| Things to Live For |
Chapter 17 |
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The gospel is for all experiences. The religion of Christ is for our times of gladness as well as for our days of trouble. It is not merely a lamp to shine in our dark nights. We never need Christ more than when the world is shining upon us. Yet Christianity is peculiarly a religion for sorrow. This is one reason the Bible is so precious to men and women everywhere. It is full of sympathy. On every page it has words of comfort. In every chapter we feel the heart beat of divine love. The preacher who has no comfort in his sermons will soon find his congregation melting away. Longfellow once said that a sermon was no sermon to him if he could not hear the heart beat in it. Poor, aching hearts will not long come to a ministry in which they do not find warm sympathy, in which they do not feel continually the heart beat of Christ.
Many people must think at first reading that Christ’s beatitude for mourners is a strange one: “Blessed are they that mourn.” Blessed means something very good, very beautiful. To be blessed is to be happy, prosperous, favored. But if we are asked to name the people who are happiest and most favored of all we know, we would not likely name those who are passing through affliction. How can the strange paradox of Christ’s beatitude be explained?
“Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.” There must be something very precious, very rich, in God’s comfort, that makes it worth while even to have sorrow and loss to get it. What is comfort? Some of us think we are comforting people when we sit down beside them in their trouble, and sympathize with the, as we call it, going down into the depths with them, but doing nothing to lift them up. When will good people learn that their errand to their friends in sorrow is to help them, to put cheer into their hearts? To comfort, in the Bible sense, is to strengthen. We comfort others truly when we make them stronger to endure, when we enable them to pass through their sorrow victoriously. That is the way Christ comforts. He does not merely sit down beside troubled ones and enter into their experiences. He does sympathize with them, but it is that he may make them strong to endure.
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