God's Bitter Cups for Sick Souls

GOD is the wisest and best of physicians. He understands precisely the soul’s diseases. He never selects the “wrong bottle,” and never gives one drop too much of corrective medicine. My brother, can you not trust your heavenly Father? Do you fear that he will give you poison in His cup of chastisement? Do you try to avoid the draught which He has prepared, and with a wry face push it from you? “The cup which your Father gives you, shall you not drink it?”

God often comes to one of his own children, and finds him in sore need of spiritual medication. He has become sick from indulged sin, and eating of forbidden fruit; or else he is utterly debilitated in all his powers and affections. His pulse beats low; his graces are weak. Perhaps this very Christian used to pray for more grace, for more strength or humility or patience or assurance of hope. God takes him at his own word. The Christian asks to be made purer, better, stronger, and more Christ-like. And the very first thing that his heavenly-Father does is to mingle for him a cup of bitter disappointments or afflictions. Instead of relieving him, God seems to be smiting him. Instead of increasing his joys and hopes, he seems to be blighting them like Jonah’s gourd.

Perhaps this is the way, my reader, that God is treating you. A bitter cup of trial has been commended to your lips.

Blit it is your leather’s cup: drink it. What does faith in God 7iiean but just this very thing, — that you will trust him though he slay? What is faith but the firm and delightful belief that when God goes into the laboratory of his secret purposes, and mingles for you a bitter draught, he knows just what he is doing, and also just what your soul’s disease requireth? It may be bitter, but the disease is worse.

I call you to witness that those confiding souls who have taken God’s medicines of trial in the right spirit have found their prayers answered in their afflictions. Behold! the very graces they prayed for — the patience, the meekness, the heavenly-mindedness — were in that cup, that bitter cup! If the cup had not been drank, the sweet coveted blessings would have all been lost. If God had not dealt with them precisely as he did, the spiritual disease would have raged on, and the soul have been sick unto death. Do not then push away that tear-draught of sorrow which your merciful Father is pressing to your trembling lips. The cup is encircled with this precious inscription: ‘’ Whom I love I chasten; all things work together for good to them that love ?;2^.” Will you refuse to drink it?

Oh! what blessings are afflictions to those who can bless God for afflictions! “Oh!” said a bright-hearted young man, who was tortured with a fatal and painful bodily disease, “when I have the most pain in my body, I have the most comfort in my soul. When Christ suffered, he had none but enemies about him, and they gave him gall and vinegar to drink. When I thirst, I have beside me the Friend that sticketh closer than a brother. The cup that He gives me, shall I not drink it? I do not doubt but that there is love in the bottom of the cup, though it is bitter in the mouth.”

There was a fine Christian philosophy in this last thought of the suffering youth, — that at the bottom of the cup lay the precious blessing. He must, therefore, drink the whole bitter draught, in order to reach it. Depend upon it, brethren, that many of the purest and grandest displays of Christian grace can only be reached under a regimen of severe trial. Faith’s anchor is never so fully tested as in a hurricane. Patience never shines so lustrous as in a midnight of black adversity. Courage never shows so grandly as when death on his “pale horse” is careering down upon us over a battle-field strewn with defeat and disaster.

There is a patience of hope, a joy under tribulation, and a sense of the immediate support of Jesus that never can be reached by us when we are in a condition of ease and outward prosperity. These rich graces lie in the boUom of trial’s bitter cup. And God esteems these graces of such priceless value that he mingles for us just such cups of suffering, in order to bring out the graces in their beauty and power. God so esteemed faith in Abraham that he proved it with a knife flashing over the throat of his darling son. He so esteemed patience in Job that he stripped him of all his wealth, and left him the richest soul on all the earth. What a cup of compounded trials did he mingle for the heroic apostle! Yet that apostle gratefully acknowledges that” the trial of his faith, being much more precious than of silver and gold, though it be tried in the fire, would be found unto (rOD’S BITTER CUPS. I2I

praise and honor and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ.”

Be not surprised, my friend, when God mixes for you a bitter cup. He sees that you need it. Disappointment and bereavement do not put sugar into their cups: they are meant to be bitter. So are the best tonic medicines bitter; but they quicken appetite, and invigorate the system. Many a cup of wormwood has braced a Christian’s graces. Many a sore loss has proved an everlasting gain. Bereavements are often full-brimming cups of tears; but they have been a medicine to the soul more healing than the sweetest “balm” on Gilead. God never mingles a cup of trial for one of his children without a merciful purpose. He either means to cure a soul’s sicknesses, or to save it from eternal death. The cup which our Father gives us, shall we not drink it?

Let US all be careful how we choose a cup for ourselves, and insist on having it. Children choose confectionery always sooner than medicine: one may bring sickness, the other health. God sometimes lets us have our own selfish way. He left rebellious Israel to their own way when they grew tired of Heaven-sent manna, and lusted for the quails. He sent them the food they asked for, and, while the “flesh was yet between their teeth,” they were smitten with a terrible plague.

So has many a Christian lusted for what has proved a plague to his soul. I have known professed Christians to choose for themselves a cup of great worldly prosperity; and // made them drunk! There was Satan’s sorcery in the cup. Their heads grew dizzy, and they were lifted up with pride. They grew greedy for lucre, fond of fashionable follies, self-indulgent, and neglectful of their religious duties. Prosperity spoiled them. It has ruined thousands in our churches. Ah! had all these foreseen what was in that cup of worldly prosperity, they might well have cried out, “O Father! I pray thee, let this cuf pass from me!”