March 31, 2019

As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him.
—Psalm 103:13

Look at the text, believing in its meaning and not saying, “That is in a human way.”61 For there is no other manner in which we can speak and no other manner in which God himself can speak if he means us to understand.
Hear it first for your encouragement, and hear it next for your imitation. Hear it, that you may be encouraged; God is not unfeelingly afflicting you, but he feels compassion for you. Hear it that you may go into the world with a like compassionate eye. If you ever have to say a rough word in fidelity or are required to utter a rebuke, do it in the way your heavenly Father does, having compassion even if you have to blame and gently delivering the expostulation that it grieves you to have to deliver at all.
Observe that the pity of the Lord extends to all those who fear him. There are none who are not fit objects of his compassion—the very best and brightest of his saints, the brave heroes, the well-instructed fathers, the diligent workers; God has compassion for you. Take that home to yourselves, because there is a beautiful lesson of humility in so accounting ourselves as pitiable creatures in the eyes of the Lord, even when we are at our best estate. I have seen some brothers and sisters who really did not seem at all fit for pity, because they imagined that the very roots of sin had been eradicated out of their hearts. Their characters and their conduct were akin to perfection in their own estimation. They had lived many weeks without a sin, except some wandering thought, but they could hardly refer to that as a fault. I pity people who talk so; if they are God’s children, all that God does with them is he has compassion for them, and well he may; for he says to himself, “Poor dear creatures; how little they know of themselves, and how different their estimate of perfection is from mine.” He still feels compassion for them.
The biggest children he has, the children who are most like their Father and have learned most of Jesus, may come to this text and see themselves depicted in it—“As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him.”
—C. H. Spurgeon