It is the will of God that men should have true hope and comfort conferred upon them in no other way than by Jesus Christ. It is only by Him that sinners have comfort at their conversion, and it is by Him only that the saints have renewed hope and comfort after their declensions. And therefore the way to obtain this comfort is to look to Him, to fly for refuge to Him. And in order to do this, persons have need to be brought to a sense of their necessity of Him. And that they may be so, it is needful that they should be sensible of their calamity and misery, that they should be in trouble and be brought to see their utter helplessness in themselves. And not only natural men, but Christians also, who are fallen into sin and are in a dead and senseless frame, need something to make them more sensible of their necessity of Christ. Indeed, the best are not so sensible of their need of Christ but that they need to be made more sensible; but especially those who are in ill and dead frames and a declining state need trouble and humbling to make them sensible of their need of Christ and to prepare their minds for a renewed confiding application to Christ as their only remedy. The godly in such a case are sick with a sore disease, and Christ is the only physician who can heal them; and they need to be sensible of their disease, that they may see their need of a physician. They, as well as natural men, need to be in a storm and tempest to make them sensible of their need to fly to Him who is a hiding place from the wind and a covert from the tempest.

From “Hope and Comfort Usually Follow Genuine Humiliation and Repentance,” p. 844