To be near unto God - pagina 452

And even

in such moments, faith that is not continues to shine through. After his deep fall David felt the anxious estrangement. He realized that as long as God looked upon his sin, no restoration of fellowship was possible, and ''Hide thy face from my therefore he prayed: sins, and blot out all mine iniquities" (Ps. 51:9). He became inwardly conscious that his polluted heart was bound to estrange him from God, and therefore he pleaded in such touching and beautiful terms: ''Create in me a clean heart, God, and renew a right spirit within me." He walked in deep darkness, and so he prayed that the light of

understood,

God's countenance might pour down its beams again upon him. But though he bruised his guilty head against the wall of separation, in that same striking moment the sense of faith was alive in him, that behind that wall the Holy Ghost still reached out to comfort him, and therefore he prayed not: "Give me back thy Holy Spirit," but altogether differently: "Take not thy Holy Spirit from me."

Thus the soul that is troubled and wretched holds fast to faith. It does not understand this in itself; it does not grasp this; but it feels that grace does not let go, that grace is in God, that God with his grace still operates within, and it only fears that this grace, which is in God himself, might be removed from it. And against this fear the soul prays, supplicates, cries: O God, stay by me, stay in me. Let me not go forever. And this supplication keeps on, in earnestness and in sincerity, until at length in unspeakable compassion the door of the temple opens itself again. 444

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