Promised Comfort

“Let your steadfast love comfort me according to your promise to your servant” (Psalm 119:76).  The promised blessing that is asked of God in this verse is comfort.  How does God’s steadfast love bring us comfort?  Thomas Manton’s answer to that question can hardly be improved upon: “The highest and chief object of our comfort is the Lord himself.  Though everything else fail, this should satisfy us; though we have little health, no friends, no outward supports, to rejoice in; yet you have God, whose favour is life, and who is the fountain of happiness, and the center of the soul’s rest.”  To experience this divine encouragement to the fullest, we must be careful about what we make the object of our comfort.  In Luke 12:15 we have an explicit statement by our Lord that it is not abundance of possessions that makes a person happy.  The nature of biblical comfort is a delightful sense of God’s love and favor, which so strengthens the heart, that the believer is kept from being overwhelmed by doubts, fears, and sorrows.  This is a blessing only God can give.  Only the Holy Spirit can fill our hearts with assurance of God’s love (Romans 5:5).  Like the psalmist, we must ask God for it.