My leanness, my leanness!

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"My leanness, my leanness! Woe is me!" Isaiah 24:16

There is no more continual source of lamentation and mourning to a child of God than a sense of his own barrenness. He would be fruitful in every good word and work. 

But when he contrasts his own miserable unprofitableness—his coldness and deadness—his proneness to evil—his backwardness to good—his daily wanderings and departing from God—his depraved affections—his stupid frames—his sensual desires—his carnal projects—and his earthy grovelings—with what he sees and knows should be the fruit that should grow upon a fruitful branch in the only true Vine, he sinks down under a sense of his own wretched barrenness and unfruitfulness.

Yet what was the effect produced by all this upon his own soul?

To wean him from the creature—to divert him from looking to any for help or hope, but the Lord Himself. It is in this painful way that the Lord often, if not usually, cuts us off from all human props, even the nearest and dearest, that we may lean wholly and solely on Himself.