"Does your peace go with you only as far as the prison
door? Or the hospital bed? It is easy to be confident of a salvation as long as
your health is good; but as soon as death is in sight, does your conscience
point out the serious symptom that your peace is a mere pretense?
I know that affliction is a trying time. Even the most
sincere Christian may, for a season, be beaten away from his artillery and
Satan seem to capture his confidence. Some precious saints have been carried
down the stream of violent temptations so far that they question whether their
former peace was from the Holy Spirit the Comforter of from the evil spirit the
deceiver. Yet there is a vast difference between the two.
They differ in their causes. The darkness which sometimes
comes upon the sincere Christian's spirit in deep distress comes from the
withdrawing of God's countenance of light. But the horror of the deceived man's
torment proceeds directly from a guilty conscience, which prosperity and
preoccupation have lulled to sleep. As God's hand upon this man awakens his
numb conscience, it reveals the falseness of his profession of faith. It is
true that the saint's conscience may justly accuse him of carelessness or
compromise through strong temptation, but it cannot accuse him of a
hypocritical motive behind his whole spiritual walk.
They differ in
the things,, which accompany them. Lively workings of grace are visible even as
the Christian sorrows. The less joy he has from awareness of God's love, the
more earnestly he will grieve for the sin, which clouded that joy. The farther
Christ is gone out of his sight, the more he clings to his love for the Savior
and cries after Him with the prayer of Heman: "Unto thee have I cried, O
Lord"; his heartfelt supplication rises to God early in the morning hours Psalm
88:13.
Quoted material from, ”The Christian in Complete
Armour Daily Readings in Spiritual Warfare” by Gurnall and James S Bell.
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