“So great a Saviour is provided for our deliverance that we must expect to have great castings down from which we need to be delivered. Why, believer, what are one half of the promises worth if we are not the subjects of doubts and fears?
Why hath Jehovah given us so many shalls and wills but because he knew that we should have so many accursed ifs and perhapses? He would never have given us such a well-filled storehouse of comfort if he had not foreseen that we should have a full measure of sorrow.
God never makes greater provision than will be needed; so, as there is an abundance of consolations, we may rest assured that there will be an abundance of tribulations also.
There will be much fear and casting down, to each of us, before we see the face of God in heaven. This disease of soul-dejection is common to all the saints, there are none of God’s people who altogether escape it.
Let me go a step further, and say that the disease mentioned in our text, although it is exceedingly painful, is not at all dangerous. When a man has the toothache, it is often very distressing, but it does not kill him. There have been some, who have foolishly and peevishly wished to die to escape from the pain, but nobody does die of it.
The bills of mortality are not swelled by its victims. And, in like manner, God’s children are much vexed with their doubts and fears, but they are never killed by them. They are a great trouble, but they are not like a mortal disease; they are sorely vexatious, but they are not destructive. Why, it is possible for you to have real faith, and yet to have the most grievous unbelief!
“Oh!” say you, “how can faith and unbelief live together?” They cannot live together in peace, but they may dwell together in the same heart.
Remember what our Lord Jesus said to Peter, “O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?” He did not say, “O thou of no faith,” but “of little faith.”
Thus there was some faith, though there was also much doubt. So, in the psalmist, there was some faith,—there was, indeed, a great deal of faith,—for he said, “O my God,” and it takes great faith truly to say “my God.”
Yet is there not also great unbelief here? Otherwise, would his soul have been cast down at all? But, meanwhile, had he not the yearnings of lively hope in God? If not, would he have dared to say, “Therefore will I remember thee from the land of Jordan, and of the Hermonites, from the hill Mizar”?
The fact is, we are the strangest mixture of contradictions that ever was known. We never shall be able to understand ourselves. God knows us altogether; but we shall never, at least in this life, completely comprehend ourselves.
You remember that verse about the holy women at the sepulchre of Christ; after they had heard the angel’s message, “they departed quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great joy.” What a strange mixture! On the one hand, we have the golden fruit of joy; and on the other hand, the black fruit of fear.
So it makes a kind of checker-work; there are blacks and whites, joys and sorrows, bliss and mourning, mingled together. The highest joy and the deepest sorrow may be found in the Christian; and the truest faith and yet the most grievous doubts may meet together in the child of God.
Of course, they only meet there to make his heart a battlefield; but there they may meet, and his faith may be real while his doubts are grievous.
I would remark, yet further, that not only is it possible for a man thus to be cast down, and yet to have true faith all the while, but he may actually be growing in grace while he is cast down; ay, and he may really be standing higher when he is cast down than he did when he stood upright.
Strange riddle! but we, who have passed through this experience, know that it is true. When we are flat on our faces, we are generally the nearest to heaven. When we sink the lowest in our own esteem, we rise the highest in fellowship with Christ, and in knowledge of him.
Someone said, “The way to heaven is not upward, but downward.” There is some truth in the saying; though it is upward in Christ, it is downward in self.
The inverse is equally true; the humbler I lie at my Saviour’s feet, the more his glories strike mine eyes. This very casting down into the dust sometimes enables the Christian to bear a blessing from God which he could not have carried if he had been standing upright.”
–Charles H. Spurgeon, “Sweet Stimulants for the Fainting Soul,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, vol. 48 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1902), 48: 459-461.
Spurgeon preached this sermon on Psalm 42:6 on December 16, 1860.
Leave a Reply