John R. Macduff

Second Day.

RESIGNATION IN TRIAL.

“Not my will, but Thine be done!”—Luke, xxii. 42.

Where was there ever resignation like this! The life of Jesus was one long martyrdom. From Bethlehem’s manger to Calvary’s cross, there was scarce one break in the clouds; these gathered more darkly and ominously around Him till they burst over His devoted head as He uttered His expiring cry. Yet throughout this pilgrimage of sorrow no murmuring accent escaped His lips. The most suffering of all suffering lives was one of uncomplaining submission.

“Not my will, but Thy will,” was the motto of this wondrous Being! When He came into the world He thus announced His advent, “Lo, I come, I delight to do Thy will, O my God!” When He left it, we listen to the same prayer of blended agony and acquiescence, “O my Father, if it be possible let this cup pass from me! Nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt.”

Reader! is this mind also in you? Ah, what are your trials compared to His! What the ripples in your tide of woe, compared to the waves and billows which swept over him! If He, the spotless Lamb of God, “murmured not,” how can you murmur? His were the sufferings of a bosom never once darkened with the passing shadow of guilt or sin. Your severest sufferings are deserved, yea, infinitely less than deserved! Are you tempted to indulge in hard suspicions, as to God’s faithfulness and love, in appointing some peculiar trial? Ask yourself, Would Jesus have done this? Should I seek to pry into “the deep things of God,” when He, in the spirit of a weaned child, was satisfied with the solution, “Even so, Father, for so it seems good in Thy sight”?

“Even so, Father!” Afflicted one! “tossed with tempest, and not comforted,” take that word on which thy Lord pillowed His suffering head, and make it, as He did, the secret of thy resignation.

The sick child will take the bitterest draught from a father’s hand. “This cup which Thou, O God, givest me to drink, shall I not drink it?” Be it mine to lie passive in the arms of Thy chastening love, exulting in the assurance that all Thy appointments, though sovereign, are never arbitrary, but that there is a gracious “need be” in them all. “My Father!” my Covenant God! the God who spared not Jesus! It may well hush every repining word.

Drinking deep of his sweet spirit of submission, you will be able thus to meet, yea, even to welcome, your sorest cross, saying, “Yes, Lord, all is well, just because it is Thy blessed will. Take me, use me, chasten me, as seemeth good in Thy sight. My will is resolved into Thine. This trial is dark; I can not see the ‘why and the wherefore’ of it—but ‘not my will, but Thy will!’ The gourd is withered; I can not see the reason of so speedy a dissolution of the loved earthly shelter; sense and sight ask in vain why these leaves of earthly refreshment have been doomed so soon to droop in sadness and sorrow. But it is enough. ‘The Lord prepared the worm;’ ‘not my will, but Thy will!’”

Oh, how does the stricken soul honor God by thus being dumb in the midst of dark and perplexing dealings, recognizing in these, part of the needed discipline and training for a sorrowless, sinless, deathless world; regarding every trial as a link in the chain which draws it to heaven, where the whitest robes will be found to be those here baptized with suffering, and bathed in tears!

“ARM YOURSELVES LIKEWISE WITH THE SAME MIND.”