From the pen of Charles Spurgeon:

From the pen of Charles Spurgeon:

There are times in our spiritual lives when human counsel or sympathy, or even the ordinances of our faith, fail to comfort or help us. Why does our gracious God permit this? Perhaps it is because all too often we attempt to live without Him, and thus, in order to drive us to Himself, He takes everything from us upon which we have been in the habit of depending.

 

It is a blessing, however, to live at the source of "the fountain of life." Doing so keeps our "bottles" of flesh full, but when we run dry, nothing will help us, except calling to the Lord, as Hagar later did, saying, "You are the God who sees me" (Gen. 16:13). We are like the prodigal son (see Luke 15:11-32), for we are prone to love the pig troughs and their husks and to forget our Father's house. Remember, we can turn even our various Christian rituals and ordinances into pig troughs; they are blessed things, but once we put them in place of God, they have no value. Anything becomes an idol when it keeps us from God. Even "the bronze snake" should be despised as "Nehushtan" (2 Kings 18:4) if we worship it instead of God. [NIV footnote: "Nehushtan sounds like the Hebrew for bronze and snake and unclean thing."]

 

The prodigal son was never safer than when he was driven to his father's embrace, because his needs could be met nowhere else. Our Lord blesses us with "a famine through the land" (Amos 8:11) in order to make us seek after Him all the more. The best place for a Christian is one of living wholly and directly on God's grace--abiding where he stood at first--"having nothing, and yet possessing everything" (2 Cor. 6:10). And may we never think, even for a moment, that our standing before God is the result of our works of holiness, our self-denying discipline, our talents, or our feelings; but let us know that we are saved only because Christ offered full atonement and that we are complete only in Him. Then, trusting in nothing of our own, but resting solely on the merits of Jesus, His passion and holy life provide for us the only solid ground of confidence.

 

Beloved, when we are brought to the point of true thirst, we are sure to turn to "the fountain of life" with eagerness