From chastening to grace

You see what he is saying in the first part of Haggai 2:19?  The people of Judah at this point are on the brink of agricultural disaster, of real famine, and it is precisely at this point that the - Lord says, but from this day on, I will bless you—and you can mark it on your calendar. The point I want you to see is that when God turns to his people in his grace, he often does it at their deepest point of desperation and need. At the very point when they are on the brink of whatever kind of disaster it is —it is precisely at that point, when they can't go any lower, that the grace of God meets them. For instance; in the biography of Martyn Lloyd Jones, we read about a Welshman who was in London and he had become destitute. He had professed Christ at one time, but he had ruined his life and his family. He was in destitution and he was in utter hopelessness. He decided on this particular Sunday that he was going to go to Westminster Bridge and take his own life by plunging into the river Thames. He went to Westminster Bridge, but just as he was preparing to take his own life in that way, he heard the tolling of Big Ben and it reminded him it was the hour of public worship. He decided that he would go to Westminster Chapel and hear Dr. Lloyd Jones once more before he took his life. Dr. Lloyd Jones was leading in the morning prayer. It was often a very regular kind of prayer, remembering people in pain and the sick, but once in a while there was a different twist in it. On this particular day there was a petition that was not usually there. As this fellow went up those stairs and opened the door to go into the gallery, the first words he heard were God, have mercy on the backslider. Apparently those words hit him, and it was on that very day that he was restored and lived a consistent Christian life and died a faithful death in Christ. But right at the very abyss of his own hopelessness, at that point the grace of God touched him.

That comes through here in these verses. That is what the Lord is saying even to us, so frequently: that at the very depth of the very bottom of your own hopelessness, it is precisely then that my grace touches you. A hymn writer who was afflicted with madness and melancholy wrote Hymn 418 in your hymnbook:

Sometimes the light surprises the Christian while he sings;
it is the Lord who rises with healing in His wings.
When comforts are declining, He gives the soul again
a season of clear shining, to cheer it after rain.¹

Dale Ralph Davis