SUFFERING PREPARATORY TO SERVICE
SUFFERING PREPARATORY TO SERVICE
I have heard of the great sorrow you have been passing through; one would say insupportable, were there not an assured faith in the heart that the Lord has more a prospective meaning and purpose in these sore afflictions than a retrospective one. Affliction always precedes promotion, and according as one bears the first, one is proved truly qualified for the second. Joseph is in prison, David in Ziklag, before they are fitted, or proved by their power of endurance to be fitted, for serving the Lord. If you will receive your great affliction at the hand of the Lord in this light, you will certainly find that they who sow in tears reap in joy. The patience, the power to endure, measures the real amount of faith [p. 317] in God, and this is the groundwork of all service. When a man is impatient, when he chafes, then it is not God who is before him, but himself - he is hindered in his service, because the Lord cannot sustain him in it in that spirit. When one has got God for oneself, and He is simply and solely before one, everything one does reaches the spiritual, as of God. All His education and dealings with us are to bring us to this. “The trying of your faith worketh patience” (James 1: 3). It is a very wondrous work that is going on in the Lord’s education and preparation of us, for His own purposes as to us here, as well as for the place which each of us will hold in the holy temple of the Lord by-and-by. There is the wearing away of the outer man, and the renewing, day by day, of the inner man. There is a chiselling process going on, that the inner, the new man, may be more visible and prominent. It is only as it is, that we can be truly in His service, and the exercise of the soul, through the Spirit, as to all we have to pass through, is for this end. By-and-by the sound of the hammer will not be heard. Now we have the din of it on every side; and as we submit to it in our own hearts, there is the reaching to the “perfect and entire, wanting nothing”, and this is real fitness for His service.
Take comfort in this deep affliction; talk it over with the Lord, and He will give you meat out of the eater. It is a great help and cheer when one understands the intention of perfect love, in removing anything that interferes with my progress, or with my fitness to be used as a vessel for His purpose and pleasure.