When spiritual famine is gnawing at our hearts, and all is desolate and forsaken around us; when sickness has prostrated us, or death has cut down our companions around us, till the world seems empty, and a hue of decay and death tinges all the objects which we look at; when darkness and disappointment and disaster all weigh upon our spirits, and God is all that is left to us--how should we live were it not for the cake and the water cruse? How do we grasp the very means which we before had too often slighted.
We call up the neglected promises, and there is life in them. Our troubled thoughts find vent in earnest prayer; and whether we lie stretched on the bed of languishing, or wrestle in the closet, or meditate in the sanctuary, we find the water cruse is beside us, and we are kept from fainting. Oh, it is when, under the load of crushing sorrow and dejection, the wanderer sinks down by the shrub of the desert, it is then he prizes the cruse and the cake. Many of you, I doubt not, were you to call to mind the season when you valued most the presence of the Master, when you wrestled nearest the mercy-seat and experienced the most surprising deliverances, would point to the days of sore trial and weariness, when you gave up all hope, and when, turned out from the world, you sat alone and sighed under the juniper and waited for death. There you fed upon the bread of life. And though you felt that you were pilgrims in the desert, you still felt that you were not forsaken.
But, brethren, we need not only the provisions made for us in the means of grace, but we need also a friendly hand to help us to partake of them. We need our attention called to them with a voice that can reach the inner ear; for too often, with all our distress and dejection, there comes also a lethargy and insensibility which, if unbroken, must at last prove fatal. The care-worn prophet, with all his wretchedness and despair, still reclined his head and slept. Hungry and weak and way-worn, a drowsiness nevertheless came over him, and he must needs be aroused if he was to be strengthened. The cake is there, and the cruse of water is there, and the coals are glowing, but the pilgrim heeds them not. What a figure is this of the complaining and dejected Christian who is starving for the spiritual food that is beside him, and at the same time sleeping in his sorrow. Despondency and unbelief have so paralyzed his heart that he takes no nourishment, even though the promises and the Sabbath and the sanctuary are before him; but they are dead to him, they are useless to us all, so long as we sleep on.