Sympathy from Christ

How earnestly and touchingly did Christ ask His disciples: "Stay here and watch with me, while I go yonder and pray." And when from the scene of His conflict and anguish He returned, sobbing and gory, to bury His grief in their compassion and love - lo! He found them sleeping! How gentle, yet how searching, His rebuke - "Could you not watch with me one hour?"

What condition in the experience of the saints does this page of our Lord's history meet? It meets a sad and painful one - one which could only thus be met - the lack of human sympathy. You are, perhaps, in a condition which needs the sympathy of a kind and loving spirit, and your sad and clinging heart yearns for it.

But, as in the case of your sorrowing Lord, it slumbers at the moment that you most needed its wakeful, watchful expression. And yet its very absence may prove your richest soothing, by bringing you into a closer experience of the sympathy of Jesus. Having Himself felt its need and its lack, He is all the more fitted, as your fellow-sufferer, to sympathize with, and supply your present need.

Maybe you are suffering from BETRAYED AND DISAPPOINTED CONFIDENCE. One you thought a friend, tender and true, has deserted you; a judgment upon whose guidance you leaned has misled you; a source upon whose supplies you depended has failed you; a confidence in which you too implicitly reposed has betrayed you; and thus you are learning the lesson Jesus learned when, "all His disciples forsook Him, and fled."

Cheer up, my soul! there is One who has promised never to leave you. When father and mother, husband and wife, lover and friend, forsake you, the Lord will take you up. He who was deserted by friends and followers, will cling to you in prosperity and in adversity, in weal and in woe, with unfaltering fidelity and unchanging love; and though all forsake you, yet will He not in life, in death, and through eternity.

How great and precious the divine promise - "They may forget, yet I will not." "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever." Precious Jesus! Though all forsake me, as all forsook You; yet YOU will never leave me, nor forsake me!

O.W.