""Therefore say: 'This is what the sovereign Lord says: Although I have removed them far away among the nations and have dispersed them among the countries, I have been a little sanctuary for them among the lands where they have gone.'"
Ezekiel 11:16 NET
Beloved of God, if this Lord's Day finds you worshipping alone or with only your household, take heart from that word of the Lord. I pray you would indeed find Him to be "a little sanctuary" in this time of isolation and exile from the house of God.
In addition, I offer you these words of encouragement from 19th-century English pastor Charles Spurgeon. He struggled with the autoimmune disease gout, which regularly kept him from attending worship services in the church he pastored. His wife also suffered with chronic illness that rarely permitted her to hear her husband preach in person. These thoughts encouraged me. I pray they bring hope and comfort to your heart too.
"Now, notice, God says to his people, when they are far away from the temple and Jerusalem, 'I will be to them as a little sanctuary.' Not, 'I have loved the people, and I will build them a synagogue, or I will lead others to build for them a meeting-place; but I myself will be to them as a little sanctuary.' The Lord Jesus Christ himself is the true place of worship for saved souls. 'There is no chapel in the place where I live,' says one. I am sorry to hear it, but chapels are not absolutely essential to worship, surely. Another cries, 'There is no place of public worship of any sort where the gospel is fully and faithfully preached.' This is a great want, certainly, but still, do not say, 'I am far away from a place of worship.' That is a mistake. No godly man is far away from a holy place. What is a place of worship? I hope that our bed-chambers are constantly places of worship. Place of worship? Why, it is one's garden where he walks and meditates. A place of worship? It is the field, the barn, the street, when one has the heart to pray. God will meet us by a well, a stone, a bush, a brook, a tree. He has great range of trysting-places when men's hearts are right….
"Now, dear friends, God says, 'I will be to them as a little sanctuary,' that is to say, an accessible throne of mercy, an accessible place of mercy. When men have no mercy on you, go to God. When you have no mercy on yourself -- and sometimes you have not -- run away to God. Draw near to him, and he will be to you as a little sanctuary….
"If at this time you have lost many of the comforts of this life, and seem bereaved of friends, then find in God your 'little sanctuary.' Go home to your chamber with holy faith and humble love, and take him to be your all in all, and he will be all in all to you. Pray after this fashion -- 'O Lord, so work in me by thy Spirit that I may find thee in all things, and all things in thee!'
"The Lord has ways of weaning us from the visible and the tangible, and bringing us to live upon the invisible and the real, in order to prepare us for that next stage, that better life, that higher place, where we shall really deal with eternal things only. God blows out our candles, and makes us find our light in him, to prepare us for that place in which they need no candle, for the glory of God is their light; and where, strange to tell, they have no temple, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple thereof. The holy leads to the holiest: living upon God here leads to living with God hereafter. Oh, that God would gradually lift us up above all the outward, above all the visible, and bring as more and more into the inward and unseen! If you do not know anything about this, ask the Lord to teach you this riddle; and if you do know it, ask him to keep you to the life and walk of faith, and never may you be tempted to quit it for the way of sight and feeling. For Christ's sake we ask it. Amen."
From Charles Haddon Spurgeon, "A Little Sanctuary"
A Little Sanctuary accessed August 4, 2024, at 12:27 PM CDT
