Sunday Spurgeon

What a grand day that was for Elijah when he saw the fire come down upon his bullock, in answer to his prayer, and he cried in holy wrath, “Take the prophets of Baal, let not one escape.”

I think I see the grim pleasure in the Prophet’s face as he saw them taken to the brook and slain. Behold his exhilaration as he binds up his loins and runs before Ahab’s chariot, keeping pace with the monarch’s horses with an agility in which soul and body joined. And then, what happens a day or two afterwards? In the wilderness, all alone, he has fled from a woman’s face, and you hear him cry, “Let me die, I am no better than my fathers.” Yes, the man who never was to die at all, prayed that he might die!

Just so, high exaltations involve deep depressions. But what was under Elijah when he fell down in that fainting fit under the juniper tree? Why, underneath were the everlasting arms! So shall it be with you who are called thus to fall into the depths of depression—the eternal arms shall be lower than you are! Brethren, there are many such occasions in which the spirit sinks sometimes through a sense of sin, through disappointments, through desertions of friends, through beholding the decay of the Lord’s work, through a lack of success in our ministry, or a thousand other mischiefs which may all cast us low.

Yes, as low as Jonah, who went, he says, to the bottoms of the mountains. But when Jonah went to the lowest, underneath him were the everlasting arms! And when the earth, with her bars, was about him forever, and the weeds were wrapped about his head he came up again—because still lower than he was the hand of God—the everlasting arms were underneath him still.