Night Of Weeping~Affliction

Affliction is full of warnings. It has many voices and these of the most various kinds. It speaks counsel, it speaks rebuke, it speaks affection.

But it speaks warning too. Let us hear some of its words of warning.

1. Affliction says, "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him (I John 2:15).

There is no enforcement of this warning so solemn as that which affliction gives.

It exposes the world's hollowness and says, "love not."

It shows us what a withering gourd its beauty is and says, "love not."

It points out to us its hastening doom and says, "love not."

It declares the utter impossibility of loving both the world and the Father, "If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him."

Know you not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God?

There can be no companionship between God and the world. They cannot dwell together under the same roof or in the same heart.

2. Affliction says, "Take heed and beware of covetousness" .

Luke 12:15  And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.

Riches cannot help, neither earthly comfort avail us in the hour of grief.

They cannot dry up tears, nor reunite broken bonds.

They cannot heal the living, nor bring back the dead. They profit not in the day of darkness. Their vanity and emptiness cannot then be hidden. 

You fool, this night your soul shall be required of you, then whose shall those things be which you have provided.

It is then we find that we need a "treasure in the heaven that fails not." "I counsel you to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that you may be rich."

3. Affliction says, "Abstain from all appearance of evil" (I Thess 5:22). "Hate even the garments spotted by the flesh."

It is not the flesh merely that we are to hate, but even its garments.

Nor is it the garments dyed and defiled with the flesh, but even "spotted" with it.

It is not merely abstain from evil, but from all appearance of evil. 

Suffering teaches us to shrink from sin- even from the remotest and most indirect connection with it. 

It says, "Oh, do not that abominable thing which I hate!"

4. Affliction says, "Grudge not one against another". 

James 5:9  Grudge not one against another, brethren, lest ye be condemned: behold, the judge standeth before the door.

Let there be no halfhearted affection in the family of God.

Let there be no envy, no jealousy, no misunderstandings among the brethren.

Why should we be less than friends who are both fellow-sufferers and fellow-soldiers here?

Why should we, who are sharers in a common danger and a common exile, bear for each other anything but the sympathies of an intense affection?

Why should we not love one another with a pure heart fervently?

Yet oftentimes it needs affliction to teach us this, to remove our jealousies, and to draw us together as brethren in sympathy and love.

5. Affliction says, "Keep yourselves from idols". 

If there be one remaining idol, break it in pieces and spare it not.

Nothing is so fruitful a cause of suffering as idolatry.

Nothing so forcibly displays the vanity of our idols as suffering.

It is with this whip of cords that Christ scourges out of us the buyers and sellers- allowing no earthly traffic to proceed in His Father's house.

~Horatius Bonar~