MM Meditation – Losses and Crosses

by Charles Haddon Spurgeon

My soul begin this wintry month with your God. The cold snows and the piercing winds all remind you that He keeps His covenant with day and night, and tend to assure you that He will also keep that glorious covenant which He has made with you in the person of Christ Jesus. He who is true to his Word in the revolutions of the seasons of this poor sin polluted world, will not prove unfaithful in his dealings with His own well beloved Son.
Winter in the soul is by no means a comfortable season, and if it be upon you just now it will be very painful to you: but there is this comfort, namely, that the Lord makes it.

He sends the sharp blasts of adversity to nip the buds of expectation:

He scatters the frost like ashes over the once verdant meadows of our joy:

He casts forth His ice like morsels freezing the streams of our delight.

He does it all, He is the great Winter King, and rules in the realms of frost, and therefore you cannot murmur.

 Losses, crosses, heaviness, sickness, poverty, and a thousand other ills, are of the Lord’s sending, and come to us with wise design. Frosts kill noxious insects, and put a bound to raging diseases; they break up the clods, and sweeten the soul. O that such good results would always follow our winters of affliction!

 How we prize the fire just now! how pleasant is its cheerful glow! Let us in the same manner prize our Lord, who is the constant source of warmth and comfort in every time of trouble. Let us draw near to Him, and in Him find joy and peace in believing. Let us wrap ourselves in the warm garments of His promises, and go forth to labours which befit the season, for it were ill to be as the sluggard who will not plough by reason of the cold; for he shall beg in summer and have nothing. “
To rightly endure the losses and crosses of life, we first have to accept and understand that these are from the Lord for our benefit. To waver and doubt, like a wave tossed in the wind, will cause us to chafe under the yoke, and cause us to find a human way of escape, rather than give in to the Creator’s divine plan of conforming us to the image of His own Son.

Does He not promise that our losses will be restored?

Does He not promise that He shares the burden of the crosses?

In the midst of the winter storms of life, we must begin on a firm foundation of faith, trusting the losses and crosses to the One who first suffered loss, and who alone suffered on the Cross.