Meditation 9*

No One Is Near To Restore My Spirit

This is why I weep
and my eyes overflow with tears.
No one is near to comfort me,
no one to restore my spirit.
My children are destitute
because the enemy has prevailed.
Lamentations 1:16

The godly person calls out, “’This is why I weep! My eyes overflow with tears,’ because the Comforter, who was to refresh my soul, is far from me.”

Do you ever weep like that? Oh, so many tears flow day after day and often into the night. Our heart desires, hopes for and hangs onto so many things. When these don’t come or are taken away from us, an abrasive sense of fear and emptiness, of lack and disappointment goes through our soul. Sadness sometimes overwhelms both our heart and eye. We may experience a release when we weep and our heart can unburden itself by way of a tearful eye. Tearless, dry eyes only double the pain.

A child weeps more readily, because it is more emotional. That is precisely the reason a child tends to be happier, for as the tears well up in its eyes and trickle down its cheeks, its childish sadness also dribbles out of its young heart.

In contrast, we grownups keep our pain inside of us. It digs and bores its way deep into our hearts. It searches for release, not through the eye but via the depth of our soul. That is just what makes our pain and sadness that much more real, the reason being that shedding tears makes people sympathize, but if you cannot weep and receive no such sympathy, the pain bottles up without comfort or consolation.

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But when at times you do weep, what do your tears call for? The Lord says also to you, “Why should the living complain when punished for their sins?” (Lamentations 3:39). Do you know that pain? Do your sins devastate you? Are you dying in your inner life because of yours sins? Do they oppress and wring your heart? Do you understand the Psalmist’s terrified cry, “Your wrath has swept over me; your terrors have destroyed me?” (Psalm 88:16). Alas, that cry leads us to take a penetrating look at each other. It altogether looks like it is too much for us, as if an alien pain has crept into our soul.

Guilt? We acknowledge it. Sin? We confess it! Which person can claim clean hands? But away with that blindfold. Speak the truth and tell us whether or not you should not be accusing yourself nearly all the time? Not just after a specific act of disobedience or a specific sin, but all the time in general, in ordinary life. And when the hour came when you pined away in your inner life and your soul sank away in deep desperation, how did you overcome all that, except through the gracious operation of the Holy Spirit?

Ah, if only that Spirit taught you, gripped you and made you thoroughly dissatisfied with yourself! If only He would make you aware of your own heart and of your own motives, of your past, your family, your birth all the way back to Adam. Then, yes, then your soul would overflow and begin crying for mercy and forgiveness from your God. But outside of that discovery and that introductory grace, you are so hard, so dull, so insensitive that your heart can jump and dance and skip while your soul is dying and laugh at your own stupidity rather than weep and mourn over your inner depravity.

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But you know, the weeping of which the man of God speaks in his exclamation in the text at the heading of this chapter, “This is why I weep and my eyes overflow with tears. No one is near to comfort me, no one to restore my spirit” is more than simply bursting out in tears for the realization of our status of complete damnation. He who airs such complaints has received refreshment. Light has broken into the darkness of his innermost. He has seen, tasted and reveled in Heavenly things. Oil has been dripped into his wounds; the boils have been pressed out; he has been given medicine; his has become the consolation of his God.

Alas, suddenly the Comforter withdrew; the boil in his heart became infected again and the hope that he had cast on the Lord his God faded away. Now he is worse off than before and much unhappier. For he has known grace and mercy, but now it all has escaped him. He tasted consolation and refreshment of the soul, but now the soul is once again enveloped in its suffering.

“Would God forget His grace and never again bless with His mercy?” Was the experience of salvation only something momentary in order to let him sink into even deeper suffering? Was it a mere glimpse of a light beam that would render the dark fears in his heart even more real? And so the soul goes under, defeated.

Oh, no, not so fast, not immediately. At first, when this situation develops, he doesn’t know it and is not aware of missing anything. But once this forsaken state ends and the Lord revives his soul again, that’s when the regrets and the pain return. And only when the Comforter returns, does he realize with unspeakable pain that the Comforter had left him (temporarily).

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You see, this Comforter had consoled him with glorious promises, for he could not carry all this by himself. The Comforter did not instruct him as human comforters tend to do by urging him, “You’ve got to do it! You must double your efforts!” No, the divine Comforter whispered into his ear, “Poor struggler, no, you can’t do this on your own. With Me, there is counsel and strength. Come to Me and I will enable you to will and to perfect it all in you!”

Now that was manna (Exodus 16:31) for the soul and water for the thirsty (Psalm 42). What a precious promise. Not that He exacts it from our empty hearts, but, instead, He pours it into those empty hearts and somehow arranges that we end up doing it ourselves.

The law was no longer the executioner who hammered us to the cross, but a delineation of the glorious paths along which He would make us travel. And then came the prayer of the soul, prayer not for worldly treasures or prosperity, but for the fulfillment of that promise. To beseech God every morning and evening to receive that promise that He work in us to will and to complete and that we will walk the walk for which He prepared us. Oh, blessed joy when it comes. We yearn to thank Him for His fulfilled promise.

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That was a Comforter, the Holy Spirit, that consoled us with respect to our evil heart, our wicked nature as well as our powerlessness and our heart-rending lack of holiness.

But we became accustomed even to all that grace and mercy. God was so extremely generous. As a result, we lost our hunger and thirst and along with it the desire to pray earnestly and seriously. We no longer begged morning and evening for grace and mercy. We prayed more mechanical prayers without passion or concern. That’s the reason the Lord put grace on ransom. He did not forsake you, but put you in skimpier meadows and gave you to drink from a creek that was almost dried up. The promise no longer poured mercy; at best, a few drops here and there.

That’s how the Lord drew the dullness from your soul. That’s how you began once again to hunger and thirst. And then the weeping started all over again, because there was “no one ... near to comfort me, no one to restore my spirit.” But when the sorrow becomes that intense, the Comforter Himself returns, for He was not far away: It only looked that way to eyes dimmed by sin.