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My soul, wait silently for God alone, for my expectation is from Him. He only is my rock and my salvation; He is my defense; I shall not be moved. In God is my salvation and my glory; the rock of my strength, and my refuge, is in God.
PSALM 62:5–7
The last and greatest lesson that the soul has to learn is the fact that God, and God alone, is enough for all its needs. This is the lesson that all His dealings with us are meant to teach.
If God is indeed the “God of all comfort”; if He is our Shepherd; if He is really and truly our Father; if, in short, all the many aspects we have been studying of His character and His ways are actually true, then we must come to the positive conviction that He is, in Himself alone, enough for all our possible needs, and that we may safely rest in Him absolutely and forever.
Most Christians have, I suppose, sung more often than they could count these words in one of our most familiar hymns: “Thou, O Christ, art all I want, more than all in Thee I find.” But I doubt whether all of us could honestly say that the words have expressed any reality in our own experience. Christ has not been all we want. We have wanted a great many things besides Him. We have wanted fervent feelings about Him, or realizations of His presence with us, or an interior revelation of His love; or else we have demanded satisfactory schemes of doctrine, or successful Christian work, or something of one sort or another that will constitute a personal claim upon Him. Just Christ Himself, Christ alone, without the addition of any of our experiences concerning Him, has not been enough for us, and we do not even see how it is possible that He could be enough.
The psalmist said: “My soul, wait silently for God alone, for my expectation is from Him” (Psalm 62:5). But now the Christian says, “My soul, wait on my sound doctrines, for my expectation is from them”; or, “My soul, wait on my good feelings, or on my righteous works, or on my fervent prayers, or on my earnest striving, for my expectation is from these.” To wait on God only seems one of the unsafest things they can do, and to have their expectation from Him alone is like building on the sand. They reach out on every side for something to depend on, and not until everything else fails will they put their trust in God alone.
No soul can be really at rest until it has given up all dependence on everything else and has been forced to depend on the Lord alone. As long as our expectation is from other things, nothing but disappointment awaits us. Feelings may change; doctrines and dogmas may be upset; Christian work may come to nothing; prayers may seem to lose their fervency; promises may seem to fail; everything that we have believed in or depended upon may seem to be swept away, and only God is left.
We say sometimes, “If I could only find a promise to fit my case, I could then be at rest.” But promises may be misunderstood or misapplied, and, at the moment when we are leaning all our weight on them, they may seem utterly to fail us. But the Promiser, who is behind His promises, can never fail nor change. The little child does not need to have any promises from its mother to make it content; it has its mother herself, and she is enough. Its mother is better than a thousand promises. And should every promise be wiped out of the Bible, we would still have God left, and God would be enough.
I do not mean by this that we are not to have feelings or experiences or revelations or good works or sound doctrines. We may have all of these, but they must be the result of salvation and can never be depended upon as any indication of our spiritual condition. We are to hold ourselves absolutely independent of them all, resting in only the grand, magnificent fact that God is and that He is our Savior. We are to find God sufficient for all our spiritual needs, whether we feel ourselves to be in a desert or in a fertile valley. We are to say with the prophet: “Though the fig tree may not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines; though the labor of the olive may fail, and the fields yield no food; though the flock may be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stalls—yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation” (Habakkuk 3:17–18).
The soul can never find rest short of this. All God’s dealings with us, therefore, are shaped to this end, and He is often obliged to deprive us of all joy in everything else in order that He may force us to find our joy only in Himself.
We have so accustomed ourselves to consider all the accompaniments of the spiritual life as being the spiritual life itself that it is hard to detach ourselves from them. We cannot think that the Lord can be anything to us unless we find in ourselves something to assure us of His love and His care. And when we talk about finding our all in Him, we generally mean that we find it in our feelings or our views about Him. If, for instance, we feel a glow of love toward Him, then we can say heartily that He is enough; but when this glow fails, then we no longer feel that we have found our all in Him. The truth is that what satisfies us is not the Lord, but our own feelings about the Lord. But we are not conscious of this; and consequently when our feelings fail we think it is the Lord who has failed.
Of course, all this is very foolish, but it is such a common experience that very few can see how foolish it is. Perhaps an illustration may help us to clearer vision. Let us think of a man accused of a crime, standing before a judge. Which would be the thing of moment for that man: his own feelings toward the judge or the judge’s feelings toward him? Would he spend his time watching his own emotions and trying to see whether he felt that the judge was favorable to him or would he watch the judge and try to discover from his looks or his words whether or not to expect a favorable judgment? Of course we will say at once that the man’s own feelings are not of the slightest account in the matter, and that only the opinions and feelings of the judge are worth a moment’s thought. Upon the judge only would everything depend.
In the same way, if we will only bring our common sense to bear upon the subject, we cannot help seeing that the only vital thing in our relationship with the Lord is what His feelings are toward us.
This, then, is what I mean by God being enough. God is our answer to every question and every cry of need. If there is any lack in the One who has undertaken to save us, nothing supplementary we can do will avail to make it up; and if there is no lack in Him, then He Himself is enough.
The all-sufficiency of God ought to be as complete to the child of God as the all-sufficiency of a good mother is to the child of that mother. My own experience as a child taught me this. My mother was the remedy for all my ills and, I fully believed, for the ills of the whole world. And when anyone expressed doubts as to her capacity to remedy everything, I remembered with what fine scorn I used to annihilate them by saying, “Ah! But you don’t know my mother.”
And now, when any tempest-tossed soul fails to see that God is enough, I feel like saying, not with scorn, but with infinite pity, “Ah, dear friend, you do not know God! If you knew Him, you could not help seeing that He is the remedy for every need of your soul, and that He is an all-sufficient remedy. God is enough, even though no promise may seem to fit your case, nor any inward assurance give you confidence. The Promiser is more than His promises, and His existence is a surer ground of confidence than the most fervent inward feelings.”
But someone may say, “All this is no doubt true, and I could easily believe it if I could only be sure it applied to me. But I am so good-for-nothing and so full of sin that I do not feel as if I had any claim to such riches of grace.”
All the more, if you are good-for-nothing and full of sin, have you a claim on the all-sufficiency of God. Your very good-for-nothingness and sinfulness are your loudest claims. The Bible declares that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; not to save the righteous, not to save the fervent, not to save the earnest workers, but simply and only to save sinners.
If we want to see God, our interior questioning must be, not about ourselves, but about Him. How does God feel toward me? Is His love for me warm enough? Has He enough zeal? Does He feel my need deeply enough? Is He sufficiently in earnest? Although these questions may seem irreverent to some, they simply embody the doubts and fears of many doubting hearts, and they only need to be asked to prove the fact that these doubts and fears are in themselves the real irreverence. We all know what would be the triumphant answers to such questions. No doubts could withstand their testimony; and the soul that asks and answers them honestly will know the profound and absolute conviction that God is enough.
“All things are yours,” declares the apostle Paul, “whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas, or the world or life or death, or things present or things to come—all are yours. And you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s” (1 Corinthians 3:21–23). It would be impossible for any statement to be more all-embracing. All things are yours because you belong to Christ. All things we need are part of our inheritance in Him, and they only await our claiming. Let our needs and difficulties be as great as they may, there is in these “all things” a supply exceedingly abundantly above all we can ask or think.
Because He is, all must go right for us. While God lives, His children must be cared for. What else could He do, being what He is? He knows everything, He cares about everything, He can manage everything, and He loves us. What more could we ask?
Paul could say triumphantly in the midst of many trials: “For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39).
Nothing can separate you from God’s love, absolutely nothing. Can we not understand that God, who is love, who is, if I may say so, made out of love, simply cannot help blessing us. We do not need to beg Him to bless us, He simply cannot help it.
Therefore God is enough! God is enough for time, God is enough for eternity. God is enough!
FOOD FOR THOUGHT.
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PASTOR ANDRA HIGGINBOTHAM