Taking our cross to God, and casting all our care upon him.
Deep afflictions seem to pass beyond the reach of human aid. Whether it be bereavement, or sense of sin, or coming trouble of any heavy kind, the profoundly afflicted soul for the most part feels human hell) vain, human sympathy impertinent, and finds no refuge, no consolation, except in pouring itself out before God. We know that "he careth for us" (1 Peter 6:7); we know that he can understand us. It is true wisdom to fly to him, and put our griefs before him. Only let us be sure that, like Hezekiah, we "spread" the whole before the Lord (Isaiah 37:14), that we keep nothing back—no dark corner of our heart, no "secret place" of our complex nature, no hidden act of our life. Unless we be honest with God, we have no claim to his help. He hates such as "dissemble in their hearts" (Jeremiah 42:20) before him. The best human counsellor can give us little aid unless we "make a clean breast" of our difficulties to him. So God will have us "make a clean breast"—not for his information, since he "understandeth our thoughts long before" (Psalms 139:2), but that we may be fit recipients of his grace—that his healing balms may have power to work on us and comfort us and effect our cure.
Faith neither blind to seemingly adverse facts, nor chary of admitting them.
Sennacherib thought to destroy Hezekiah's trust in Jehovah by an array of facts which he regarded as having the force of an induction. Hezekiah fully admitted the facts ("Of a truth, Lord, the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the nations, and their countries"), but did not suffer his faith to be shaken by them. His faith rested upon another distinct set of facts, which Sennacherib's did not and could not invalidate. The truth is that inductions, being never complete, are never demonstrative—they do but establish a probability, and the first adverse fact that can be adduced against them upsets them, or rather upsets the general conclusion that has been drawn from them. Faith, therefore, has no need to be afraid of any amount of seemingly adverse facts, drawn from the region of the sensible. For faith's facts lie mainly in a different sphere, and are untouched by the facts of sense, however numerous. The miracle of our Lord's resurrection rests, for instance, first upon prophecy, secondly upon testimony, thirdly upon vision (Revelation 1:18). No amount of ascertained facts that others have not risen, can touch the sufficiently established fact that our Lord did rise. There is no even seeming clashing or contradiction, until the physicist proceeds to draw from his army of facts the general conclusion: "Therefore no men rise." But this conclusion is one that he has no right to draw; it is illogical; the data do not entitle him to infer more than that" Most men do not rise," or rather, "have not yet risen." And so generally with the facts that are adduced against the dicta of faith. They are no disproof of that which they are alleged to disprove. Faith, real faith, is always ready to admit the facts, when once they are established as facts. It disputes the illogical conclusions drawn from the facts, and the ingenious hypotheses projected from the brains of scientists to account for them.