Exaggerating Our Troubles
By Rev. C. H. Spurgeon
wonderful afflictions, and they are altogether quite equal to Job and Jeremiah rolled into one. Never did any persons undergo sufferings comparable to theirs. You cannot sit down by their side to comfort them, but they will tell you at once that you do not know anything about the great deeps whereon they are doing business; you are only knee-deep in the waters of trouble, while all God’s waves and billows have gone over them. I meet with some who are almost impossibly afflicted; their tribulations exceed that which is common to man, and that which is uncommon too; but this may be accounted for by the large organ of imagination with which they are endowed. By using this imagination to paint their spectacles, they are soon able to see all manner of dreadful visions, and they talk accordingly. That is the way of our unbelief; it will talk at random about trials and troubles. God does not love his children to talk in that fashion. The lips that speak truth are his delight; and if our unbelief will not speak truth—and it very seldom does, perhaps never does—then it is a great pity that it cannot hold its tongue. May I ask if any friend here has been exaggerating his trouble? Is there any sister here who is fretting out of all reason—making a great deal of what may be much, but is not everything? Then stand rebuked at this hour. Your cup is not all gall. Your bread is not all turned to ashes. All your comforts have not fled; many a mercy is left you. Come, come, friend, we are not quite cut off from before the Lord; let us leave off exaggeration, lest we be guilty of falsehood. The utterances of unbelief dishonor God. “I am cut off,” says David, “from before thine eyes.” He does, as it were, blame the Lord. Before thy very eyes I have suffered this; thou hast so forsaken me and given me over to the enemy, that I am cut off from before thine eyes. Why dost thou not deliver me? He spoke in his haste, as if God, at the very least, had been forgetful, even if he had not been untender and unfaithful. “I am cut off from before thine eyes.” It would greatly dishonor God if he did suffer one that could say, “In thee, O Lord, have I put my trust,” to be cut off from before his eyes. It would be contrary to his promise; for he has said that he will not suffer the righteous to perish. “The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and his ears are open to their cry;” there never was a godly man cut off from God yet, and there never shall be till time shall be no more. All the attributes of God forbid the destruction of a soul that is resting on the Almighty arm; and yet the unbelieving heart declares that such a destruction has taken place in its own case. Oh, wondrous unbelief, to think the Lord to be so unrighteous as to forget our work of faith and labor of love, to forget his children, to cast away his own, his covenanted ones, with whom he has entered into solemn league by oath, saying, “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.” He puts his promise very strongly in that passage, using many negatives in the original tongue. “I will not, not, not—never, never leave. I will not, not forsake thee;” many times over negating the idea that he could possibly forsake one of his own.—Rev. C. H. Spurgeon.