and he prepared his brothers and sisters for the future with his counsel: “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering’85. but rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ” (1 Peter 4:12–13).

Fellow believers, it is the same kind of world in which we live in this 20th century. We do well to let the Apostle Peter speak to us!
No matter who you are, no matter what your education, you can read Peter’s First Epistle and understand it reasonably well and you can say to yourself, “The Holy Spirit is saying this to me!”
There isn’t anything dated in the Book of God. When I go to my Bible, I find dates but no dating. I mean that I find the sense and the feeling that everything here belongs to me. There is nothing here that is obviously for another age, another time, another people.

Many other volumes and many other books of history contain the passionate outpourings of the minds of men on local situations but we soon find ourselves bored with them. Unless we are actually doing research we do not care that much about something dated, something belonging only to another age.
But when the Holy Spirit wrote the epistles, through Peter and Paul and the rest, He wrote them and addressed them to certain people and then made them so universally applicable that every Christian who reads them today in any part of the world, in any language or dialect, forgets that they were written to someone else and says, ”This was addressed to me. The Holy Spirit had me in mind. This is not antiquated and dated. This is the living Truth for me—now! It is just as though God had just heard of my trouble and is speaking to me to help me and encourage me in the time of my distress!”

Brethren, this is why the Bible stays young always. This is why the Word of the Lord God is as fresh as every new sunrise, as sweet and graciously fresh as the dew on the grass the morning after the clear night—because it is God’s Word to man!
This is the wonder of divine inspiration and the wonder of the Book of God!

The Refiner's Fire 
Ten thousand enemies cannot stop a Christian, cannot even slow him down, if he meets them in a attitude of complete trust in God. They will become to him like the atmosphere that resists the airplane, but which because the plane's designer knew how to take advantage of that resistance, actually lifts the plane aloft and holds it there for a journey of 2,000 miles. What would have been an enemy to the plane becomes a helpful servant to aid it on its way. 

The main thing is this: we should never blame anyone or anything for our defeats. No matter how evil their intentions may be, they are altogether unable to harm us until we begin to blame them and use them as excuses for our own unbelief. Then they become potent to do us injury; nevertheless, we are to blame and not they. 

If this should seem like a bit of theorizing, remember that always the greatest Christians have come out of hard times and tough situations. Tribulations actually worked for their spiritual perfection in that they taught them to trust not in themselves but in the Lord who raised the dead. They learned that the enemy could not block their progress unless they surrendered to the urgings of the flesh and began to complain. And slowly, they learned to stop complaining and start praising. It is that simple--and it works!

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