Philip Bennett Power

WE must keep close to thoughts of God. We must meet Satan’s dark thoughts and suggestions about God with bright thoughts about Him. For if we do not, he will always be able to bring God up terribly against us. However we may divert our minds, the evil one will always keep saying, “But ah, what about God? All is not right with Him; and what is more, all never can be.”

But if we have gone to God and have well-assured thoughts of Him, then God can never come before us as a dark shadow, but as light. We shall know Him as a Father indeed; and if Satan comes to vex us with thoughts about Him, we shall say, “We know Who He is—our Father Who is in heaven.” I consider, then, God’s character as my great help to believing Him to be a God of comfort. And first of all, from the mere fact of His being generous, we may judge that He is very likely to be a God of comfort. Everywhere in Scripture, He is represented to us as a large-hearted God. He is One that hath no pleasure in the death of a sinner but would rather that he turned from his iniquity and lived. He says, “Open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it…Their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more” (Psa 81:10; Heb 8:12; 10:17). How much more generous God is than man we have remarkably set before us in what He says to the prophet Jeremiah: “Hast thou seen that which backsliding Israel hath done? she is gone up upon every high mountain and under every green tree, and there hath played the harlot. And I said after she had done all these things, Turn thou unto me” (Jer 3:6-7). Others would have said, “Begone,” but God said, “Return!” That was generosity indeed. In the first verse of this chapter, God shows that man’s way of treating a person under similar circumstances would be very different; but then He is God and not man, and His ways and thoughts are not like our ways and thoughts. His generosity is altogether beyond ours. Happening to open the concordance this moment, I came upon five texts, one after another, where God is spoken of as being [earnestly asked] with success. “After that God was intreated for the land” (2Sa 21:14). “The LORD was intreated for the land, and the plague was stayed” (2Sa 24:25). “They cried…and he was intreated of them” (1Ch 5:20). Manasseh “prayed…and he was intreated of him” (2Ch 33:13). “We…besought our God…and he was intreated of us” (Ezr 8:23). God is “longsuffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth” (Psa 86:15). And in the parable of the prodigal son, generous dealing is shown to the very full: the father receives the wretched sinner just as he is; and reproaching him not, restores him to favor, and clothes him in the best robe and kills for him the fatted calf. Now, if I need anything, it is a great encouragement to me in going to ask for it that I know I [will] deal with a generous person. I feel He will be predisposed to help me, to deal liberally with me, and to do me good. And let this thought comfort you: There is not one miserly word about God in all the Bible. You will be sure to get from Him simply because He is what He is, whatever He has promised to bestow. And if God be generous, then He will be self-communicative—that is, He will be always outputting good. God is not content with simply having His goodness and keeping it to Himself. He spared not His only Son, but freely gave Him up for us all, and “how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” (Rom 8:32). If we had to go to a person for anything, who is actually wanting to give away the very things we needed, what wonderful spirit it would put into us to go to him for what we required. Now, can God have all that would make us happy and comfortable and never bestow a taste on us? Certainly not! Therefore, if you lack, He will communicate Himself to you, and what He communicates must be Himself, must be like Himself, and therefore it must be good! It will be the giving of Himself to you as you are and with your particular need. He will pour His streams into all your hollow places, all your dry wells, on your parched lands and empty water courses; where you are driest and most in need is the place where He will most surely come. Then, we may take great comfort from considering that God stands to us in the relation of a Father; and forasmuch as He must from His very nature do everything in the best and most perfect manner, and to the fullest extent also, we may be sure He will be to us better than ever any earthly father has been to a son!…We have a Father in heaven, and He will not come short in the fulfilment of even one of the functions of a parent.

Comfort yourself, then, with the thought that the One with Whom you have to do is in every way One Whose very relationship to you secures your getting what you need. If your Father will not comfort you, who will? He is the most likely person to get comfort from— therefore, the proper person to go to for it. And because He is a Father, you may expect all tender comfort. It is “through the tender mercy of our God” that “the dayspring from on high hath visited us” (Luk 1:78). James tells us that “the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy” (Jam 5:11). The command to be kind one to another, to be tender-hearted, and to forgive one another, is all grounded on such things in God: “Even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” (Eph 4:32). Now, if instead of thus looking at God and at all that is to spring forth from Him because He is what He is, we look at ourselves and at all that we deserve, we shall have no comfort at all. Comfort will never travel to us by this latter path. We are to look at ourselves, expecting to find all emptiness and not wanting to make the matter one whit better than it is. We must not be surprised, startled, or downhearted at realizing this emptiness: it simply arises from our being what we are…But all the discoveries of God will be of fullness, and in putting the two together must lie our comfort. Bathe your thoughts, then, in God. Be rich in God—poor in yourselves, but rich in Him. You see what He is. All His nature, all His sayings, all His doings argue comfort. Not comfort for the unrepentant, the independent, and those who think they have no need; but for all who wish to be humble, in need, and to be supplied from a source outside themselves. Say then thus, in your communings with yourselves: Who knows so well what God is as Himself? All that He has told me leads toward comfort. I will not give God a bad character by expecting only gloom from Him. I will not take Satan’s opinion about God. What interest can he have but to malign Him? I will not take my own deceitful, suspicious, and ignorant heart’s speculation about Him; for from my poor fallen nature, they are sure to be warped. I will throw myself upon God, as He has revealed Himself. I will keep my eyes fixed on Him, and I will shut them to everything else. I will keep to what He has revealed. I can only be what I am—empty; and He can only be what He is—the Supplier of that emptiness. Out of His fulness, then, shall I receive; and because He is what He is, I shall have grace to help in every time of need.

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From The Sick Man’s Comfort Book, in the public domain.

Courtesy of Chapel Library. Used with permission.