Octavius Winslow

Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the
Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort —2 Corinthians 1:3.

It is in the heart of God to comfort His people. We need to begin with this central truth. All real comfort for any sorrow flows from sympathy, and true sympathy is the reflection of the heart. All our divine comfort is the pure reflection of the heart of God. Oh, how imperfectly we deal with this truth! God’s heart is our heart: in it, we dwell as in a home; and within it, we are enclosed. Can we doubt His heart for a moment when within His bosom He found the Lamb for our sin offering? If then, He spared not His own Son, but gave Him up for us all (Rom 8:32), shall the shadow of a doubt be allowed to rest in our minds, dimming the hope of comfort from God that rests there in the depth of our deepest grief and woe? In the very heart that gave us Jesus is welled the divine spring of all the true consolation that flows at our side through this valley of tears.

Daughter of affliction, son of sorrow, God loves you from His heart. Its every pulse of life, its every throb of love, heart. its every spring of compassion, and its every drop of sympathy are yours. God’s heart speaks to your heart. Its deep love chimes with your deep grief. Do you doubt this? Listen to His command to His servant, the Prophet: “Comfort, comfort ye [how great the divine earnestness!] my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem [to the heart], and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned” (Isa 40:1-2.) Mark the tenderness of God’s comfort. It is like the heart of a mother. Whose heart is as full of love, tenderness, and sympathy as hers is? Listen to the touching words: “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you” (Isa 66:13). From what source of love so pure, what fountain of sensibility so deep, what spring of tenderness so sweet, do sympathy and comfort flow in seasons of adversity and sorrow as hers? A mother’s heart is the first home that love enters and the last it leaves. Born with our birth, it grows with our growth and clings to us through all life’s changes. It smiles when we smile [and] weeps when we weep. When age has dimmed the eye, the head has turned gray, and the snows of many winters bow down the womanly form, the mother’s love is as deep, fresh, and warm as when first it held its newborn treasure. Such is the comfort with which God comforts His people. “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you”…

We have introduced the idea that God’s comforts are parental. He comforts us as a father. All God’s corrections are fatherly; so is His comfort. The hand that slays, the hand that makes alive, the hand that wounds, and the hand that binds up are all the Father’s hand. “If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?” (Heb 12:7). “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him” (Psa 103:13). This image finds an echo in every parental heart. How soothing it is to trace the discipline of trial to a father’s hand! God rebukes, chides, and corrects us, even as a father does the children that he loves; and this softens, subdues, and heals our wounds. “If this cup is from my Father,” exclaims the afflicted child, “then will I drink it without a murmur. He has pierced my heart through and through. He may have afflicted me, but He is my Father still, and I will give Him reverence, bowing silently and submissively to the rod that only love has sent and that is already bursting into bud and maturing into precious fruit, making me a partaker of His holiness.”

Accept, then, the comfort with which your heavenly Father seeks to support and soothe you in your present calamity. Do not refuse to be comforted. To refuse divine comfort because God’s hand has smitten is to cherish a murmuring and rebellious spirit against God. Your persistent rejection of all the promises, assurances, and consolations of your heavenly Father says, “God has deeply, sorely wounded me; and I will not forgive and cannot forget.” Should you be angry?…In love, He shaded your home with death or transferred earth’s flower to bloom in heaven’s paradise. Will you now reject the consolation He would sincerely pour into your heart, exclaiming in the spirit of contumacy¹ and rebellion, “My soul refuses to be comforted”? God forbid. Yield your heart to that comfort as the fainting flower to the dew, and, in the depth of your gratitude, exclaim, “Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort, who comforteth us in all our tribulation” (2Co 1:3-4)…It is a delightful thought that in His own infinite heart, in the Covenant of Grace, in the Gospel of His love, and in our Lord Jesus Christ, He has made provision for all the sorrows of His people! No new trial springs up in your path, no new grief shades your spirit, no new calamity crushes you to the earth that the God of all comfort has not anticipated in the comfort He has provided for His Church. “Oh, how great is thy goodness which thou hast laid up for them that fear thee; which thou hast wrought for them that trust in thee before the sons of men” (Psa 31:19).

And what a comfort is the Lord Jesus Christ to His people! There could be no revelation of God as the God of all comfort except through Christ. He is the great Depository of our consolation. He is even called the “consolation of Israel” (Luk 2:25). Christ is our comfort and the Holy Spirit is our Comforter. Who can listen to these words of tenderness and love distilled from His lips into the sorrowing hearts of His disciples on the eve of their separation from Him and not feel that Christ is truly the consolation of His people: “Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions” (Joh 14:1-2).

Does your sorrow spring from a sense of sin? Jesus’ blood pardons. Is it from a conviction of condemnation? Jesus’ righteousness justifies. Is it from the power of indwelling sin? Jesus’ grace subdues. Is it from some pressing temporal need? All resources are in Jesus, and He has promised to supply all your need so that your bread and your water will be sure. Is sore, crushing bereavement your grief? Where will you find such tender sympathy as in His heart of Whom it is recorded, “Jesus wept” (Joh 11:35)? Who can comfort that sorrow but Christ? He can and He will comfort it. Does some foe menace you, or does some insurmountable difficulty lie in your way? All power is Christ’s, and He will defend you from your enemy and roll your stone of difficulty from before your feet. Does suffering, [illness], and waning health affect your spirits? He Who “bare our sicknesses” (Mat 8:17) is your consolation now and will not leave you to suffer alone. He can either heal your malady with a word or make all your bed in sickness, by the supports of His grace and the discoveries of His love, such that you are willing to lie there patiently so long as it pleases Him…

Learn from the subject to take all your troubles to God at once. God wants you to make use of Him as the God of comfort at once. Why has He revealed Himself as such if not that you should go to Him immediately and without hesitation in every tribulation? They are sent for this purpose that you might “acquaint yourself with Him.” Many poor souls have made their first acquaintance with God in some deep, sore trial. It was not until God tore up all their earthly comforts by the root that they were led to see that they had been living without God.

But it is in the later stages of our religious life that we know more of the character of God, learn more of His loving heart and of His revealed Word as we fly to Him in our tribulations for the comfort only He can give. Oh, the blessedness of nearness to Him into which our trouble has brought us!…And we should not overlook the various channels through which God comforts us. He comforts us by His Word, its doctrines, promises, and precepts. He comforts us through the channel of prayer, drawing us to His mercy seat and bringing us into communion with Himself through Christ. What comfort flows through this channel! The moment we arise and give ourselves to prayer, we are conscious of a mental quietness and an indescribable soothing of heart. Prayer has unloosed the burden, dissolved the cloud, and proved an inlet of peace, joy, and hope, passing understanding and full of glory…Nor must we forget that God often comforts His people by putting to death all comfort outside of Himself. He said to His Church, “Behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her” (Hos 2:14). Is He bringing you, beloved, into the wilderness of separation, trouble, or solitude? You can be sure that it is to comfort you, to speak to your heart, and to reveal Himself to you as the “God of all comfort who comforteth us in all our tribulation.”

Thus, we learn that if we would have true comfort and consolation, we must run in faith to heaven for it. It is a treasure found in no earthly climate. It is a jewel of heaven, a flower of paradise, found in no mine or growing in no garden below. We can carve our own crosses, but we cannot make our own comfort. Seeking it from creatures, we only seek the living among the dead…

Has Jesus given you an excess of comfort? Go and pour its overflow in some stricken heart. Remember one purpose of God’s comforts: “That we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God” (2Co 1:4). What a high, holy, divine privilege—to go to some house of mourning, to some sick room, to some bed of suffering, to some believer in Jesus passing through adversity, or some child of light walking through darkness, and to strengthen and comfort them in God. With this as our mission, let us then be imitators of God, the “God of all comfort.”

Let me remind you what a fountain of comfort you have in the truth that this God of all comfort is your God. While you possess the streams, the streams lead you to their source, and all that is in God is yours. I will suppose your case one of extreme woe. I will imagine you tried in your families, afflicted in your circumstances, friendless and homeless. Yet, against all this, I will weigh the truth that the God of all comfort is your God. Knowing how infinitely this blessing outweighs all your destitution and sorrow, I would call on you to make the solitude through which you are traveling echo and reverberate with your shouts of joy and your songs of praise.

What if your home is desolate and your provisions are scanty? What if your heart is lonely and your body is diseased? What are these if God is your God, Christ is your Savior, and heaven is your home? Amid all your trials, sorrows, and discomforts, you have more cause to be happy and to sing than the brightest angel before the throne does! They stand in their own righteousness; you stand in the righteousness of God. They worship at a humble distance from God; you are brought near by the blood of Christ, enter into the holiest, and call Him “Father”!

Is it no comfort to be assured that Christ is yours, and that you are Christ’s? With such a Savior and Friend, with such a Patron and Intercessor in heaven as Jesus, how comforted should you be in all your tribulations! Jesus knows you; others may not. The world assails, the saints judge; friends misinterpret and foes condemn, just because they do not know or cannot understand you. Jesus knows you! Let this suffice. What a comfort that you can admit Him to every corner of your soul and to every secret of your heart with the feeling that He sees all, knows all, and understands all…

Oh, to live independently of the saints and above the world upon Jesus! This is true comfort. The moment you are brought fully to realize, “Christ knows me altogether: my personal infirmities, my secret sorrows, my domestic trials, my professional anxieties, all the workings of my inner life,” you are comforted as no friend on earth or angel in heaven could comfort you. What a Christ is ours! How we should love Him, trust Him, serve Him, and, if need be, suffer and die for Him.

From Our God, reprinted by Soli Deo Gloria, a ministry of Reformation Heritage Books, www.heritagebooks.org.

Octavius Winslow (1808-1878): Nonconformist pastor; held pastorates in New York, USA, and in Leamington Spa, Bath, and Brighton, England; born in London, England.

Courtesy of Chapel Library