You are in a difficulty, but do not begin to fret, and fume, and worry and trouble yourself about what you cannot help. Can you alter it with all your worrying? Have you not found out yet, I have, that the very anxiety which arises through your being in a difficulty, unfits you to meet that difficulty? You speak of a court case, a subpoena, an interview, and benefits renewed. These things press upon you. Yet if you are the Lord’s, He has entered into covenant with you, even as with Noah, that He would preserve you and your family alive. He who travels on the King’s Highway is under the King’s protection, but he who takes to byroads must protect himself. As for the truths of God which God has taught you by His own Spirit, grapple them to you as with hooks of steel, for, if you go in the way of error, you cannot expect divine protection!
You wish for the case to be dropped. I hear another say, “My anxiety has nothing to do with my personal affairs. I am anxious about the cause of God.” That is right, but if you are telling yourself about it and your anxiety is confined to yourself, no good will come of that. The case is so settled that in eternity you shall never hear of it again except as a case which was gloriously decided, if Christ is your Daysman. Surely it were the path of wisdom, sinner, to accept Him at once as the Arbitrator in the case! See how well He understands it! Christ has suffered the Law’s fullest and most severe penalty, and there is now no fear whatever that the case can ever be revived, by writ of error, or removal into another court, because it has been settled on the eternal and immutable principles of Justice. If your trust is in Him, then in this present storm, you remember Joseph in the dungeon, Israel in Egypt, Hannah in the family of Elkanah. Are not all these instances of God exalting the low tree?
You will always need divine and angelic keeping, for God would not have charged His angels to keep His people in all their ways if they did not need protection in all their ways! This protection is perpetual as well as personal. Yet perhaps your desire for benefits renewed points to a deeper need. That solemnly joyful sight suggests to my heart the propriety of addressing you upon the subject of the renewal of your consecration to Christ. The work of renewal is a stern work. It is called in Scripture, conversion. Now, in conversion the same power is exercised that was put forth in raising Jesus Christ from the dead. What power, then, must be required in the renewal of a soul! Oh, that we might have a deep anxiety to undergo that wondrous change, that radical and total change of heart, “You must be born again”!
The practical point is, Do we belong to that family? I will leave that naked question to work in every heart. Those who have been quickened and made to live, and introduced, therefore, into the family of God, have one mark, one never-failing mark. The Holy Spirit will never guide us along a road in which we claim to be His equal, in which we claim to still be free and to have no authority above us. God grant that prayer meetings may begin to be better attended, that family prayer may be more regarded and that private prayer may be more diligently and more spiritually maintained. Go to the Lord with David’s prayer, “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.”