Spiritual leaders can be spiritually full even while empty of earthly comfort. Here is how seventeenth-century theologian Samuel Rutherford expressed it:
“When I look over the line and beyond death, to the laughing side of the world, I triumph, and ride upon the high places of Jacob: howbeit, otherwise I am a faint, deadhearted, cowardly man, oft borne down and hungry in waiting for the marriage supper of the Lamb. Nevertheless, I think it the Lord’s wise love that feeds us with hunger and makes us fat with wants and desertion” —Samuel Rutherford.
What amazing insight! Have you thought about your suffering, unsatisfied longings, unmet needs, unanswered prayers, or those burdens God hasn’t chosen to remove from your life as adding to your happiness in God?
When we think of our suffering as increasing our joy in God and our eternal happiness, it puts our present pain in the proper perspective. Paul said it this way:
“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:16-17).
Prayer
Father of Jesus, help me appreciate, even rejoice in, the deepening fellowship with you and my spiritual siblings I’m gaining even while this temporal life becomes increasingly profoundly uncertain. Make me “fat in want,” in Jesus’s name, amen.
