Longings Of The Soul Often Painful – Charles H Spurgeon

Have you never seen a caged eagle with its breast or wing bleeding from blows received by dashing against the wire of its cage? The poor creature dreamed of the forest and the craggy rock, and, filled with aspirations for sublimest flight, it stretched its wings and flew upward, only to bring itself into sharp contact with its prison. Even thus the new-born nature, stirred in its inmost depths with longings suitable to its celestial origin, aspires after the joys of heaven, stretching all its wings to soar towards perfection; but alas! we who are in this body do groan, we find the flesh to be a prison, and so the more we long the more we pine, and pining we sigh and cry, and wound our hearts with insatiable desires and bleeding discontents. The pangs of strong desire for the presence of the Lord in glory, who among believers has not felt them? Who among us has not found our flight upward brought to a painful pause by the stern facts of flesh and blood, and earth and sin?