Christ’s Companionship in Sorrow

Do not keep this sacred thought of Christ’s companionship in sorrow for the larger trials of life.  If the mote in the eye be large enough to annoy you, it is large enough to bring out His sympathy; and if the grief be too small for Him to compassionate and share, it is too small for you to be troubled by it.

If you are ashamed to apply that divine thought, “Christ bears this grief with me,” to those petty molehills that you magnify into mountains sometimes, think to yourself that then it is a shame for you to be stumbling over them.  But, on the other hand, never fear to be irreverent or too familiar in the thought that Christ is willing to bear, and help you to bear, the pettiest, the minutest, and most insignificant of the daily annoyances that may come to ruffle you.  He will do more, he will bear it with you, for if so be that we may suffer with Him, He suffers with us.

-       Alexander MacLaren[1]

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[1] Alexander MacLaren was a Baptist minister. Born in Glasgow in 1826 to Baptist parents, he was baptized in 1840 and trained at Stepney College. He died in 1910. Ian Sellers,  in the New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, describes his life:

He ministered successfully at Portland Chapel, Southampton (1846-58), and Union Chapel, Manchester (1858-1903), where he acquired the reputation of “the prince of expository preachers.” His sermons drew vast congregations and his methods of subdivision and analogies drawn from nature and life have been widely imitated ever since. In the pulpit he expounded evangelical certainties, yet his writings and private conversations show him prepared to accept a critical position. His attitudes are thus ambiguous, though Spurgeon excepted him from the ‘Downgraders.’ MacLaren was twice president of the Baptist Union and chairman of its Twentieth Century Fund and the first president of the Baptist World Alliance (1905). He strove unsuccessfully to unite the Baptist and Congregational denominations, but saw the establishment of many “Union” churches at a local level.