Christ Without Comforters

If you have a copy of the scriptures, please turn to Psalm 69. I know some of you will be the same as us, that Handel’s Messiah is already playing in the home. It’s that time of year where many of us, maybe not the only time of year, but certainly one, we tend to have it playing. And if you’re not acquainted with Handel’s Messiah, I don’t want to assume anything. We encourage you to be acquainted with it—one of those things that improves with more listening, more exposure.

I was listening afresh on Thursday evening, excuse me, on Thursday evening, to a select portion and was moved to tears again. The observation, which I’ll reflect on in my introduction here, is very powerful, the truth carried with the music. So many of you know that we have looked at the text of Handel’s Messiah each December over the last number of years, and I’m returning this morning to that same theme. So we are in the middle of it, in the heart, where we are brought to the scenes of the cross. I trust the Lord will bless us as we reflect on these portions.

Tonight I will return to Luke 24 to finish the Gospel of Luke, God willing. Sermon 164 will see us bring it to a close, and we look forward to that tonight as well. But let us read Psalm 69. I’m going to begin reading at verse 8. We’ll begin there, the 8th verse, and read through verse 21. Let us hear the Word of the Lord.

Psalm 69, verse 8: “I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother’s children. But the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up, and the reproaches of them that reproach thee are fallen upon me. When I wept and chastened my soul with fasting, that was to my reproach. I made sackcloth also my garment, and I became a proverb to them. They that sit in the gates speak against me, and I was the song of the drunkards. But as for me, my prayer is unto thee, O Lord, in an acceptable time. O God, in the multitude of thy mercy, hear me in the truth of thy salvation. Deliver me out of the mire. Let me not sink, let me be delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters. Let not the water flood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up, and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me. Hear me, O Lord, for thy lovingkindness is good. Turn unto me according to the multitude of thy tender mercies, and hide not thy face from thy servant. For I am in trouble; hear me speedily. Draw nigh unto my soul, and redeem it. Deliver me because of mine enemies. Thou hast known my reproach, and my shame, and my dishonor. Mine adversaries are all before thee. Reproach hath broken my heart, and I am full of heaviness. And I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none. They gave me also gall for my meat, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.”

Ending our public reading of God’s Word at verse 21, what you’ve heard again is the infallible and inerrant Word of the living God, which you are to receive and believe and be the very guide of your life. And the people of God said, amen.

Lord, help us. Please help us in thy Word. Open it up, O Spirit of the living God, open up the Word. Open it up that it might have a freshness, that it might be as dew upon the mown grass. Open it up that we may behold wondrous things out of thy law. Open it up that our hearts may be drawn not just to things of interest, but to the God-man Himself. Our hearts may be inclined toward Him more and more. Save the lost. Restore the backslidden. Comfort the people of God. Be thou the guide of our life. Make us to walk in Thy ways, a salt and light in this dark world. So come, please, I ask now for the fullness of divine power, the promised Holy Ghost, grant it now upon me and upon all, we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

In 1741, at the height of what is known as the Great Awakening, and the same month that Jonathan Edwards preached his now-famous sermon at Enfield, Connecticut, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a brilliant and wealthy man by the name of Charles Jennings sent to his friend George Frederick Handel the libretto or the text for what is now the most famous oratorio of all time, Messiah. It’s so strange how the Lord works and how He can be functioning in wonderful ways in one part of the world and in another part at the same time, sending His Spirit and power here and moving by His Spirit in various parts of the United Kingdom as well, even in ways that we may not think about, even through the arts, through music, through things of this nature.

Over the past number of years, as I said, each December we have turned to the texts of Handel’s Messiah. We’ve looked at those texts and sought to preach them so that we have a little more light as we may listen to Messiah. And I trust it’s been of encouragement to you so far. We ended last time with the scene of Psalm 22, when the words are brought to our attention in Messiah, “All they that see me, laugh me to scorn. They shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying, ‘He trusted in the Lord that He would deliver him; let Him deliver him, seeing He delighted in him.’” And if you listen to Messiah, you will hear how Handel masterfully uses the mix of male and female voices in the choir to communicate the scene. It begins with sober tones of derision, but moves gradually to the sound of polyphonic mockery. At certain points, it almost sounds like the choir is laughing as they utter the words of the text. And the dissonance between the beauty of the music and the cruelty of the words reflects the tragic irony that they are mocking God.

As I mentioned, I listened to this on Thursday night afresh and wept as I considered the scene with the music that Handel put to the text and feeling that sense of the scorn and mockery and laughing of the crowd as they looked upon the beaten and broken body of our Lord Jesus. And from there, our attention in Messiah is turned to the perspective of our Lord, not reflecting upon the remarks or consideration of the crowd, but our Lord. How does He feel in the face of this mockery? How did our Lord feel as He’s exposed to the crowd? Have a more stoic posture, feeling nothing? We return then to consider Psalm 69, where verse 20 becomes a language that follows on the heels of the crowd’s derision at our Lord Jesus. Psalm 69, verse 20: “Reproach hath broken my heart, and I am full of heaviness, and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none.”

Psalm 69 is explicit in its references to messianic detail. You see it from where we read the language of verse 8, our Lord Jesus becoming a stranger to His brethren, an alien to His mother’s children, and the zeal of the house of the Lord eating Him up, and so on. You can see even to the last verse we read, “They gave me also gall for my meat, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” These are details given to us in the gospel accounts, details in which we see our Lord experiencing the language of Psalm 69.

But it is verse 20 that is drawn to our attention in Messiah. Verse 20 that we are to ponder in the context of the mockery of the crowd around the cross, where we, as I’ve said already, are brought to see how our Lord is feeling, what He is dealing with in His own soul. At this point, Handel introduces a solo tenor voice, and I’m no musician, but the lack of memorable melody, and I never noticed this before, makes me think that Handel was deliberately trying to make this a forgettable part of his oratorio. And I would say that even some of you who have listened to it many times may be struggling to bring to your mind the sound that goes along, the music that goes along with Psalm 69, verse 20. And I think that’s intentional. It’s meant to drive home man’s utter lack of care for Christ, no memory of His sorrow, no thought or consideration to His experience. It’s driving home the point: man has forgotten Jesus Christ.

This might seem like a somber text for December, but even holiday seasons can bring about difficult times. The pain of family strife, the uncertainty of the future, the loss of loved ones, things of this nature can, at a time that appears so family-oriented, only exacerbate the sense of loss and loneliness. So maybe it’s not out of order at all that at the start of the season we are brought to a text that brings us to the experience of man feeling isolation and no one around to comfort. “Reproach hath broken my heart, and I am full of heaviness. I looked for some to take pity but there was none and for comforters but I found none.”

I’ve titled the message, “Christ Suffered Without Comforters.” I have three heads: We’ll see first His internal anguish, then His external abandonment, and finally, His eternal advocacy. Internal anguish, external abandonment, eternal advocacy.

His internal anguish, look at the text: “Reproach hath broken my heart.” The first thing of this internal anguish is Christ being heartbroken. “Reproach hath broken my heart.” Words paint a picture of a spirit crushed by relentless slander and hostility. And although it’s apparent in His passion and His suffering at the cross, the seeds of such a burden of reproach appear early in our Savior’s life. His entrance into this world was not with universal welcome, as you no doubt are aware. The sense of reproach occurs early, this idea of public mockery, verbal abuse that shames the recipient. And this reproach, as it’s described here, is not mere passive rejection but active disdain. It is opposition to Him. It includes insults that are intended to undermine the integrity and dignity and worth of the one who is on the receiving end. This mockery creates a sense of isolation.

“Reproach hath broken my heart, and I am full of heaviness, and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none, and for comforters, but I found none.” The social, the emotional alienation for our Lord Jesus was real. The word reproach captures the weight of the human rejection that results in this broken or crushed heart. It highlights the emotional agony and puts before us, lest we not see it, the reality of the vulnerability of Christ’s human frame. He is a man, and He is suffering as a man. The experience, of course, will play into the sympathy that our Lord then can show to His own people, His understanding of the trials of this life and what you may go through or I. Which is why we know the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart (Psalm 34). He knows to draw near.

In the season of being heartbroken, the one thing you need is the nearness of the Lord. And He knows that, as He sought for it Himself. So, being heartbroken is something we see in our Lord. Reproach, this disdain of the public, this mockery, the language of “He trusted in God,” and so on, breaks His heart. The idea that “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me” is not even true of our Lord Jesus. All the criticism, all the misrepresentation, all that He had done to help others—utterly ignored at the time of His greatest need.

He’s not only heartbroken, but He experiences heaviness. Heaviness. “Reproach hath broken my heart, and I am full of heaviness.” The Hebrew root for this word heaviness implies being bent or bowed down or even sickened. It suggests a state of extreme burden, bowed down by the weight of something, lacking the strength to stand—a sorrow that manifests outwardly in posture or behavior. It’s actually paralleled in Job’s experience. You may turn to Job 6 if you like, but in Job 6, Job there accounts his experience. And it gives you some sense of what he was enduring. Job 6, verse 2: “‘Oh, that my grief were thoroughly weighed and my calamity laid in the balances together; for now it would be heavier than the sand of the sea.’”

That’s what our Lord is enduring. He is full of heaviness. “Reproach hath broken His heart, and He is full of this heaviness, this weighing down of His soul.” It applies to all aspects of our frame: our physicality, how we hold ourselves emotionally, how we stand spiritually. Remember what the prophet said? “Surely He hath borne our griefs.” The description given here is not that He’s bearing our grief, standing in an upright way with an erect posture as if it were light to Him. I think sometimes that’s the way we imagine it because we understand Him to be God in flesh, we then make assumptions that He stood erect under this burden, shook it off like it was nothing, walking through, experiencing and enduring all of this. It’s almost as if it had no effect on Him at all.

But that’s not what we have before us here in this text. What we have before us prophetically gives us the experience of Christ—that He is full of heaviness. He feels it. He feels the weight. You can go through your own times of heaviness. And you think that you’re alone, but you’re not. The infant of Bethlehem came to bear the burden of the world, not just coming to the earth, but coming under the weight of earth’s greatest afflictions.

He is full of heaviness. Now, I don’t know where you are this morning. But I’m quite certain that if you have not yet experienced this fullness of heaviness, you will. It will make you feel like you can’t escape. It will make you feel trapped. It will make you feel like maybe there is only one way out, and that is to end your very existence.

Full of heaviness. Take comfort, Christian, that your Savior had His heart broken by man and experienced this fullness of heaviness because of the treatment of man. In many instances, it’s going to be the same for you. People are going to hurt. They are going to say or not say, do or not do things that bring you to the same experience of being heartbroken and full of heaviness.

What are you going to do? Where will you turn?

So we have His internal anguish, also His external abandonment. The passage, verse 20, reflects on the internal being heartbroken, being full of heaviness. That’s internal. But then it turns to the external, doesn’t it? I looked for some to take pity, but there was none. And for comforters, but I found none. Again, two things: the lack of human pity and the lack of human comfort.

The lack of human pity. “I looked for some to take pity.” The word “pity” contains a sense of movement, a sense of going to and fro in the Hebrew. It’s translated as “vagabond” in Genesis 4, with application, of course, to Cain. And then you may be wondering, well, how does a word that’s translated “pity” also be translated as “vagabond?” How can the two ideas coexist in the same word? I had that thought. I don’t know if you do, but I had that thought. How can this coexist? But it seems as if the word is used, and again, context tells a story in which in some instances, of course, it is attributed to one who is in this to-and-fro state of flux, no resting place, nowhere to find repose, as it were, like Cain. He has no place to call home. He is pushed away from the presence of God, and he’s as a vagabond.

And then the response of others to such a person, that when there is such a one who has no home, has no rest, has no place to just come aside, that the world looks on and has pity. In our text, it’s not referring to Christ as a vagabond, but Him looking for pity since He has no rest. Will there be pity for Him?

The word is actually used again in Job’s account, Job 2, verse 11, when Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that was come upon him. They came, every one from his own place. It goes on to say, “For they had made an appointment together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him.” That’s the same word: pity. They came to mourn, to show pity to their friend, Job. And this is what our Lord is looking for—Christ is looking for this.

Job’s comforters did the right thing. They heard of the plight of their friend, they responded, they dropped everything and they went to their friend. Now we know that they didn’t exactly exercise their responsibility as friends in the best possible way, and we can certainly find fault in their misconstruing of everything that was going on. But at least they responded, right?

With our Lord Jesus, He’s looking for pity, and no one responds. No one’s there. That’s what the prophecy is indicating. “I looked for some to take pity, but there was none. I looked to take pity, but none.” No one is there. No one to take pity.

Left with a lack of human pity, but also a lack of human comfort and for comforters. Looking for comforters. Why would our Lord look for comfort? Do you not find yourself looking for comfort in times of distress? Our Lord looked over Calvary and John was there, Mary was there, others were there, even Peter may have been in the vicinity, but most of these are too filled with their own self-pity, their distress at seeing the crucifixion and the effect of that upon themselves for them to think upon how they may show comfort to the Lord Himself.

Instead, though there may be a few scattered through the crowd, it’s the crowd that takes the dominant or the prominent place around the cross. Their voices are heard. Their mockery comes to the fore. Their language of criticism and reproach is elevated in the ear of the Son of God crucified.

And looking for a voice, someone to take pity, looking for comforters, and there’s none. When an infant Herod threatened His life, Joseph had enough compassion and love to relocate to Egypt, but no such help exists as Christ hangs upon the tree. There on that cross bearing your sins and mine, and bearing the sins of some who were there around that cross that day, still there is no comfort from any of them.

The use of the plural form suggests one who’s looking at various sources for the possibility of comfort. He looked for comforters, friends, family, those who benefited from His ministry, but there is no one.

Have you been there? Have you? A time when your internal anguish is met with external abandonment. Where is everyone? No pity. No comfort. This is what the psalmist reveals. I want you to feel this in your own soul. I want you to sense that your Savior, the Son of God, experienced this, that this was necessary for Him to be an advocate for you, to sympathize with you, and to support you.

There are many mysteries about it because, on the one hand, of course, you say, “Well, God knows everything, nothing to learn.” Yet, as Hebrews 5 reveals, there is a need that the priest be of our nature and understand the frailty of our frame, that he might be a faithful high priest. Our Lord then endures things akin to the greatest suffering that man can experience.

The particulars may be distinct. He cannot, in the particulars, experience everything that any man or woman has ever experienced. But it’s not really about the particulars, is it? It’s about how the particulars affect us and their limitations to that. The scope or the spectrum of our experience is more narrow than the scope of the particulars that may occur to us.

So there may be a plurality of things that happen, but those various things can be categorized as having a similar effect of bringing sorrow, or grief, or discouragement, or depression. So our Lord goes through things, and they bring Him to an experience that you are likely to have in your life. A broken heart, full of heaviness, and then looking externally to some form of help to take pity, to offer comfort, and there’s none.

Which brings us then to His eternal advocacy.

His eternal advocacy. So I thought about this, to give consideration to this text, I thought about the wonder of Him who is our advocate. This is how He’s described in 1 John, chapter 2, verse 1. We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ. We have an advocate. In fact, the word advocate is used elsewhere in the New Testament, such as you have in John 14, where it’s translated as comforter, with reference to the Holy Spirit. “I will send you another comforter, an advocate.”

And the encouragement for us as the people of God is that the Spirit of God functions as this advocate continually in the life of the child of God. And described then in this language of being the paraclete, that’s the Greek term, to come alongside. And the Holy Spirit comes alongside. He comes alongside the people of God. He is there. When we look for one to take pity, there’s the Holy Spirit. When we look for one to comfort, there’s the Holy Spirit.

But our Lord Jesus is also designated in a similar fashion. We have an advocate. We have a comforter with the Father, Jesus Christ. He is called alongside. He is commissioned to come alongside, to assist, to support His people. And there is no one, beloved, no one better equipped to come alongside you than Jesus Christ. The person does not exist.

So if you find yourself today, or in some time in the near future, and you can recall this message, and you’re looking for someone to come alongside, I want you to think about God’s provision for you in His Son, Jesus Christ, who knows exactly—not just from the perspective of being dutifully sent to come alongside, God present with His people. And that’s a wonder in and of itself that God condescends to be present alongside His people.

But with Jesus Christ, there’s a specific aspect we need to keep in mind. It is God in flesh coming alongside. It is one who is in our frame eternally, even though in heaven He bears our frame. And all the memory of His experience, and He still bears the marks and has in His heart this sense of looking for pity, and there is none, seeking for comfort, and there’s none, and He knows then what it’s like to be right there.

There is no one, I say, better equipped to come alongside you. Do you want His company? Whose company do you seek? Because Jesus Christ is there. Do you need His strength? He offers it. The strength that comes, the encouragement, the putting of strength into someone. Our Lord Jesus is there to minister in that way.

Have you lost a loved one? Does it make you feel alone in this world, that loss? Did you expect certain people would still be in your life and they’re not? Christ knows the feeling, the feeling of isolation, the feeling of abandonment. He watches over His solitary people, and He occupies a position of power and sympathy, equipped to help and support and willing to do so. That’s the encouragement. He has the ability and the will.

You may think someone else is equipped to help you, and yet you find that they don’t have the will to do so. Or, on the flip side, you may find a bunch of people who have the will to help you, but they don’t have the ability. And they almost just add salt to the wound. You wish they would give up trying to help you. Again, like Job’s comforters, perhaps. But this is not Jesus. His suffering was intentional, redemptive. And He ministers to His own as their eternal advocate, there all the time. Any hour of the day, any hour of the night, He is there.

He that keepeth Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps. The Lord is thy shade. The Lord is at thy right hand. He governs over our affairs. He rules in the details of our lives that we might discover Him to be our closest and most trusted companion. I mean, that’s what you do, isn’t it? You ask why? And He replies, because I know what’s best.

Perhaps you’ve experienced the isolating consequences of ill health. Maybe you’ve wrestled with depression or anxiety. You felt blamed or misunderstood by other people. Again, Christ knows such trouble of soul. He was the one whose experience in Gethsemane was described as being exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. Sorrow that almost ended His existence.

So we’re dealing with one who bore a mental, emotional burden so great that He sweat, as it were, great drops of blood. He understands the darkest night of the soul, and He is uniquely equipped and able to comfort those who suffer eternal anguish and external abandonment. And His understanding is not detached from sympathy. It is grounded in His lived experience of dread and grief.

And His response—what was His response? We have this, again, very real, very human-felt experience on the cross that then gets expressed in a cry. It may be interpreted as someone who is despairing, but quite the contrary, it is a cry of hope and trust. “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”

Lord Jesus offers such a cry, not because He had lost all hope, but because He was still hoping, still trusting. Sometimes even when you experience financial hardship and the social stigma of not succeeding as people might interpret success, it can make you feel miserable. You feel like you haven’t reached what others might imagine you ought to have reached. Maybe parents that you think are disappointed in your lack of success or friends who don’t value you or neighbors that don’t see really what you’ve gone through even to achieve what you have.

And you can feel ignored. You can feel despised because you don’t have the wealth, you don’t have the status. Again, our Lord, through His life, this sense of lack of pity and lack of comfort was real. The foxes have holes, the fowls of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head. He understands the scorn of poverty. He walked with the marginalized, identified with those who had nothing. And yet He didn’t turn His ear away or His heart away from those who were wealthy but had their own afflictions. He still condescended to them.

When the rich could not buy deliverance for their loved ones, such as the nobleman in John 4, Jesus heard the cry, heard the desperation, and responded. He walked with the lowly, but He heard all.

We must be careful how we measure others and what they go through. Our Lord did not have the measurements that I think exists within all cultures at all times and seasons where we measure by certain carnal metrics of worth. But He had no money. He had no honor as far as this world might consider honor. He had no education that was thrown at Him as well. At His trial, before His crucifixion, He’s treated as a worthless criminal. There’s no honor in the way they assigned His death, no recognition of what He had done for thousands of people.

No, instead He’s mocked, stripped, humiliated, left devoid of any worldly honor. So our Lord knows, our Lord knows these kinds of experiences of degradation. He knows what it is to walk on this world and the honor not to be there, the prestige not to be offered. He understands what it’s like to be wrongfully imprisoned, to be impoverished, and so on. These experiences can isolate us, make us feel there’s no pity, no comfort in this world.

When we go through betrayal, the heartbreak of betrayal, betrayed by our parents, the people who were designated in this world to love us and care for us, and yet they do not. To long for the joy of marriage, only for it to be the most devastating wound ever afflicted upon you. Betrayal. Christ was despised and rejected of men. Came unto His own, His own received Him not. Tasted treachery firsthand when Judas, whom He designates friend, betrays Him with a kiss. Peter, so resolved never to deny Him, denies Him three times with oaths and cursing. The collective body of disciples who were so resolved that they would follow Him wherever that would lead and whatever that would mean, forsaking Him and fleeing at the point when He needed support.

It was all just empty words. Again, like the person who stands in public and with every fiber of their being determined they will love this person to death, they do part, only to find, to reflect upon that day, to consider the exchange and wonder, did they ever mean those words? Did they ever mean it? Because when things got hard, when they became difficult, there was no sense of resolve that’s communicated in language like that.

Betrayal. This was not a distant thing that Jesus observed. This is something that He felt, that He went through. He does not go through the world unmoved by the feelings of friends. He felt the sting profoundly. We read the gospel narratives and we imagine He’s all prepared for Judas’ betrayal. He knows it’s coming. And still, He was wounded in the house of His friends. He felt it.

And yet, this One is the eternal advocate of the people of God. All men in the past, how they have adored or despised their kings, their presidents. How they have almost deified them, other times executed them. And often when we’re dealing with such lofty figures, it is with an understanding that really this person does not know what it’s like to be me. I mean, think of the presidents you’ve had over the years. They did not walk the path of ordinary people. The vast majority born into power, into privilege. Do they really know isolation? Wealth brings many friends.

But here is one who had no wealth. Here is one who was assigned the place of poverty, nothingness in this world. And so He knows, He knows. He went through all these horrific experiences of rejection and betrayal and grief so that He could come beside you, and you would know He understands.

“Reproach hath broken my heart, and I am full of heaviness. And I looked for some to take pity, but there was none, and for comforters, but I found none.”

Is that where you are? Ask why God, in His love, would so order your steps. And allow me this morning to make the suggestion that He is directing those steps not to terminate in the horror of what you’re experiencing, but for those steps to terminate in His arms, in His embrace, in the comfort of His presence.

He does not bring us through hardship to leave us just in the hardship hanging. But He leads us into hardship and tragedy and difficulty and discouragement and depression and heartache and heaviness so that we turn to Him. He is enough. Yes, the greatest cry of faith was not something like Joshua outside Jericho, “Shout for the Lord hath given you the city,” but the cry of dereliction of Jesus, the Son of God. “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”

And in that you can reflect on this, beloved, you can reflect on this. You’re not promised. There is nothing in the Scripture that promises to you that you will go through your life without feeling or experiencing the language of Psalm 69, verse 20. At some point, you may look for pity and there be none, and for comforters and find none. In terms of this world, you’re not promised that there will always be some person who loves and cares for you and is there to support you through the trial and the difficulty.

What you’re promised, however, what you can be certain of, is God will never leave you nor forsake you. So while Christ experienced that sense of being ignored or not comforted by any man, He also went through the horror of a keenly felt hell-like experience of the dereliction and abandonment of the Father on the cross as your sins were laid on Christ. But covenantally, whatever you feel, covenantally you know that Him having endured that isolation means you will never, you will never be able to charge God having completely abandoned you because His covenant oath is that He cannot. “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

“I will never abandon you. I go away. I send another Comforter that He may abide with you forever.” And so all the covenant language of the presence of God is yours, bought by the blood of Jesus Christ, assured, ratified, given as an oath, a guarantee. He cannot abandon you, having put your trust in Christ.

I can’t promise that you’ll always have an earthly friend. I can’t promise that the triune God will never abandon you. Therefore, turn your eyes upon Jesus. Find your rest and your comfort there.

Let’s pray together.

A message like this may come at a time that is very delicate in your life. So I encourage you in these moments to let the Word embed more upon your soul. However isolated, however alone, however discouraged, please, I beg you in God’s name, this message is coming to you to say, I’m here. Dear child of God, I’m here.

Don’t ignore Him. Get back into His Word and hear His promises. Fall upon your knees and call upon Him each day. Be assured of His abiding presence and the strength He has to carry you through.

Lord, give grace and use Thy Word. Hide it in our hearts and extend the peculiar and necessary blessings which we need from this message. Lead us as a flock. Guide us with Thine eye. Bless us, people, with peace. Help us to love Thee. Help us to be like our Lord Jesus. He set His face as a flint to go to the place of suffering. May we have the same resolve to trust God even through our greatest trials. “He knoweth the way that I take, and when He hath tried me, I will come forth as gold.”

Bless us, and may the grace of our Lord Jesus, the love of God the Father, and the fellowship of the Spirit be the portion of every child of God now and evermore. Amen.