Learning to Live by Faith

“For the Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody.” Isaiah 51:3 KJV

In Chapter 3, Hannah Whitall Smith writes about God’s name given in 2 Corinthians 1:3-4,“the God of all comfort.” She writes that “among all the names that reveal God, this, the ‘God of all comfort,’ seems to me one of the loveliest and the most absolutely comforting. The words all comfort admit of no limitation and no deductions; and one would suppose that, however full of discomforts the outward life of the followers of such a God might be, their inward religious life must necessarily be always and under all circumstances a comfortable life. But, as a fact, it often seems as if exactly the opposite were the case, and the religious lives of large numbers of the children of God are full, not of comfort, but of the utmost discomfort. This discomfort arises from anxiety as to their relationship to God, and doubts as to His love.”

So again she is explaining that the problem of a lack of comfort is caused by a lack of faith. Smith says that “God has spoken ‘comforting words’ enough, one would think, to comfort a whole universe, and yet we see all around us unhappy Christians, and worried Christians, and gloomy Christians, into whose comfortless hearts not one of these comforting words seems to be allowed to enter.” She says the problem is that we have not believed what God has said. You must believe God’s words in order to receive the comfort.

What is meant by comfort? What kind of comfort does God give?

In Isaiah 66:13, God says, “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you; and you will be comforted over Jerusalem.” God will comfort us by picking us up in His arms and surrounding us with love and comfort as tenderly as a mother would comfort her child. But have we experienced this type of comfort from God? Do we believe He is tender with us – or do we doubt His kindness towards us? Smith writes, “Instead of thinking of ourselves as being “dandled” on His knees, and hugged to His heart, as mothers hug, have we not rather been inclined to look upon Him as a stern, unbending Judge, holding us at a distance, and demanding our respectful homage, and critical of our slightest faults? Is it any wonder that our religion, instead of making us comfortable, has made us thoroughly uncomfortable? Who could help being uncomfortable in the presence of such a Judge? But I rejoice to say that that stern Judge is not there. He does not exist. The God who does exist is a God who is like a mother, a God who says to us as plainly as words can say it, ‘As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you’.”

Smith says “the God who exists is the God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God who so loved the world that He sent His Son, not to judge the world, but to save it. He is the God who “anointed” the Lord Jesus Christ to bind up the brokenhearted, and to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound, and to comfort all that mourn.” She says, “If any troubled doubting heart, any heart that is fearing continually every day some form or other of evil should read these lines, let me tell you again in trumpet tones that this is just what the Lord Jesus Christ is for—to care for and comfort all who mourn. ‘All,’ remember, every single one, even you yourself, for it would not be ‘all’ if you were left out.”

And our Comforter is not far away. He is here with us. He abides with us. When Christ was preparing to go away from the earth, He told His disciples, “And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.” (John 14:16-17 KJV) Jesus said the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, would teach them all things and bring all things to their remembrance. And then He declared, as if it would be the result of this divine comforting by the Holy Spirit, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart [therefore] be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

Smith says, “‘Comforter’—what a word of bliss, if we only could realize it. Let us repeat it over and over to ourselves, until its meaning sinks into the very depths of our being. And an ‘abiding’ Comforter, too, not one who comes and goes, and is never on hand when most needed, but one who is always present, and always ready to give us ‘joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.’

The very words abiding Comforter are an amazing revelation. Try to comprehend them. If we can have a human comforter to stay with us for only a few days when we are in trouble, we think ourselves fortunate; but here is a divine Comforter who is always staying with us, and whose power to comfort is infinite. Never, never ought we for a single minute to be without comfort; never for a single minute ought we to be uncomfortable.”

One of the ways comfort comes in is when the Holy Spirit reproves us for our sins. We might think that this would make us uncomfortable. But Smith explains that it actually brought her great comfort. She says, “what sort of creatures should we be if we had no divine Teacher always at hand to show us our faults and awaken in us a desire to get rid of them? …It is indeed a comfort to know that there is always abiding with me a divine, all-seeing Comforter, who will reprove me for all my faults, and will not let me go on in a fatal unconsciousness of them.” Smith tells how she always felt comforted when she was young to have her sister walk with her to guide her. It was when she walked somewhere alone that she would feel uncomfortable. So we should feel comforted to know that the Holy Spirit is watching over us and will bring to our attention anything that might draw us off from following God’s path. She says that “the declaration is that He ‘comforts all our waste places’; and He does this by revealing them to us, and at the same time showing us how He can make our ‘wildernesses like Eden,’ and our ‘deserts like the garden of the Lord’.” That is beautiful imagery to use in your daily meditation time. Envision God’s healing light shining into a barren wilderness and transforming it into a vibrant garden paradise. That’s what God wants to do for us in our lives. He wants to comfort, restore, and revive us. Smith explains that God “restores comforts” by revealing our sin and healing it, by showing us the broken places in our lives and sending His refreshing, reviving rains to restore us and turn those wildernesses into flourishing gardens.

God also works through afflictions. In Hosea 2:14 God says, “‘Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her’.” Smith says, “We find ourselves, it may be, in a ‘wilderness’ of disappointment and of suffering, and we wonder why the God who loves us should have allowed it. But he knows that it is only in that very wilderness that we can hear and receive the ‘comfortable words’ He has to pour out upon us. We must feel the need of comfort before we can listen to the words of comfort.” She explains that “the consolations of God mean the substituting of a far higher and better thing for what we lose to get them. The things we lose are earthly things, those He substitutes are heavenly.” In Ezekiel Hopkins’ book The Excellency of Heavenly Treasures, he writes about the difference between earthly treasure and heavenly treasure. He lists some of the heavenly treasures as being the love of God, the consolations of his Spirit, actings of grace, hopes of glory, God’s favor, a saving interest in Him, and communion and fellowship with Him. And in The Christian in Complete Armor, William Gurnall writes about growing in graces – faith, hope, and love – which are heavenly things. I think these are what Smith is referring to when she says that God substitutes heavenly things for any earthly things we lose. She writes, “And who of us but would thankfully be ‘allured’ by our God into any earthly wilderness, if only there we might find the unspeakable joys of union with Himself. Paul could say he ‘counted all things but loss’ if he might but ‘win Christ’; and, if we have even the faintest glimpse of what winning Christ means, we will say so too.”

In Psalm 71:21, the psalmist tells us that God “comforts us on every side.” Smith calls this an all-embracing comfort; no aching spot is left uncomforted. He “comforts us in all our troubles.” (2 Cor. 1:4) But Smith says that in times of special trial, many Christians think that God comforts them on every side except just the side where their trials lie; on that side they don’t feel comfort anywhere. But God says He comforts us on every side, and Smith says that “it is only unbelief on our part that leads us to make an exception of our special side.”

But how can we get hold of this divine comfort? Smith’s answer is that you must take it. “God’s comfort is being continually and abundantly given, but unless you will accept it you cannot have it.” She explains that God’s comfort is not given in any mysterious or arbitrary way. Rather it is given by a divine method. “The indwelling Comforter ‘brings to our remembrance’ comforting things concerning our Lord, and, if we believe them, we are comforted by them. A text is brought to our remembrance, perhaps, or the verse of a hymn, or some thought concerning the love of Christ and His tender care for us. If we receive the suggestion in simple faith, we cannot help being comforted. But if we refuse to listen to the voice of our Comforter, and insist instead on listening to the voice of discouragement or despair, no comfort can by any possibility reach our souls.”

Smith says we must be careful that we do not refuse to be comforted. She says, “The apostle tells us that whatsoever things are written in the Scriptures are for our learning, in order that we ‘through patience and comfort of the Scriptures may have hope.’ But if we are to be comforted by the Scriptures, we must first believe them. Nothing that God has said can possibly comfort a person who does not believe it to be really true.” Smith says the problem is that we want to feel something first before we can believe it is true. She says people are “waiting to have an inward feeling that His words are true, before they will believe them. They look upon them as beautiful things for Him to say, and they wish they could believe them, but they do not think they can be true in their own special case, unless they can have an inward feeling that they are; and if they should speak out honestly, they would confess that, since they have no such inward feeling, they do not believe His words apply to them; and as a consequence they do not in the least expect Him actually to care for their affairs at all. ‘Oh, if I could only feel it was all true,’ we say; and God says, ‘Oh, if you would only believe it is all true!’

She explains that God says, “Believe, and then you can feel.” But we say, “Feel, and then we can believe.” She uses the examples of the captain of a ship and the conductor of a railway to represent God. In the example, the captain tells us his vessel is safe. We first have to believe what he has said before we can feel comfortable aboard the vessel. I think what she is saying is that often times we do not take the captain at his word but rather must first be on board the vessel for a while and see that we are traveling safely before we can trust what the captain said. Until then, we are plagued by doubts and fears. Instead, we should believe what the captain said first, find comfort in that, and trust that we will be safe on board the vessel just because the captain told us we would. In the example of the railway conductor, the conductor tells us that we are on the right train, the train that will take us to the correct destination. Before we can be calm about being on the train, we must believe what the conductor says about where the train is going. Often times we do not believe what the conductor says at first, but continue to have doubts and anxieties until we see where the train goes. So I think Smith is saying that we will experience more comfort by trusting in what God says right away. We must build a sense of trust in His word. We must believe the vessel is safe because He said it is. We must believe the train is going to the correct destination because He said it is. If we do that, we will be comfortable before we get on board the vessel or the train. Smith says, “Always and in everything comfort must follow faith, and can never precede it.” You must believe what God says first, and then you will experience comfort.

Smith says that “it is pure and simple unbelief that is at the bottom of all our lack of comfort, and absolutely nothing else. God comforts us on every side, but we simply do not believe His words of comfort. The remedy for this is plain. If we want to be comforted, we must make up our minds to believe every single solitary word of comfort God has ever spoken; and we must refuse utterly to listen to any words of discomfort spoken by our own hearts, or by our circumstances. We must set our faces like a flint to believe, under each and every sorrow and trial, in the divine Comforter, and to accept and rejoice in His all-embracing comfort. I say, “set our faces like a flint,” because, when everything around us seems out of sorts, it is not always easy to believe God’s words of comfort. We must put our wills into this matter of being comforted, just as we have to put our wills into all other matters in our spiritual life. We must choose to be comforted.”

In Psalms 94:19, the psalmist says, “In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight my soul.” But Smith says that Christians often spend more time thinking about their discomforts rather than thinking about God’s comforts. She says, “We must think of His comforts if we are to be comforted by them.” As you go through your week, try to keep an awareness of how much time you spend thinking of your discomforts and how much time you spend thinking of God’s comforts to you. If you notice yourself getting stuck thinking about your problems, try to gently guide your mind into thinking about God’s comforts to you. Think about His promises throughout the Bible. Set your mind on the things of God and remember that you can always call out to Him in prayer when you are hurting. You have an abiding comforter. He is right there with you, ready to help you.

Links:

Hannah Whitall Smith: God of All Comfort – Christian Classics Ethereal Library

Hopkins Heavenly Treasures