Acquaintance With Grief
Isaiah 53:3, "A Man of sorrows acquainted with grief."
This is the unshakable secert of the Lord to those who trust Him- " I will give thee thy life." What more does a man want than his life? It is the the essential thing. " thy life for a prey" means that wherever you may go, even if it is into hell, you will come out with you life, nothing can harm it. So many of us are caught up in the shows of things, not in the way of property and possessions, but of blessings. All these have to go; but there is something grander that never can go- the life that is "hid with Christ in God."
We are not acquainted with grief in the way in which Our Lord was acquainted with it; we endure it, we get through it, but we do not become intimate with it. At the beginning of life we do not redconcile ourselves to the fact of sin. We tade a rationnal view of life and say that a man by by controlling his instincts, and by educating himself, can produce a life which will slowly evolve into the life of God. But as we go on, we find the presence of something which we have not taken into considration, viz., sin, and it upsets all our calculations. Sin has made the basis of things wild and not rational. We have to recognize that sin is a fact, not a defect; sin is red-handed mutiny against God. Either God or sin must die in my life. The New Testament brings us right down to this one issue. If sin rules in me, God's life in me will be killed; if God rules in me, sin in me will be killed. There is no possible ultimate but that. The climax of sin is that it crucified Jesus Christ, and what was true in the history of God on earth will be true in your history and in mine. In our mental outlook we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact of sin as the only explanation as to why Jesus Christ came, and as the explanation of the grief and sorrow in life. by: Oswald Chambers
