The petition you have put before the throne of grace is marked by its simplicity, rain to cease, creatures to be stilled, and it has in it the very essence of faith, for it deals with things too small for the proud to bring before the Most High. Yet what is rain but the gift of God alone? Who has divided a channel for the overflowing water, or a path for the thunderbolt, to cause it to rain on the earth where there is no one? It is the Lord who gives rain, and it is the Lord who withholds it, and so to Him you do well to look. But while you ask for the ceasing of the outward shower, I would have you seek a far greater mercy: that the latter rain of His grace might fall upon your own soul. As the former rain comes at the seed-time and the latter just before the harvest, so has the Lord visited you in days past; entreat Him now that the clear shining after rain may break forth, and that the tender herb of your faith, now perhaps drooping under the drip of many a trial, may spring up afresh.
Consider how the small rain falls upon the tender herb, not to beat it down as with a tempest, but to enter it, so that the herb might drink in nourishment and be truly refreshed. The highest power in the spiritual kingdom is ever consistent with the lowliest tenderness. You have cried out for the rain of outward affliction to pass; but have you seized upon the inward refreshment which the Master would work through this very weather? Sometimes the rain must fall while the burning sun of our fears is shaded, lest we be scorched. The Lord, in His preserving Providence, often goes before us with blessings of goodness we neither sought nor deserved, sending His rain upon the desolate and waste ground to satisfy it. Trust, then, that whether the rain ceases before the hour you have named, or tarries longer, His design is to do you good. Yield yourself to the congenial atmosphere the Spirit would create: a holy tenderness, a devout heartbreaking. For if you love Him, He seems in softer, sweeter tones to say, “If you love Me, cease your sorrow and begin to rejoice.”
But there is a deeper thing I would press upon you, for we are prone to settle upon the mere outsides of faith. What if the Lord, by withholding an immediate answer, means to make use of you to advance His glory where your reliance has never yet been known? Set not your confidence upon the arrangement of the skies, nor upon the stillness of the woods, but upon Jesus only. He is the ladder set up from earth to heaven, and many a stout sinner has run up it with a weight of sin enough to crush the heavens into hell, yet the ladder has never broken. You are, perhaps, a soul of tender conscience, and these small outward things unnerve you; but I charge you, sit down now and take stock. Would the defection of a creature’s quiet, or the continuance of a storm, shake your trust in Christ? Remember the Master’s own words: before the trial comes, love Him and keep His commandments, and when it stands before you, love Him as the Source of your hope, your pardon, your life.
Look then for the clear shining that follows the rain. You will get into times of infirmity when there will be rain, and rain, and rain, and perhaps little sunshine. Yet expect that you will come to the land of Beulah. The aged saints have told of the rain, the children dying, the poverty passed through, the persecution endured, but they have also told of the clear shining after it. The Lord reserves for us the appointed weeks of harvest. Only let your love for Him be the coin that is current in the skies, for whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; but he that loves possesses that which goes on forever. Lay hold upon this, and let your Beloved come into your heart, standing before you with scars of honor in His flesh and triumph in His eyes. Then, whether the rain ceases by the sixth hour, or the woods stir with the beasts of the field, you shall stand unshaken, watered by the small rain of His doctrine, and made tender by His grace.