Known--and still loved!

For Good Friday this year my thoughts are turning to Psalm 31 ("Into your hands I commit my spirit," Ps. 31:5/Luke 23:46). Especially powerful is v. 7: "I will rejoice and be glad in your steadfast love/because you have seen my affliction;/you have known the distress of my soul."
Charles Spurgeon remarks: "God owns his saints when others are ashamed to acknowledge them; he never refuses to know his friends. He thinks not the worse of them for their rags and tatters. He does not misjudge them and cast them off when their faces are lean with sickness, or their hearts heavy with despondency. Moreover, the Lord Jesus knows us in our pangs in a peculiar sense, by having a deep sympathy toward us in them all; when no others can enter into our griefs, from [lack] of understanding them [experientially], Jesus dives into the lowest depths with us, comprehending the direst of woes, because he has felt the same."