Proverbs 18 and verse 14 The spirit of a man will sustain
his infirmity But a wounded spirit who can bear This is a very deep and Many
faceted consideration one that we don't give a lot of thought
to normally. But if a man suffers a loss,
an external loss of some kind, a death, that's something that
can devastate someone, to lose a loved one,
some type of a debilitation, You lose your sight or you lose
the ability to walk or something like that. Some people, I'd say many people
would be devastated by some kind of financial disaster that left
them destitute. Relationships gone wrong, how
hard that can be. A great failure of some kind when
someone fails at something important
to them. That can be very, very terrible. But it's strength of spirit.
It's what a man has or a woman has on the inside. It's their character. It's who they
are. the soul, the spirit that will sustain them or not. That's the hope, that's the need. When there's an external horror
of some kind, something that happens to you, it's what's in
you that will sustain you if you're to be sustained. We've all known people who have
suffered great loss and affliction that have done so with grace
and determination to honor the Lord and the strength of spirit
that's admirable and a joy to see. Some of us have also seen people's
spirit crushed. And it's a terrible thing to
see. I believe I've seen that maybe
two or three times in my whole life. And there's no real recovery
from that. Certainly, apart from the grace
of God, there's no recovery. You see, that's where hope resides,
is in the Spirit. That's what'll bear a man up
when everything else, or even something else that's vital,
precious to them is lost. Hope resides in the spirit, and
when hope is crushed, there's no recovery. There's nothing
to sustain a man. In the words of our text, there's
no sustaining you unless it comes from within. And for the true understanding of
our text, we have to talk about what a man's hope is. Why are
spirits crushed or not depends on what your hope is. That makes the difference because
you see, there is a difference. There's one man may lose everything
he has and go jump off a building. Many people have done that or
something like that. And another man may lose everything
he has and say, the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away.
Blessed be the name of the Lord. So there is a difference. And
the one man's hope was in money and material wealth. And when
he lost that, he lost his hope. His spirit was wounded and hope
was lost, but the other man lost everything just the same, but
his spirit sustained him because he had the spirit of Christ.
And money was not his hope, Christ was. I've seen a lady lose her husband
and completely transform before my eyes into someone ugly and very hard to
even be around. It was somebody I loved very
much, but I've seen another bear the same loss with grace and
resignation to the Lord's will and be an example to others in
that. The difference is not in the
strength of the person. The difference is the spirit
within them. But that difference is God. When an unbeliever is wounded
in spirit, without grace, they lose hope. And they can't bear
it, according to our text. Who can bear that? You can't
bear it. Cain said, my punishment is greater
than I can bear. 800,000 people commit suicide every year.
Have you ever wondered what depth of hopelessness you would have
to come to to end your own life? Every 40 seconds somebody does
that. Almost 50,000 in this country
alone. And how many lose their minds?
Why do homeless people sleep in a box under a bridge? or many committed to asylums. I'd say mostly because their
spirit is crushed and broken and there's no fixing that. Drugs can't fix that. They can
just mitigate the symptoms of it. Here's an important lesson in
this. A believer is wounded in spirit
deliberately by God. The Lord breaks our spirit on
purpose. And that's important now. And
he does it in the most deep and elemental way. You see, people
kill themselves or they lose their minds because of problems. God shows his people that we
are the problem. You can't sink lower than that. We lose all hope in ourselves,
but God, in his wonderful grace, shows us that all of our hope
is in Christ anyway. It always was. We just didn't
know. until he revealed it to us. And this is most important and
something we ought to be deeply thankful for and pray for for
others that we love. Somebody who knows
the Lord Jesus Christ and the forgiveness of sin. That problem,
our sin problem, Us being the problem, the problem of all problems
being done away with by Christ. We're healed. Our souls are healed. He broke our spirit, but he mended
it. He wounded our souls, but he
quickened us together with Christ. And we understand now, since
that, we see to be the problem. The things that other people
call problems, those aren't the problems. Those are the symptoms
of the problem. And you can't just treat the
symptoms. There has to be a rooting out
of the problem if there is to be true healing.
And that's why only God can heal a soul. When you know that the only real
problem is sin and that's been dealt with for you by Christ,
other things that people kill themselves over and lose hope
over, they're not the same way for us. We don't think of them
the same way. We don't look at them the same
way. They don't affect us like they do the hopeless and lost. And this manifests itself also
in small things that get people so twisted up, that get people
so bowed up and so consumed by a sense of revenge or getting
even or settling the score, bring out the ugly nature of people.
A believer tends to not get that upset when they get a scratch
on their, somebody scratched my car. You know, or the cable
man left a tire track in my lawn. I'm going to sue somebody. No,
not going to sue anybody over that. Somebody said something
about me that wasn't true. Join the club. It's not the same, you see, because
we understand what a problem is by the grace of God. what real trouble means. And
God has healed us of all of our soul's diseases. We know by the grace of God that
a man could gain this whole world and lose his own soul and the
whole world wouldn't profit him one whit. And so our soul being redeemed
by Christ Bought with his precious blood, the world has lost its
shine. And the temporal things, the
things that God calls for us the former things, like death
and depilitation and broken relationships and money, these things come
and go and our anchor holds. Because Christ is the anchor
of our soul. He has wounded our soul, but
then He healed it. He's broken our spirit, but then
He mended it and He is our hope now. And if He is your hope,
if in trouble and despair and heartache and pain and fear,
you look to Him, you can't lose your hope. You cannot lose it. Judas, when he realized that
he had betrayed the innocent blood, went out and hanged himself. But those in Acts chapter two
that heard that they had crucified the Lord of glory, in verse 41 of that chapter,
it says that they gladly received the word of Simon, who said that there's remission
of sins in Christ. and they were baptized in his
name. The difference is grace. The
difference is grace through faith. The difference is in here. The spirit, no matter what happens
to us or with us in this world, the spirit of Christ in us will
bear us up. We know that he is the one that
brings trouble. He is the one that causes the
heartache. But with his spirit in us, we're
able to rejoice. We're able to sing in the prisons. and to praise his holy name in
all affliction. The difference is grace, the
gift of God, the gift of God. Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable
gift.