SORROW’S USE by Alexander Maclaren

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 12, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 46.

SORROW’S USE.

By Alexander Maclaren

THE sorrow that is meant to bring us nearer to God may be in vain. The same circumstances may produce opposite effects. I dare say there are people who will read these words who have been made hard and sullen and bitter and paralyzed for good work because they have some heavy burden to carry, or some wound or ache that life can never heal.

Ah, brother, we are often like shipwrecked crews, of whom some are driven by the danger to their knees, and some are driven to the spirit casks. Take care that you do not waste your sorrows; that you do not let the precious gifts of disappointment, pain, loss, loneliness, ill health, or similar afflictions that come in your daily life mar you instead of mending you. See that they send you nearer to God, and not that they drive you further from Him. See that they make you more anxious to have the durable riches and righteousness which no man can take from you, than to grasp at what may yet remain of fleeting earthly joys.

So let us try to school ourselves into the habitual and operative conviction that life is a discipline. Let us beware of getting no good from what is charged to the brim with good. May it never have to be said of any of us that we wasted the mercies which were judgments, too, and found no good in the things that our tortured hearts felt to be also evils, lest God should have to wail over any of us: “In vain have I smitten your children; for they have received no correction.”—Alexander Maclaren.