A love-stroke
Dear Madam,
You thought right that I should pity you, when I knew the cause of the
lameness of your hands. For who that loves can forbear the greatest pity to
a worthy friend who was used most cruelly? Cruel treatment was this from the
creature—but a love-stroke of God your
Father! You have hereby seen the wonders of His infinite goodness which He
has wrought for you in that support under and deliverance from those many
and great distresses which at present are to your wonder, joy and praise,
and shall be to the advance of your felicity in eternal glory and to God's
honor, unto endless ages!
I think my afflictions are nothing if compared with those
which you have passed through. Afflicted in body, from head to foot
severely—terrified in soul so exceedingly—brought to the very brink of death
and the grave in the former, and, as it were, into the belly of hell in the
latter; and yet, everlasting arms underneath you in all this, the
consolations of God given to your heart, and great deliverance to your body
from its sore distress as an answer to social prayer—how great, how wondrous
was the grace! And when a little raised up yourself, to be so soon plunged
into distress by the awful affliction of your dear sister, and ever since to
be exercised with such various scenes of distresses through which you have
been called to pass, and yet maintained in life—in the life of nature and in
the life of grace, and favored with the use of your natural and spiritual
senses, how bright towards you have been the displays of the Lord's
excellent loving-kindness! You may well say, "in deaths often; troubled on
every side."
But when you shall have come up at last out of all great
tribulations—having washed your robes and made them white in the blood of
the Lamb, and are presented faultless before the throne of God—how sweet,
how ineffably sweet, will be your eternal glory-rest! Then you will reflect
with the highest pleasure upon all your past sorrows, and in unknown
transports of joy and praise forever adore that wise grace which conducted
you safely and advantageously through all the terrors and dangers of the
wilderness. Most surely, your joy and glory, and God's joy and glory in
yours, is to be exceeding great, or you would not have met with such great
miseries and griefs in the present state.
I am glad that you long, dear Madam, to devote yourself
and your all unto God, and to be of special service to His praise, who has
shown towards you such wonders of grace. And let the Lord's past appearances
for you, in your great and sore troubles, encourage you to trust in Him for
delivering grace, even to the last of your distresses. For He who said unto
you, "Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God"—is
still the same. And so He will be through all your earthly-necessities, and
to an endless eternity. It is His covenant with you to "work marvels."
And think, O woman of sorrows, think, and think
again—Christ, the tree of life, is cast into all your deaths, and will not
He well sweeten these bitter waters. Oh, what is Christ, your Christ? "In
Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily!" He is God in your
nature, a Father, a Brother, a Husband, a Friend, that ever lives, and ever
loves! For love, in all relations, His is immense and endless; for life, He
is the Lord of it—an immensity, an eternity of life dwells in Him for you,
to perpetuate and perfect your life of grace, and to ripen it into the life
of glory! Yes, to maintain your unknown felicity to a boundless eternity.
And having Him, who is love, who is life, your love and life with you in all
your deaths—will not He make every bitter sweet, and swallow up all your
deaths in the infinity of His love and life? Yes, verily, He will for you,
both in soul and body, swallow up death in victory, instate and maintain you
in a glorious immortality to a blessed eternity. And so wondrously will He
work for you, that He will bring life, and an increase of it, out of every
death that passes over you.
Is it not better, infinitely better to have Christ with
you as your own Lord Jesus, amid ten thousand deaths, for this small moment
of time, who will swallow them all up in perfect victory and eternal glory
in the world to come—than to be surrounded with all the outward felicity of
the present state, with all the splendors of a worldling's honors and
pleasures—those ‘glow-worm glories’ which will suddenly be no more—and sent
away from Christ at last, with a "Depart from Me, you cursed, into
everlasting fire?" May you be enabled to rejoice then in your portion, your
soul-sustaining, your soul-satisfying, your life-giving portion, and walk
worthy of your portion, by a constant dependence on Him, and a joyful
expectance from Him, until you are fully blessed with the complete
possession of Him who fills all in all, and will fill you brimful of light
and life, of joy and glory, endless and unknown!
Oh, dear Madam, you are straitened in me, a little babe,
a little child, who cannot speak; but you are not straitened for immense and
eternal bliss in your Jesus. The tongues of angels and archangels, in all
their innumerable armies, can never, never tell a thousandth part of His
infinite fullness, beauties, and glories! What then can an earth-worm, the
least, think or speak of that infinitely glorious Lord? When all is said
that can be uttered by the greatest of men, it may be fitly said of their
most comprehensive speeches concerning Him, "There was the hiding of His
glory!" Yes, when the Lord Himself is set forth in the bright display of His
power, it is said, "And there was the hiding of His glory!" What, in the
display of it? Yes, with regard to the infinity of it in His own immense and
unsearchable essence!
But it is enough, Madam, to make you inconceivably
blessed, that in Him, this infinite Him, you have an entire and eternal
interest. God grant you the joy of this ineffable felicity. I mourn that I
can say no more of this vast and endless storehouse of blessings. Confusion
covers me that I have thus veiled Him, when I would gladly have given you a
glimpse of His glory. God grant you "the spirit of wisdom and revelation in
the knowledge of Him" to your unspeakable joy!