God's Arrows

Wenceslaus Hollar/Source

For your arrows have sunk into me, and your hand has come down on me. 

Psalm 38:2

What has God wrought in you? Has he even given this conviction to you, not a little fight now and then, or a qualm of your conscience? The devil and natural conscience may do this, but when it is wrought in your heart by the Spirit of God, it goes to the bottom, the arrow sticks fast, and a poor soul sometimes endeavors to pray, endeavors to pull it out, all but in vain. Has God wrought this in your soul? Now, when God works this change in the soul, the devil is always busy tempting the poor convicted sinner to despond, if not despair. Ignorant formalists, who are some of the worst people under heaven, when a person is under conviction, think the devil is got into them, whereas the devil is in themselves; for the devil hoodwinks people, and he endeavors to persuade them that there is no harm done to God by sinning against him. It is God who wounds the soul, and it is he that heals it. Has God wrought in you not only a deep and humbling sense of the outward acts of sin but a humbling sense of the inward corruptions of your heart? Has he led you beyond the streams, through the powerful operations of the Spirit, to the fountainhead? When he has done so, then are we Christians indeed; and this cannot be the work of the devil, which never did, nor do I know whether he can, show a person the inward corruptions of his heart; it must be the Spirit of God.

George Whitefield Daily Readings, Randall J. Pederson, ed., Christian Focus Publications, 2010, August 31 reading.