Category: SUFFERING & TRIBULATION

  • It is important, then, that your spiritual senses be trained to recognize God’s voice calling you to return to Him. Therefore you must correlate whatever you go through—whether disease, troubles, or problems—with your relationship with God. Make all of them an occasion to strengthen your fellowship with Him, to deepen your prayers and increase your love for God.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Life of Repentance and Purity

  • All of these punishments on earth are different from the eternal punishment. The eternal punishment is eliminated by repentance, but the earthly punishment remains intact. So the mother who does not bring up her son properly repents and her sins are forgiven, but her son remains as a bitterness of heart to her on earth. The student who does not study and fails can repent and the Lord will forgive him for his negligence, but this does not bring back a year of his life lost on earth in vain. The person for whom since causes disease can be forgiven his sin by repentance, but the disease remains with him as an earthly punishment as a natural result of sin.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Life of Repentance and Purity

  • You are passing through a time of deep sorrow. The love on which you were trusting has suddenly failed you, and dried up like a brook in the desert—now a dwindling stream, then shallow pools, and at last drought. You are always listening for footsteps that do not come, waiting for a word that is not spoken, pining for a reply that tarries overdue.

    Perhaps the savings of your life have suddenly disappeared; instead of helping others, you must be helped, or you must leave the warm nest where you have been sheltered from life’s storms to go alone into an unfriendly world; or you are suddenly called to assume the burden of some other life, taking no rest for yourself till you have steered it through dark and difficult seas into the haven. Your health, or sight, or nervous energy is failing; you carry in yourself the sentence of death; and the anguish of anticipating the future is almost unbearable. In other cases there is the sense of recent loss through death, like the gap in the forest-glade, where the woodsman has lately been felling trees.

    At such times life seems almost insupportable. Will every day be as long as this? Will the slow moving hours ever again quicken their pace? Will life ever array itself in another garb than the torn autumn remnants of past summer glory? Hath God forgotten to be gracious? Hath He in anger shut up His tender mercies? Is His mercy clean gone for ever?

    The Gift of Suffering
    by F.B. Meyer

  • Sorrow is a refiner’s crucible.—It may be caused by neglect or cruelty of another, by circumstances over which the sufferer has no control, or as the direct result of some dark hour in the long past; but inasmuch as God has permitted it to come, it must be accepted as His appointment, and considered as the furnace by which He is searching, testing, probing, and purifying the soul. Suffering searches us as fire does metals. We think we are fully for God, until we are exposed to the cleansing fire of pain; then we discover, as Job did, how much dross there is in us, and how little real patience, resignation, and faith. Nothing so detaches us from the things of this world, the life of sense, the bird-lime of earthly affections. There is probably no other way by which the power of the self-life can be arrested, that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh.

    But God always keeps the discipline of sorrow in His own hands.—Our Lord said, “My Father is the husbandman.” His hands hold the pruning-knife; His eye watches the crucible; His gentle touch is on the pulse while the operation is in progress. He will not allow even the devil to have his own way with us. As in the case of Job, so always. The moments are carefully allotted. The severity of the test is exactly determined by the reserves of grace and strength which are lying unrecognized within, but will be sought for and used beneath the severe pressure of pain…”God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tried above that ye are able.”

    The Gift of Suffering
    by F.B. Meyer

  • In sorrow the Comforter is near.—”Very present in time of trouble.” He sits by the crucible as a Refiner of silver, regulating the heat, marking every change, waiting patiently for the scum to float away, and His own face to be mirrored in clear, translucent metal. No earthly friend may tread the winepress with you, but the Savior is there, His garments stained with the blood of the grapes of your sorrow. Dare to repeat it often, though you do not feel it, and though Satan insists that God has left you, “Thou are with me.”

    When friends come to console you they talk of time’s healing touch, as though the best balm for sorrow were to forget, or in their well-meant kindness they suggest travel, diversion, amusement, and show their inability to you to appreciate the black night that hangs over your soul; so you turn from them, sick at heart, and prepared to say, as Job of his, “Miserable comforters are ye all.” But all the while Jesus is nearer than they are, understanding how they wear you, knowing each throb of pain, touched by fellow-feeling, silent in a love too full to speak, waiting to comfort from hour to hour as a mother soothes her weary, suffering babe.
    Be sure to study the art of this Divine comfort, that you may be able to comfort them that are in any affliction with the comfort with which you yourself have been comforted of God (2 Cor. I.4). There can be no doubt that some trials are permitted to come to us, as to our Lord, for no other reason than that by means of them we should become able to give sympathy and succour to others. And we should watch with all care each symptom of the pain, and each prescription of the Great Physician, since, in all probability, at some future time, we shall be called to minister to those passing through similar experiences. Thus we learn by the things we suffer, and, being made perfect, become authors of priceless and eternal help to souls in agony.

    The Gift of Suffering
    by F.B. Meyer

  • Do not shut yourself up with your sorrow.—A friend, in the first anguish of bereavement, wrote, saying that he must give up the Christian ministries in which he had delighted; and I replied immediately, urging him not to do so, because there is no solace for heartpain like ministry. The temptation of great suffering is towards isolation, withdrawal from the life of men, sitting alone, and keeping silence. Do not yield to it. Break through the icy chains of reserve, if they have already gathered. Arise, anoint your head, and wash your face; go forth to do your duty with willing through chastened steps. Selfishness, of every kind, in its activities or its introspection, is a hurtful thing, and shuts out the help and love of God. Sorrow is apt to be selfish. The soul occupied with its own griefs, and refusing to be comforted, becomes presently a Dead Sea, full of brine and salt, over which birds do not fly, and beside which no green thing grows. And thus we miss the very lesson that God would teach us. His constant war is against the self-life, and every pain He inflicts is to lessen its hold on us. But we may thwart His purpose, and extract poison from His gifts, as men get opium and alcohol from innocent plants.

    The Gift of Suffering
    by F.B. Meyer

  • You felt you were Christ’s companion; that He was using you, and there was a constant interchange of holy fellowship between Him and you. But for some reason which you cannot understand the morning light has died out of your life, and instead of your sitting with Christ upon the throne, in the conscious enjoyment of fellowship with Him, you have been brought down into the very dust of neglect and forsakenness; and for a long time now you have been saying, “My God, my God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?” You cannot imagine why. The probability is, that in your case it is not the result of any sin on your part, or of any neglect of your duties, but because God is desirous of ascertaining whether you love Him for the light of His face or for Himself.

    The Gift of Suffering
    by F.B. Meyer

  • “Be the day dreary, be the day long; at last it ringeth to evensong.” The watcher knows that presently the darkest night will thin into the grey dawn. There is always an end to things. Pain is limited. At last there comes the swooning, when we can suffer no more, and we fall into a gentle sleep, and forget ourselves. There is always a limit, always a “thus far, and no further.”

    The Gift of Suffering
    by F.B. Meyer

  • Perhaps you look too much inwards on self, instead of outwards on the Lord Jesus.—The healthiest people do not think about their health; the weak induce disease by morbid introspection. If you begin to count your heartbeats, you will disturb the rhythmic action of the heart. If you continually imagine a pain anywhere, you will produce it. And there are some true children of God who induce their own darkness by morbid self-scrutiny. They are always going back on themselves, analyzing their motives, re-considering past acts of consecration, or comparing themselves with themselves. In one form or another self is the pivot of their life, albeit that it is undoubtedly a religious life. What but darkness can result from such a course? There are certainly times in our lives when we must look within, and judge ourselves, that we may not be judged. But this is only done that we may turn with fuller purpose of heart to the Lord. And when once done, it needs not to be repeated. “Leaving the things behind” is the only safe motto. The question is, not whether we did as well as we might, but whether we did as well as we could at the time.

    We must not spend all our lives in cleaning our windows, or in considering whether they are clean, but in sunning ourselves in God’s blessed light. That light will soon show us what still needs to be cleansed away, and will enable us to cleanse it with unerring accuracy.

    The Gift of Suffering
    by F.B. Meyer

  • Sometimes it looks as if we are bound to act. Every one says we must do something; and indeed things seem to have reached so desperate a pitch that we must…It is not easy at such times to stand still and see the salvation of God; but we must. God may delay to come in the guise of His Providence…He stays long enough to test patience of faith, but not a moment behind the extreme hour of need. “The vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and shall not lie; though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come; it will not tarry.”

    The Gift of Suffering
    by F.B. Meyer