Meditation on the Text of the Week

Losses

As the deer pants for the waterbrooks,
So my soul pants for Thee, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God;
When shall I come and appear before God?
Psalm 42:1-2

There is no other loss, in all the range of possible losses that is so great as the breaking of our communion with God. There are other losses--losses of friends by alienation or misunderstanding; losses of property, of comforts, of health, of reputation; the shattering of brilliant hopes, but there is not one of these that is such a calamity as the loss of God's fellowship.

Men sigh over those misfortunes which touch only their earthly circumstances, but forget that the worst of all misfortunes is the decay of spirituality in their hearts. We do not know what God is to us until we lose the sense of his presence and the consciousness of His love.

This is true, indeed, of all blessings. We do not know their value to us until they are imperilled or lost. We do not prize health till it is shattered and we begin to realise that we can never have it restored again. . . . We do not appreciate the comforts and blessings of Providence till we have been deprived of them and are driven out of warm homes into the cold paths of a dreary world. . . . We do not know how much are friends are to us till they lie before us silent and cold.

In like manner, we do not know the blessedness of fellowship with God until His face is darkened or he seems to have withdrawn Himself. David never knew what God and God's house were to his soul until he was driven away from his home and could no more enter the sanctuary. All the other bitter griefs and sorrows of the hour were swallowed up in this greatest of all his griefs--separation from the Divine Presence.

Who is there among us all that values highly enough the tender summer of God's love that broods over us with infinite warmth evermore? Our Church privileges, our open Bibles, our religious liberty, our Sabbath teachings and communings, our hours of prayer--do we prize these blessings as we would if we were suddenly torn from them?

The loss of temporal things seems ofttimes to be necessary to empty our hearts that they may receive the things that are unseen and eternal. Into many a life God is never permitted to enter until sorest earthly losses have made room for Him.

Dr J.R. Miller, Weekday Religion, (1897)