October 3 Daily Devotional

Bible Reading

Jeremiah 17:14–18

Devotional

The path of the Christian is not always bright with sunshine. There are also seasons of darkness and of storm. It is true that God’s Word says, “her ways are pleasant ways, and all her paths are peace” (Prov. 3:17). And it is a great truth, that true religion is calculated to give a man happiness below as well as bliss above. But experience tells us that if “the path of the righteous is like the morning sun, shining ever brighter till the full light of day” (Prov. 4:18), yet sometimes that light gets eclipsed. At certain periods clouds cover the believer’s sun so that he walks through darkness and sees no light.

There are many who have rejoiced in the presence of God for a season. They have basked in the sunshine in the earlier stages of their Christian career. They have walked along the “green pastures” beside the “still waters” (Ps. 23:2). But suddenly they find the glorious sky is clouded. Instead of the Land of Goshen they have to tread the sandy desert. In the place of sweet waters, they find troubled streams, bitter to their taste. And they say, “If I were really a child of God, surely this would not happen.” Oh you who are walking through darkness, do not say that! The best of God’s saints must drink the wormwood; the dearest of his children must bear the cross. No Christian has enjoyed perpetual prosperity; no believer can always keep his harp from the willows (cf. Ps. 137:1–3).

Perhaps the Lord allotted you a smooth and unclouded path at first because you were weak and timid; he tempered the wind to the shorn lamb. But now that you are stronger in the spiritual life, you must enter upon the riper and rougher experience of God’s full-grown children. We need winds and tempests to exercise our faith, to tear off the rotten branches of self-dependence, and to root us more firmly in Christ. The day of evil reveals to us the value of our glorious hope.

[April 29, morning]

Extracted from C. H. Spurgeon, Morning and Evening (public domain), language modernized by Larry E. Wilson.