Spurgeon, Christ's friendship with His elect, and His ability to sympathize with their sufferings
I had a bunch of random thoughts last night after reading one of Spurgeon's sermons so I thought I would arrange them homiletically and then put them here on my lame blog that no one reads.
When comforting the "weary and heavy laden" as a hymn we've all sang puts it so well, pastors commonly point persons to the resurrection, the victory of Christ, God's creation of the new heavens and new earth, death defeated and tears wiped away. While this pastoral approach is wonderful, Spurgeon used a different one in the same context, (not to the exclusion of proclaiming Christ's victory over the grave, of course). Spurgeon found that focusing on Christ crucified, as the Man of Sorrows, and looking towards Christ's compassion for suffering people to be an unspeakable comfort. In suffering, it is not so much that we draw nearer to Christ, becoming more like him and leaning fully on Him. While this is undoubtedly true, in such times, truly, Christ draws near to us to walk with us in our troubles. And not only to walk with us, but to stand firm with us through them.
As Spurgeon says so beautifully:
"Jesus is touched, not with a feeling of your strength, but of your infirmity. Down here, poor, feeble nothings affect the heart of their great High Priest on high, who is crowned with glory and honor. As the mother feels with the weakness of her babe, so does Jesus feel with the poorest, saddest, and weakest of his chosen."1
It is one thing that our Lord takes note of the trials of His elect, that He is concerned with their distresses, but it is even more of a comfort to know that in His incarnation He is able to be touched with the feeling of our infirmities (Hebrews 4:15, KJV). The Jesus of Hebrews 7:25 who saves to the uttermost and always lives to make intercession for you, Christian, is the same Jesus who not merely has a "passing pity" on those suffering, but a depth of feeling in which literally means to be moved in His most inward parts to have compassion on those persons. Christ does not simply operate in compassion, but actually feels the inner turmoil and emotions of the down-trodden. In the synoptics, when the sick appealed to Jesus, as Warfield puts it, "his heart responded with a profound feeling of pity for them. His compassion fulfilled itself in the outward act; but what is emphasized by the term employed to express our Lord’s response is . . . the profound
internal movement of his emotional nature.”2 Here's my friend Isaac talking doing a word study on this topic.
"Our Lord is not only tender of nature, but quick of understanding as to the infirmities of men."
After taking all of this into consideration, I look towards myself. Introspection. I see that the fall has ruined me, all of me, all of my flesh. My compassion towards those hurting is not perfect, it is often lukewarm. My sympathy for the abuse of others, while certainly there (praise the Lord) is limited. My tender-heartedness and kind nature only comes from the Holy Spirit, who I often neglect to yield to.
A thought experiment
Imagine your own social sphere or relational circle, with true intimacy unadulterated (non-sexual, however) in the middle. As we look around the circle, we see friends who we love, but aren't necessarily intimate with. Getting closer to the middle, we see a few particular friends, maybe it is a pastor, who really "gets us", and it is a mutual delight to be able to spend time and open up with this person. For many, the people closest to the center is their spouse. These are people God has blessed us with immensely, and for that we should all be truly grateful. However, there is an issue. If we stop here with the experiment, I believe ultimately we will leave in despair. Why? Because many will be forced to realize that they don't have that one "true" friend, someone that they could go to with anything, and not be turned away. The person who you really feel safe with. Safe in the strictest sense, not just a feeling of mere temporal protection from momentary dangers. Even worse, what about those people who start to realize that even that one intimate friend they have may love you dearly, but isn't perfect. To bolster this idea, picture the perfect friend here on earth. Even then, they are still finite, they are still sinful, they cannot act in perfect accordance with God's prescriptive will, for friends not to turn away friends, for eyebrows not to be raised, for friends to feel safe, really safe, about everything.
We must admit, surely even with our closest of close friends, we don't feel fully comfortable divulging everything exhaustively about our lives. We love them, we sing praises with them, we entrust our cares to them, and for those in marriage, even more extreme intimacy is shown. Yet, at the deepest heart level, I think we all know our friends are not perfect, they do not always entrust themselves to us exhaustively, that is to say, at least not in the fullest meaning of the term. Truly, if we stop here with the experiment, we would end in despair.
And to make it worse, I know that I am not this friend to the people I love the most. I have my breaking point, I have my limits. As mentioned previously, the fall has ruined me. Sure, I can think of the times I have been a dear friend to someone hurting, but I can also think of the parts that make me say "Why would God save someone like me?" All of our human friendships have this limit. Human friendships are amazing. Human friendships have been the means by which God has used to save me from horrible things. And I have been used as a friend by God to comfort persons in the middle of horrible things. Yet, still, human friendships have limits. But what if you had a friend at the center of the social sphere? A friend who would never raise his eyebrows, a friend that has no limit on what they can withstand, a friend that has no finite stopping point in which they'd put up with you. Well, you do.
All kinds of degrees of friendship needs are met in Christ.
Christ’s heart for us means that he will be our never-failing friend no matter what friends we do or do not enjoy on earth. He offers us a friendship that gets underneath the pain of our loneliness. A friendship that is truly unconditional. While pain here on earth does not instantly go away, even after counsel with the closest of friends, its sting is made fully bearable by the far deeper friendship of Jesus. He walks with us through every moment. He knows the pain of being betrayed by a friend, but he will never betray us. This was Spurgeon's comfort to His congregation.
Jesus’s friends are those to whom he has opened up his deepest purposes.
Jesus opens up His deepest purposes to His friends, He did not filter through to His disciples what the Father had given to Him and what He hadn't, He told them everything. "for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). Likewise, because of this, we can trust that we can lay on Christ our deepest purposes and incongruities, and He will not turn us away.
"who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God."4
Does this mean we shouldn't abide in the counsel or comfort that our closest brothers and sisters in Christ give us? Moreover, does this mean we should be tepid in giving comfort to those in pain, out of worry that our help would be limited? Can we not agree with 2 Corinthians 1 because we are "limited" in our friendship? Certainly not. What this means is this: When we do comfort others, it is not our own doing, it is the Spirit of Jesus working in us. In situations like this, when someone is crying and pouring out their hurts to us, we must seek to point them towards Christ, the one who has no limits. We must pray that the Lord would use is in this, to be able to direct people towards the Good Shepherd, who has a deep and special love for His elect people. A love that is made possible by the incarnate one Himself suffering. The Man of Sorrows.
In another one of Spurgeon's sermons, titled "The Unrivaled Friend" he writes: "The love of man to man is sustained by something drawn from the object of love, but the Love of Christ to us has its deep springs within Himself. … If it had to subsist upon us, and what we do, and what we merit, ah, it would always be at the lowest conceivable ebb! But since it leaps up from the great deep of the Divine Heart, it never changes, and by His Grace, it never shall!"
To quote from Ligonier's Tabletalk magazine: "As wonderful as human friendships are, they are never perfect in this fallen world. Even our most self-sacrificial relationships tend to be rooted in what we find admirable in another person. Our friendships are harmed and often destroyed when our friends reveal their flaws. Sadly, this means that our friendships are often quite tenuous, prompting us to look for a friendship that is secure because it is not based on what the other person finds lovely in us. The only one who can provide this friendship is Jesus Christ."
"our Lord is tender to us without any effort; not only because of the reasons I have mentioned, but because he has made our cause his own. We are his friends; and does not a friend act tenderly to a friend? We are more than that, we are married to him; and shall not a husband be tender to his spouse? More than that, “we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones”; and shall not the head feel every pain of the members? It must be so. Jesus has so identified himself with his own redeemed, that he must evermore be in living, loving, lasting sympathy with them."6
1. Spurgeon, C. H. (1998). Vol. 36: Spurgeon's Sermons: Volume 36, Sermon NO. 2148
2. Warfield, Person and Work of Christ, 97–98.
3. Spurgeon, C. H. (1998). Vol. 36: Spurgeon's Sermons: Volume 36, Sermon NO. 2148
4. 2 Corinthians 1:4
5. Spurgeon, C. H. (1998). Vol. 15: Spurgeon's Sermons: Volume 15, Sermon NO. 899
6. Spurgeon, C. H. (1998). Vol. 36: Spurgeon's Sermons: Volume 36, Sermon NO. 2148