“The Lord is my portion, says my soul” Lamentations 3:24
“For your Maker is your husband–the Lord Almighty is his name–the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth.” Isaiah 54:5
How many–appropriate to our circumstances, and endearing to our hearts–are the titles and relations of God! Is there one more sacred or precious to the Christian widow than this–“Your Maker is your HUSBAND.” The Lord brings us into a gracious and experimental acquaintance with Himself by the circumstances in which He places us. Just as we learn certain lessons in certain schools, so we learn the relationships which the Lord sustains to us in the positions in life to which those divine relations are the most appropriate. Thus, He may have written you a widow, a “widow indeed,” that He might stand to you in a new and more endeared relation–even as you stand to Him in a new and more dependent character–the relation of a HUSBAND–the character of a widow. As such He is your portion. Your bereavement is so crushing, your grief so profound, your desolation so vast, your loss so irreparable, the pen shrinks from even the attempt to describe it. The strong and beautiful staff is broken, the earthly counselor is perished, the tongue is mute that blessed you, the bosom cold that pillowed you, the eye dim that smiled upon you, and the whole landscape of life is draped in wintry coldness and gloom.
But the Lord is your Portion. “For your Maker is your husband–the Lord Almighty is his name.” Divorced by death from an earthly husband, you are united more especially and closely to a Divine and heavenly Husband–even to God in Christ, who stands now in a new and more endeared relation to you, as you have now a new and more sacred claim upon Him. The widow is an object of His especial regard. No being has He more closely fenced, none for whom He has discovered more tender care. Listen to some of His touching injunctions respecting you. “You shall not afflict the WIDOW.” “Plead for the WIDOW.” “He will establish the border of the WIDOW.” “He relieves the fatherless and the WIDOW.” Such is the divine Portion, under whose sheltering wing you have now come to rest. “Your Maker is your HUSBAND.” All, and infinitely more, that the fondest, most powerful, and faithful husband ever was, the Lord is to you. Let Him, as none other can, fill the vacant place. He can make even your solitary and desolate heart sing for joy. Espouse Christ afresh. Renew your ‘first love’ to Him, the love of your earliest union.
Trace nothing but love in the removal of a human object so dear; and know that love–divine, tender, unchangeable love–will guard, guide, and comfort you until wedded hearts, sundered by death, shall meet to renew a fellowship of love in the glorified presence of Jesus never to be sundered more.
Blessed Jesus! heavenly Husband! let me now be united only and forever to You! Give me Your Spirit to seal the sacred union. Enable me, as enjoined in the word, “to trust in God, and to continue in supplication and prayer night and day, to lodge strangers, to wash the saints’ feet, to relieve the afflicted, and diligently to follow every good work” (1 Tim. 5:5, 10). And thus striving by Your grace to glorify You in the solemn character of a God-fearing, God-trusting widow, enable me to rejoice in You as my portion–my Husband–believing that You will shield me in temptation, supply me in need, comfort me in sorrow, be with me in death, and give me a place at the marriage-supper of the Lamb.
In addition to the loneliness of widowhood, there may be the heavy charge and anxious responsibility of the parent. Your children, are half orphans–fatherless. Be it so. You have now a double claim on God’s care and provision; and that claim, offered in the prayer of faith, He will acknowledge. His promise is–and on that promise you must rely—“Leave your FATHERLESS CHILDREN, I will preserve them alive–and let your widows trust in me.” God will now be, in its fullest sense, your children’s Father. He will preserve them alive; in other words, He will provide for the life that now is, and will make them partakers of the life that is to come in the sovereignty of His grace. Have faith in God! He never yet broke a promise to a saint–He never will to you!
Octavius Winslow, 1870
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