I suppose there is no day in any of our lives when we do not read something that should help us to shape them in the way God would have them. There are our daily Bible readings, verses on block calendars, little poems and wise sayings that knock on our minds from outside and usually are welcomed in. What good do they do us?
Some good, no doubt, for they must to some extent colour our thoughts, and our thoughts make us what we are. But I think that we do not usually take from them more than a fraction of what they have to give us. Our whole life, and the reason for it, is nothing but an opportunity for turning these good things into living experience.
Why did Adam and all his descendants have to work up through the training-ground of mortal life to immortality? Simply because it was no use merely telling them, as it is no use merely telling us, “In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”. We can learn it only by experience—as Eve did.
It is no use merely telling us, “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee”. We have to learn it by experience—as Joshua did. This is the hardest, as well as the most important thing we have to learn—to translate words into reality, to live the things that we say we believe.
We read, “When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee”, and we believe it with our minds, but we never know what it really means until we go through those waters, praying God all the while to be with us, and use the experience we are passing through to make us more able to help others, to teach us through it the lessons He would have us learn.
We Have To Do Something
We are not to passively go through the experience. We are to reach out to God and say, “Here we are suffering : make this suffering a blessing through us”, and then be ready to take whatever opportunity He gives us, and use it.
Are we suffering anger? We are not to expect God to join us in being angry with another, or sorry for ourselves, but He will help us to try to see the other person’s point of view and to give them pleasure instead of pain ; to grieve over the hurt to them, if they are angry.
Are we suffering bereavement and looking for pity? Of course God does pity us, “as a father pitieth his children”. Jesus has wept over Lazarus, and knows how blinding are our tears. But they may well grieve even more at our blindness in not looking up and saying, “Thank God that even though the sunshine has gone from my life He has given me stars ; and He is teaching me sympathy, so that I may be ready to help when another is bereaved.”
It is the same with happiness. God does not mean us to take our happiness passively, but to find in every new delight a new revelation of His love, and so exclaim, “O Lord, how manifold are thy works 1 In wisdom hast Thou made them all !”
We are all familiar with the words, “Cast thy burden on the Lord and He shall sustain thee”. We often quote them as something beautiful. But when we are busy and tired and our work is a burden, do we say to God, “Take it all. I give it all into Thy hands. I will not fret any more. Only enable me to do, one by one, the things you would have me do ?” and then act on that—go on with our work without worrying—have faith that though we may be tired He will not require of us more than we can safely do—and at the same time make sure we are not doing unnecessary things. If we do that we are translating another bit of the Bible into experience, and next time we read, “He shall sustain thee”, we may feel with all our hearts how true the Bible is.
Of course we falter at times. We are like Peter who looked at the waves and began to sink, but when it happens to us many times and we realise we “sink” only because of lack of faith we should like Peter cry,
Experience
“Lord, save me”. Then we begin to learn that we need never be overwhelmed if only our faith is without fear.
Of course the sea was rough and the waves dangerous I It would have been no test of Peter’s faith if he had had solid rock to walk on. But he was just as safe as when he was on the rock, so long as he looked to Jesus.
Perhaps we never in this mortal life reach a stage where we never panic at the sight of all that must be done, and have to look up and cry, ‘Lord, save me 1″ Yet, so long as our ideal is to go on without faltering at all, we have still learned the most important part of the lesson. We know that our fear is needless, and that, “Cast thy burden on the Lord and He shall sustain thee”, is a promise that never fails.
I often remember a verse quoted by a favourite writer,
“A step or two on winged feet, And then I turned to share The burden thou hads’t taken up, Of ever-pressing care ; So what I would not leave with Thee Of course I had to bear.”
This matter of turning words into living experience goes to the very heart of our lives.
James knew it when he wrote in James 2: 15,16. Peter knew it, and said, “Tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope, and hope maketh not ashamed”. Yes—experience worketh hope—hope that, if we trust Him, He will never fail us. (We must trust though—for that is the translating of words into experience). And hope “maketh not ashamed” ; in other words, we shall not hope in vain.
When I was thinking about these things some words came into my mind, almost as if I heard them spoken to me. They are words familiar to us all, for King George VI quoted them in a Christmas broadcast, and they have since been quoted on calendars, Christmas cards, book marks :
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God, and it shall be better to you than light, and safer than a known way”,
and I thought, “That is an example of beautiful words which many of us never translate into real experience. What do they mean?”
And I realised that they mean exactly what I have been saying : “Don’t worry. Go ahead without fretting, because the future is hidden, for if you commit every day to God as it comes, ready to accept whatever He permits because He never fails to keep that which is committed unto Him, you are perfectly safe whatever happens. You may not be physically safe—that depends on what God sees is best—but in that case physical safety does not matter. His bearing of your burden (or “taking of your hand”) is not only better than light : it is better than life! You are physically safe in His care so long as He sees that physical safety is necessary, and beyond that point it does not matter. That is what Paul meant when he said, -For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain”.
We do not always fully realise these things, but, when we have experienced something once, we can use the experience to help us next time.
To the end of our lives there may be times when we sympathise with the man who said, “The trouble is, I am in a hurry—and God isn’t”, but so long as we know where our trouble lies, and that our haste is of far less importance than God’s power, we can pull ourselves out of our sloughs of despond—or at least reach our hands up in perfect certainty that He will pull us out—at the right time.
Reflections on the Potter and the Clay