Victory Over Trouble

Greetings, my brother, my sister. I’m Brother Ed. It’s my pleasure to be with you today. And today we’re digging into another writing by our dear brother, G.D. Watson. Uh, this one is entitled Victory Over Trouble. The Word declares that we were born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Troubles of various kinds and degrees must be incident in a world like and with creatures such as we are. All trouble will serve as a minister of woe or will according to the attitude of our hearts toward God. There are many crises in our lives.

Some are physical, others are mental or social or spiritual or financial. Some are mostly external, others are mostly internal. Just as there are mountain peaks of blessing which come a few times in our lives and from whose altitudes we can survey across our entire history and the history of others, so there are deep ravines and seasons of excessive testing when every faculty of the whole being is seemingly stretched to its utmost tension.

Childhood has its epochal periods of grief or joy or privilege or blight. Then there are crises in our grown-up and middle life in which all the currents of our life and destiny are forced through a very narrow channel where the waters rush with great depth and speed. And as these currents shoot through these rapids, they take a turn of eternal destiny for blessing or cursing.

It often happens that there are crises reserved for old age. Many of the greatest Bible characters waded through deep waters of trial in their old age. We have no measurements by which we can tell all of God’s government over us. He is an infinite sovereign and gives no account of His ways, and we so often forget that we are only infinitesimal creatures lifted up only a few days ago out of the depths of non-existence and that we have also have absolutely no rights except such as a loving Creator gives to us.

We only see the outer edges of His dominion over us as creatures. He manipulates blessing and sorrow, failure and success, trouble and happiness in His administration with a loving skill that stretches away beyond the farthest conjecture. But when we have passed through manifold and indescribable troubles on various lines and come out, we recognize the unseen hand of God and that it has been with us every step of the way.

A beautiful, tender, affectionate wisdom has been managing the whole thing, and we are permitted to look back as it were through the borrowed eyes of infinite love. We then discover many precious truths of victory which we may remember for daily practice or give to others for their encouragement and edification.

Number one, when in trouble, do not blame others. Do not begin charging our mishaps and grief to other people or even to the agency of evil spirits, although all these things may have been important factors in the case. To blame others for our trouble will work many evils. It prevents the thorough renouncement and humiliation of ourselves, which is the very condition of having the favor of God.

It also sours the heart and embitters the mind, clouds the natural faculties, and thus poisons the very fountains of our spirits, which God designed shall be sweetened and mellowed by the very trouble that we are disposed to complain of. Above all things, there must be not even a thought of or charging our disasters on God.

Even to suspicion, God’s love of us will create something like a lump of iron in the heart and stop our victory for a long while, if not forever. To lay the blame for any of our troubles on others protects the self-life in us and nourishes self-esteem and keeps alive a subtle form of self-righteousness, which is the very thing that trouble should be the means of extirpating.

Anything that ministers to the protecting of the self-life will only prolong our troubles. Our quickest way out is to reach our nothingness. Number two, we can never cure our troubles by seeking consolation from others. Poor nature will instinctively turn to friends or supposed friends, to someone on whom the mind seems to lean instinctively for support and comfort.

But millions and millions in all ages have to learn the lesson that every creature, be he ever so rich or wise or good, is as frail and insignificant as ourselves. Sooner or later, every soul must learn this. It is a terrible disenchantment and always takes the heart by surprise.

To wake up and find out that our fellow creatures cannot deliver us is a catastrophe like the smashing of a great palace over our heads. But when our beautiful ideals of all creature consolation are torn from Though the storm of disappointment seems to beat heavily, we find it was the very thing to show us the great blue dome of God’s consolation stretching away beyond all the structures that created comfort or help.

Even if creatures were willing to lend us all their assistance, their consolation cannot be deep enough to meet the needs of our whole being. Were they all ever so liberal or sympathetic in their loving words, there are unsounded deeps in the needs of a perplexed and lacerated soul which can never be reached by human words or creature love.

There is something in a fellow creature that in the very necessity of things will disappoint us sooner or later. God has made us for Himself and so constituted us that He alone can be our deliverer and our true, unfailing, never disappointing friend, and it must grieve the loving heart of God to see us in times of distress turning in the least away from Him and seeking comfort and victory from our fellow creatures.

God’s right hand is the only hiding place. His loving bosom is our only home, and all our fellow creatures have their own troubles, many perhaps worse than ours. They each have a little world of their own, crowded with checkered and thrilling interest, so it is impossible for them to have a surplus of strength as to bear their own burdens and at the same time give us all the supplies which we need.

The fact is our needs are so numerous that none but a divine being can meet them. As long as people in trouble are looking to their fellows for relief, they only prolong the misery. The Holy Ghost has said ages ago, “Cursed is the man that trusteth in man.” Not that we are to despise the sympathy and help of creatures, but there is something in the very nature of trusting in a creature or looking to him for deliverance which seems to blight the soul.

Number three, we cannot get victory over trouble by trying to cure ourselves or by mustering up a mere fortitude of our willpower. There are many foolish lectures of this kind delivered to people in trouble, such as, “Brace up. Be a man. Remember who you are. Exert your willpower against your disasters,” and such like talk, which is the highest philosophy that poor souls know who have no God to go to.

How many thousands of troubled people in the world are, to use a worldly phrase, grinning and bearing it, relying on the resources of their own strength to tide them through seas of trouble? But with all their self-mustered courage, sooner or later they will collapse and go down with the tide.

There is no victory except to be drawn from a divine, external, loving spirit. This is number four. The Holy Spirit prescribes a remedy for people in tribulation when he says, “Blessed is he that considereth the poor. The Lord will deliver him in time of trouble.” A multitude of persons passing through great distress have taken heed to this prescription and diligently helped out the poor and relieved their needs, and almost immediately God has wrought strangely a beautiful deliverance for them.

Many years ago, I knew a wealthy man who was passing through great distress and trouble on several lines. He felt nearly crushed to the earth

and turned to God in an agony of prayer. In looking into his Bible, he saw those words, “He that considereth the poor, the Lord will deliver him in time of trouble.” He at once rose from his knees and went to his minister and inquired for the name and address of the very poor connected with the congregation.

He then ordered his wagon and had it loaded with food and raiment and went to those families and supplied them abundantly. His heart became light and cheerful, and he told me that in a few days God wrought most marvelously in his behalf. I have acted on these principles several times and found, and found God’s peculiar smile.

The principle of self-sacrifice, not as a beautiful theory, but carried out in sober actual practice, is the very essence of the Spirit of Jesus, so much so that the apostle tells us it is preeminently the law of Christ, and he tells us to bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the special law of Christ.

There is a beautiful way out from the wilderness of affliction, and many times by simply turning aside from our distresses and looking after the welfare of others who probably are suffering more than we are. Number five, and all those who are in great distress will shut themselves in to much secret prayer with a fixed determination to find out God’s will and a deep, settled purpose to obey Him at all cost.

And if they will take time to search His Word and pray wholeheartedly, accompanied by fasting, God will most assuredly reveal Himself to such souls. Nothing but great trouble will plow up the deepest depths of the human heart, and we will find when we pray through to victory that God has been perfectly true and loving and inexpressibly tender in all His dealings with us.

He has never forsaken us for one moment, even when He has seemed far away. No human remedies will meet the demands. The sooner we get perfectly dead to all creature helps, to the aid of earthly friends, and to all our own resources, and let ourselves drop into the fathomless bosom of God and take Him in deep reality as our personal, private, and particular friend, seeking everything alone from Him, the better for us, for this is where we must come in the end.

There is no sorrow on Earth, nor trouble possible to a human being, that cannot be cured by the tender, boundless love of God imparted to us by the blessed Holy Spirit. It is impossible to tell how much we can be filled with the love of God. It can fill the mind with exceeding light and beauty and fill the heart with calmness and sweetness and rest.

It can fill the activities with with zeal, refinement, and a discreet propriety. It can transform every part of our being, within and without, until grief and trouble and anxiety of all shapes and all degrees vanish away beneath the ocean of Christlike love and make even the remembrance of all troubles a sweet means of grace to draw the soul deeper into God.