Psalm 42:7 “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.”
Richard Foster writes: “Perhaps you have had the experience of hearing someone talk about faith and confidence and victory. In one sense all the words are right and the stories certainly sound good, but somehow something does not ring quite true. The problem is that you are listening to someone who is living on the fluff side of faith, someone who has not been baptized into the sacrament of suffering. Augustine notes wryly: “How deep in the deep are they who do not cry out of the deep?” But we have a Saviour who was ‘a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief’ (Isaiah 53:3). Jesus, we are told, ‘offered up prayers and supplication, with loud cries and tears’ (Hebrews 5:7).
I ask you: is the servant any better than the Master? There is a victory that is in Christ, but it goes through suffering, not around it. The triumphant note of the Apostle Paul is no triumphalism. His ‘we are more than conquerors’ comes on the other side of hardship and distress and persecution and famine and nakedness and peril and sword (Romans 8:35-39). The trenchant words of William Penn ring true to life: “No cross, no crown”. For disciples of Jesus, suffering simply comes with the territory. Thomas Kelly notes: “God, out of the pattern of His own heart, has planted the cross along the road of holy obedience.”
It is my experience that God always answers in the deep, never in the shallows of our soul. I write this during an extended time of bed rest with something resembling chronic fatigue. It’s no fun at all, but it draws me deeper, away from the shallows of my usual frenetic lifestyle.
So whatever negative stresses or strains you are under today, may you experience the positive flip side of them giving opportunity for you to be taken deeper with God himself.
Lord, I don’t want to settle for the shallows. Take me deeper today. Amen!
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