PROMOTION IS THROUGH SUFFERING

^[p. 243] PROMOTION IS THROUGH SUFFERING

I have been interested lately in seeing the suffering which each servant was passed through before he was fit to enter on God’s purpose for him — be it an Abraham, a David, a Stephen, or a Paul, their sufferings and exercises in a way indicated the goal, or their promotion. Each of them had a night before a morning. To David, Ziklag was his night; his morning was the throne of Israel. Paul’s night was “All men forsook me” (2 Timothy 4: 16), but his morning was “the Lord stood with me” (verse 17). To learn by suffering is God’s way of fitting us, if I may say, for promotion, be it service or anything else. “We who live are always delivered unto death” (2 Corinthians 4: 11). I remark the ready way in which I have often accepted a truth and in great joyfulness, and yet it was not really known to me until through suffering its virtue possessed me, and surely no one is a witness of anything until he is possessed by it, and then he not only sees it and can speak of it, but he is it. Paul says, “What ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, these things do” (Philippians 4: 9). When the truth possesses me it is not only the beauty of it which occupies me, but like the man who had been blind (John 9), I know now its virtue by all the exercise through which I have passed. In the long run that man not only has sight, but in solitude apart from every man he is in the light without any mixture, and there the Lord meets him. That man could explain light. Why? Because he had learned it through suffering. Such an one is a true servant and witness.