YOU cannot say, that the Lord your God is always equally near to you. There is sometimes so much doing in the daily life, in the house, in trade and calling, that amidst all this activity at most a single hasty thought of God can pass through your soul, and little more than what Luther called an “ejaculatory prayer” can ascend from your soul to the Lord.
Opportunity and calling are so different with respect to this. A woman, with but one little child in a quiet family, has so much freer access than a mother, who, unable to engage help, has to get along alone with five or six young children. Also the farmer, who by himself alone labors in the field, has so much more chance in life to be busy with his God, than, for instance, a bus conductor, who from early morning till late night is in the midst of distraction.
And God the Lord knows this; for His is the disposition of our life, and in His judgment upon our persons all this counts.
But what shall never be excused in you, is that you treat with negligence those special times and opportunities, which your God gives you to seek Him. And among these opportunities are the times when you are sick.
Not when you lie delirious or are overpowered by cutting pain, but when sickness or accident temporarily renders you unable to work, and shut out from all activity, you are confined to your sick-room, or lie down upon your sick-bed.
Those are days of retirement for you, when the Lord calls you to His hidden tent. When everything about you is still, and therefore He, the Lord, can speak to you. That thoughts multiply themselves in you, and thought can center itself so undisturbedly upon the Eternal Being.
That is the findingtime, and renders Isaiah’s word valid for you: “Seek ye the Lord, while He may be found, call ye upon him while he is near” (Isaiah 55, 6).
NOT as though your sick-room exclusively afforded you that “findingtime.” God is rich and has a thousand other occasions, to let Himself be found of you. Sometimes amidst a howling storm, with a shipwreck that menaces your life, far stronger than amidst the stillness, which your sickness offers.
Even as on Sinai your God can be in the storm and in the fire. Only, He can also, as with Elijah, come in the still small voice.
And the object of our word with your own conscience is reached, when you acknowledge, that the sick-room also or the sick-bed brings you a call from God, and this call in you tells you, that your God can be found of you, and that therefore you must seek Him.
And there is so much, that helps us in this.
Nothing that diverts you, and so much that leads you upward.
You are then no longer the strong and healthy one, who were sufficient unto yourself, but you feel yourself broken in strength, reminded of your weakness, and placed in your dependence before the Lord.
Even when your sickness bears no serious character, so that there is no question about any danger for your life, yet all sickness takes away the false notion, as though you possessed strength in yourself.
And this favors the attitude of mind, that is necessary to turn yourself to your God. To Him in Whose hand your life is, Who alone is able to bless the medicine ministered unto you, and Who, when sickness abates, is the alone Mighty One, to restore your strength of life to you and the refreshing feeling of being well again.
A sick-bed, lived through without God, is therefore the gambling away of a grace offered unto you.
The letting go for lost of an opportunity, of meeting your God, that perhaps never returns.
Your God was then to be found, and see, you have not sought Him. He was near, and you have not called upon Him.
BUT, thank God, it is not always so.
There are also those, and they are not few, who may glory, that in the days of their illness the hiddenness of the Lord was conscious reality to them. That God was near and that they called upon Him; that He was to be found and that they sought Him, and were able to carry away from their sick-bed as ripe fruit of the soul a prayerful fellowship with the Eternal Being. Yea, that after recovery, they surely thanked Him also for having raised them up again, but more ardently and with greater heartfeltness praised Him and jubilated over what God had done to their soul.
So it was a sickness not unto death and also not merely unto recovery, but to a glorifying of God’s Name and to an enriching of their inner wealth of salvation.
Something that is said not only of the few, to whom the sick-bed in God’s hand was the means of bringing them to a first conversion and a first jubilation of faith; but also, and still much more of them, who had already drunk something of the Fountain of Life, but with whom the real, the consuming thirst after the water of life had never yet been quickened.
Yea, one can say even yet more. The sick-bed has often been a blessing not alone to the sick himself, but equally often to those who were in the same house with the sick, to them who cared for him, who watched by his bedside, whether it was anxiety that moved the heart, or the alarm in the house that compelled deeper seriousness of thought.
O, you do not know, what spiritual blessings go for lost in hospitals and asylums, except they are institutions, where the Mediator is confessed, and the tone of the house and the spirit of the whole social atmosphere leads up to that Only One, Who can protect us.
Seek Him, so sounds the prophetcall, while He is to be found; and that seeking of the living God is so deeply significant.
Certain interest in eternal things is not enough; also living life along with your church is not enough; and equally little, being busy with the Word.
All this is thinkable and possible, and occurs even frequently, apart from any reality of a genuine seeking after the living God.
One then knew much of God, and read much of the Holy One of Israel, and was zealous for His Name, and was troubled about one’s soul, and reached out the hand after the eternal inheritance, but deepfelt longing of soul did not as yet go out after the God of life.
It was not yet what David exclaimed: “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God!”
And yet to that seeking itself it must come, for where is otherwise that love, which must be the sweetness of the soul; and the apostle so definitely declares, that it is nothing else yet but sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal, while you may be ever so rich in all gifts of grace, but are still stranger to the mystery of blessed love.
“I love, for the Lord hears me,” is the cry of a soul, that thirsted after the living God, was no more able to go without Him, and at length obtained answer to her call, and in becoming aware of that hidden fellowship, feels so irresistibly the tingling of holiest love, the love of her God.
AND it is true, indeed, that after sickness the days of convalescence disappoint again.
When presently strength returns in the blood, and the pulsebeat is stronger again, and we go back to our busy, active life with all its diversions, all its temptations and all its distractions, the sobering is often very trying and sometimes it seems, that all the blessed experience of the sick-bed was nothing but self-deception, so far do we then at times wander away again from our God.
Yea, he who is not on his guard, can after his recovery sometimes almost lose everything that he gained. For on the sick-bed, in solitariness, amidst the stillness to seek God, is so much easier than to stay near by God, and to keep God close by, in the midst of exhausting activity.
But yet, when spiritual direction is not wanting, and friends and members of the family, and above all, office-bearers in the church understand their duty, the soul is duly warned against this danger.
And though it is then easy to understand, that for a time again clouds gather between our God and our soul, also that first barrenness and darkness pass away again.
God knows His own, of whom He has been found, and He seeks them out again and comes to sup with them.
And when that struggle too is ended, and in that struggle also victory is won, then come the still more happy and still more wealthy days, when our soul enjoys the fellowship with the Eternal Being, not only when the world has been shut out from us, but also in the midst of the roaring of its waves, when in the midst of the storm of life He commands stillness.
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