Anne Dutton's
Letters on Spiritual Subjects
My Dear Sister in Christ,
Your Beloved is yours and you are His, and what can you want or desire more?
Your one Lord Jesus is worth infinitely more than
millions of worlds, were there so many! Oh, what little,
uncertain, dying things, are all creature-enjoyments! Not a drop of
refreshment can we find in them, unless the Creator fills them, and
communicates of His own fullness through those pipes of conveyance; and yet,
how prone are we to seek after creatures as if our happiness were in them!
Ah, foolish we, to "forsake the fountain of living waters, and hew out to
ourselves cisterns—broken cisterns—that can hold no water!" Were every pipe
broken and every cistern dry, the Lord—the full fountain, the overflowing
ocean of our life and bliss—would never fail. There is a river of love,
life, and glory in God, the streams whereof, through Christ, by the Holy
Spirit, the Comforter, shall make glad the hearts of the citizens of Zion.
My dear sister, God, our kind Father, takes away the
creatures from us that we may learn to live upon Himself as our present
and eternal All; and not a soul that has Him for a well, while passing
through the valley of Baca, of tears, shall ever lack supply of life and
joy. A believer can never lack anything, languish and die in his spirit for
lack of any good thing, unless he goes out of the bosom of Christ, where he
has all things—to hunt for supplies among the creatures where there is
nothing. Blessed is that soul that seeks God in the creatures it desires,
that lives upon God in the creatures it enjoys, and that makes life a
peaceful, joyous, glorious life out of God—or rather, that lives peacefully,
joyfully, gloriously in Him when the creatures fail—for surpassingly
excellent, sweet and soul-satisfying is God in all—is God in Himself.
O for more faith to live upon Him, and to Him, in all
things that He gives us, and in what He withholds or takes from us; for our
God will supply all our needs, according to His riches in glory, by Christ
Jesus.
Don't you see, then, my dear sister, how well you are
provided for? Oh, live joyfully, as a child of God—and heir of God—for no
good thing will He allow you to lack—and soon He will bring you to His
great, His glorious, His eternal Self! Your God, your all-supplying God,
will be with you in every strait, to the last moment of your stay on earth,
and then He will bring you home, to be forever with Him in heaven, where, in
His immediate presence, and seated at His right hand, He will bless you with
fullness of joy, and make you drink of the river of His pleasures for
evermore!