A good reminder: Don’t waste your suffering!

Kirsten Wetherell is correct:

Suffering can be distracting. It can embitter the spirit, harden the heart, and paralyze the will. Turning us inward, it often keeps us from seeing opportunities God is placing around us to love others and share the gospel. At times, we’re tempted to forego proclaiming Christ because we’re defeated by sin, exhausted from bodily pain, or emotionally spent from attempts to reconcile broken relationships. Suffering seems to require all our attention and effort as it drains us of resources. We feel we have nothing left to give.

But there’s hope:

In Christ’s light, suffering is a ministry, not a millstone. It’s a gift, not a glitch in the plan. . . .When life is going well, Christian joy and worldly happiness are hard to distinguish from each other. But when life is falling apart, and worldly happiness has long since fled, Christian joy can shine forth clearly and uniquely.

She concludes:

By God’s grace, your suffering is a ministry—the light of the gospel streaming through the “cracks” of your affliction into the heads and hearts of those watching. The way you suffer speaks volumes. May it speak loudly of the gospel even when it hurts, and of the God who brought us hope through suffering himself.

Read the whole article!

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An invitation we dismiss

“To know God as the Master and Bestower of all good things, who invites us to request them of Him, and still not go to Him and ask of Him – this would be of as little profit as for a man to neglect a treasure, buried and hidden in the earth, after it had been pointed out to him.”–John Calvin

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A 1:10 ratio!

A well known quote from Robert Murray McCheyne in a a letter he wrote, which was latter published in Memoir and Remains of the Rev. Robert Murray McCheyne [(Edinburgh, 1894), 293].

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Jer. 17:9. Learn much of the Lord Jesus. For every look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ. He is altogether lovely. Such infinite majesty, and yet such meekness and grace, and all for sinners, even the chief! Live much in the smiles of God. Bask in his beams. Feel his all-seeing eye settled on you in love, and repose in his almighty arms. . . .

. . . Let your soul be filled with a heart-ravishing sense of the sweetness and excellency of Christ and all that is in Him. Let the Holy Spirit fill every chamber of your heart; and so there will be no room for folly, or the world, or Satan, or the flesh.

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