Job 14:1

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"... full of trouble." Job 14:1

This is one of the exaggerations quite pardonable to men in hours of agony. There have been bright minds that have found more joy than sorrow in the world. Unquestionably there is a diversity of temperament, and that ought to be taken into account in every consideration of the whole subject of human discipline. It certainly seems as if some lives were left without the brightness of a single gleam of hope; one trouble succeeds another like cloud coming after cloud, until the whole horizon is draped in blackness. Consider the many sources and springs and occasions of trouble in human life. Take the individual constitution: some men seem to be born utterly wanting in all the conditions of health; from infancy upward they are doomed to depression, weakness, pain, and all the influences which contribute towards settled melancholy; others, again, seem to be wounded every day through their children; the hard-hearted, the ungrateful, the impenitent, the selfish, the thoughtless; others again have no success in business; whatever they do perishes in their hands; they are always too late in the morning; they always feel that some other man has passed by them in the race of life, and plucked the fruit which they intended to enjoy; others, again, are beaten down in the conflict for the want of physical strength, or mental energy, or rational hopefulness: they think it is no use proceeding further; they say the fates are against them, and so they sink into neglect, and pass away without leaving any traces of successful work in life. We must distinguish between the trouble which is external, physical, and traceable more or less to our own action, and that mysterious heart-trouble which comes from solemn moral reflection, from the reckoning up of sins, and from a thoughtful calculation of all the actions, thoughts, and purposes which have deserved divine condemnation. There is no trouble to be compared with the trouble of the mind. He is not poor who has left to him an estate of thought, reflection, contemplation, and the power of prayer. In talking of trouble we should also talk about its mitigations. Is it possible that there can be a life anywhere on which some beam of sunshine does not alight? We are not now talking about the insane, or those who suffer from increasing and continued melancholy, but about the general average of human life; and, so speaking, surely we can always find in the hardest lot some mitigation of the burden, some compensation for extra darkness and difficulty. We should look out for the mitigations. Instead of arguing from the difficulty we should argue from the strength which is able to bear it in some degree. All this is never easy to do, and he would acquire no influence over men who sought to drive away their burdens, their difficulties, and their fears. Better look at them seriously, add them up as to their real value, and so acquire standing-ground in the estimation of the hearer as to be enabled to proceed to enumerate mercies, blessings, alleviations, and the like, so as to mitigate the horrors of the actual situation. Then, whatever trouble we may have, we must remember that it is not to be compared with the distress of him who said, "My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death." We think of him, and justly so, at all times as a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. No man had sorrow like Christ's. He is therefore not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but from his own experience he is sensitive to all our sufferings, and responsive to all our appeals. Then we should look at the "afterwards" promised to those who bear discipline well and pass through chastisement patiently and unmurmuringly: "No chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby."