13. And where this has not been done the Lord has by a heavenly art made your bitter waters sweet by giving you more satisfaction with the divine will, more submission, more acquiescence in what the Lord has ordained. After all, this is the most effective remedy. If I cannot bring my circumstances to my mind, yet if God helps me to bring my mind to my circumstances the matter is made right. There is a degree of sweetness about pain, and poverty, and shame when once you feel, “The loving Lord ordained all this for me: my tribulation is of his appointing.” Then the soul, feeling that the affliction comes from a Father’s hand, accepts it, and kicks against the pricks no longer. Surely, then, the bitterness of life or of death will be past when the mind is subdued to the Eternal will. These people said, “What shall we drink?” and they would have concluded that Moses was mocking them if he had answered, “You shall drink the bitter water.” They would have said, “We cannot bear it; we remember the sweet water of the Nile; and we cannot endure this nauseous stuff.” But Moses would have said, “Yes, you will drink that, and nothing else but that, and it will become to you all that you need.” Even so, beloved, you may have quarrelled with your circumstances, and said, “I must have a change; I can no longer bear this trial.” Has not the Lord by his grace changed your mind, and so influenced your will that you have really found comfort in what was uncomfortable, and contentment in what made you discontented? Have you never said when under tribulation, “I could not have believed it: I am perfectly happy under my trial, and yet when I looked forward to it I dreaded it beyond measure. I said it would be the death of me, but now I find that by these things men live, and the life of my spirit is in all this.” We exclaim with Jacob, “All these things are against me,” but the Lord gives us more grace, and we see that all things work together for good, and we bless the Lord for his afflicting hand. So you see the Lord Jehovah heals our bitter waters, and makes our circumstances endurable to our sanctified minds.
14. Brethren, all this which you have experienced should be to you a proof of God’s power to make everything that is bitter-sweet. The depravity of your nature will still yield to the operations of his grace: the corruptions that are within you will still be subdued, and you shall enter into the fullest communion with God in Christ Jesus. I know you shall, because the Lord is unchangeable in power, and what he has done in one direction he can and will do in another. Your circumstances were so terrible, and yet God helped you; and now your sins, your inbred sins, which are so dreadful, he will help you against them, and give you power over them. You shall overcome the power of evil: by his grace you shall be sanctified, and you shall reveal the sweetness of holiness instead of the bitterness of self. Can you not believe it? Does not God’s power exhibited in providence around you prove that he has enough power to do great things within you by his grace? Moreover, should not this healing of your circumstances be to you a pledge that God will heal you with respect to your inner spirit? He who brought you through the sea and drowned your enemies will also drown your sins, until you shall sing, “The depths have covered them: there is not one of them left.” He who turned your Marah into sweetness will still turn all your sense of sin into a sense of pardon: all the bitterness of your regret and the sharpness of your repentance shall still be turned into the joy of faith, and you shall be full of delight in the perfect reconciliation which comes by the precious blood of Christ.Sustaining providences are sure pledges of grace to the saints. The sweetened water is a picture of a sweetened nature: I had almost said it is a type of it. God binds himself by the gracious deliverances of his providence to give you equal deliverances of grace. It is joyful to say, “He is the Lord who healed my circumstances,” but how much better to sing of his name as “The Lord who heals you.” Do not be satisfied until you reach to that; but do be confident that he who healed Marah will heal you; he who has helped you to rejoice in him in all your times of trouble will sustain you in all your struggles with sin, until you shall more sweetly and more loudly praise his blessed name.