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My leanness, my leanness, woe unto me!
(Philpot, "Confiding
Trust and Patient Submission")
"My leanness, my leanness, woe unto me!"
Isaiah 24:16
There is no more continual source of lamentation
and mourning to a child of God than a sense of his
own barrenness. He would be fruitful in every good
word and work. But when he contrasts . . .
his own miserable unprofitableness,
his coldness and deadness,
his proneness to evil,
his backwardness to good,
his daily wanderings and departings from God,
his depraved affections,
his stupid frames,
his sensual desires,
his carnal projects, and
his earthy grovelings,
with what he sees and knows should be the fruit
that should grow upon a fruitful branch in the only
true Vine, he sinks down under a sense of his own
wretched barrenness and unfruitfulness.
Yet what was the effect produced by all this upon
his own soul? To wean him from the creature; to
divert him from looking to any for help or hope, but
the Lord Himself. It is in this painful way that the
Lord often, if not usually, cuts us off from all human
props, even the nearest and dearest, that we may
lean wholly and solely on Himself.
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