How often we sink into those dark and dismal places where we are, in our feelings, as dead men. Has sin never slain you? Has the iron never pierced you soul? Has the accuser never knocked the wind of God out of your soul, so to speak? Has Satan never come with his darts of fire, and all the
firebrands of hell, and sought to scorch away the leadings and feelings of grace and even blot out the very desires within for life? And those times when you seemed to sink in your soul into such a
miserable emptiness of spirit, that it felt as though you
were devoid of all grace, as if it were an impossibility for grace ever again
to renew and revive your soul? Here, my friends, you were in the pallor of death. I have been here myself, more than once,
that's why I can describe it to you. Because I've been there; we all have.
Yet even with all this, there is, within the lamb, that longing
look, a heartfelt groan, a heaving sigh, and a resisting unto the blood, not an utter giving up, nor sinking down into miserable despair. God the Spirit keeps alive his work upon the soul, and Christ, Himself as the resurrection of life comes into our bosom, raising us up and drawing us to Himself, renewing and reinvigorating our lagging, lifeless spirits with fresh
movements of that Life which is in Him alone. Here, we see within us, each of us, and all of us, a personal, individual consequence of his resurrection, "Whosoever believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live."
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