Evening and Morning
By Charles
Haddon Spurgeon
April 11
Morning
"I am poured out like water, and all my bones
are out of joint."—Psalm 22:14.
Did earth or
heaven ever behold a sadder spectacle of woe! In soul and body, our Lord felt
Himself to be weak as water poured upon the ground. The placing of the cross in
its socket had shaken Him with great violence, had strained all the ligaments,
pained every nerve, and more or less dislocated all His bones. Burdened with
His own weight, the august sufferer felt the strain increasing every moment of
those six long hours. His sense of faintness and general weakness were overpowering;
while to His own consciousness He became nothing but a mass of misery and
swooning sickness. When Daniel saw the great vision, he thus describes his
sensations, "There remained no strength in me, for my vigour
was turned into corruption, and I retained no strength:" how much more
faint must have been our greater Prophet when He saw the dread vision of the
wrath of God, and felt it in His own soul! To us, sensations such as our Lord
endured would have been insupportable, and kind unconsciousness would have come
to our rescue; but in His case, He was wounded, and felt the sword; He
drained the cup and tasted every drop.
"O King of
Grief! (a title strange, yet true
To Thee of all
kings only due)
O King of
Wounds! how shall I grieve for Thee,
Who in all
grief preventest me!"
As we kneel before our now
ascended Saviour's throne, let us remember well the
way by which He prepared it as a throne of grace for us; let us in spirit drink
of His cup, that we may be strengthened for our hour of heaviness whenever it
may come. In His natural body every member suffered, and so must it be in the
spiritual; but as out of all His griefs and woes His
body came forth uninjured to glory and power, even so shall His mystical body
come through the furnace with not so much as the smell of fire upon it.
Evening
"Look upon mine affliction and my pain; and
forgive all my sins."—Psalm 25:18.
It is well for us when
prayers about our sorrows are linked with pleas concerning our sins—when,
being under God's hand, we are not wholly taken up with our pain, but remember
our offences against God. It is well, also, to take both sorrow and sin to the
same place. It was to God that David carried his sorrow: it was to God that
David confessed his sin. Observe, then, we must take our sorrows to God.
Even your little sorrows you may roll upon God, for He counteth
the hairs of your head; and your great sorrows you may commit to Him, for He holdeth the ocean in the hollow of His hand. Go to Him,
whatever your present trouble may be, and you shall find Him able and willing
to relieve you. But we must take our sins to God too. We must carry them
to the cross, that the blood may fall upon them, to purge away their guilt, and
to destroy their defiling power.
The
special lesson of the text is this:—that we are to go to the Lord with
sorrows and with sins in the right spirit. Note that all David asks
concerning his sorrow is, "Look upon mine affliction and my
pain;" but the next petition is vastly more express, definite, decided,
plain—"Forgive all my sins" Many sufferers would have
put it, "Remove my affliction and my pain, and look at my sins." But
David does not say so; he cries, "Lord, as for my affliction and my pain,
I will not dictate to Thy wisdom. Lord, look at them, I will leave them to
Thee, I should be glad to have my pain removed, but do as Thou wilt; but as for
my sins, Lord, I know what I want with them; I must have them forgiven; I
cannot endure to lie under their curse for a moment." A Christian counts
sorrow lighter in the scale than sin; he can bear that his troubles should
continue, but he cannot support the burden of his transgressions.