Grief and Troubles Exalt and Lift Us

The highest honor that God can confer upon his children is the blood-red crown of martyrdom. The jewels of a Christian are his afflictions. The regalia of the kings that God has made, are their troubles, their sorrows, and their griefs. Griefs exalt us, and troubles lift us.

Charles H Spurgeon

Concerning God’s Dealings with His Children

God takes a safe course with His children, that they may not be condemned with the world, He permits the world to condemn them, that they may not love the world, the world hates them….

Richard Sibbes

Greater Trouble, for Greater Comfort?

Look how fears have presented themselves, so have supports and encouragements; yea, when I have started, even as it were at nothing else but my shadow, yet God, as being very tender of me, hath not suffered me to be molested, but would with one Scripture or another, strengthen me against all; insomuch that I have often said, Were it lawful, I could pray for greater trouble, for the greater comfort’s sake.

John Bunyan

Concerning Becoming a Minister

Do not believe that any man will become a physician unless he walks the hospitals. And I am sure that no one will become a minister or a comforter unless he lies in the hospital as well as walks through it, and has to suffer himself.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892) _New Park Street Pulpit_ Vol. 4 [1858]

 

Concerning our Burdens

The way to be eased is not struggling with it, but meekly to bear it.

There is a fable, but it has its moral for this purpose. A certain ass, laded with salt, fell into a river, and after he had risen, found his burden lighter, for the moisture had made it melt away; whereupon he would ever after lie down in the water as he traveled with his burden, and so ease himself. His owner perceiving this craft , after laded him with Wool. The ass purposing to ease himself, as before, laid himself down in the water, and thinking to have ease, rising again to feel his weight, found it heavier.

Richard Stock

The Secret Formula of Saints

The secret formula of the saints: When I am in the cellar of affliction, I look for the Lord’s choicest wines.

Samuel Rutherford

 

Let Affliction Conform You

Labour to grow better under all your afflictions, lest your afflictions grow worse, lest God mingle them with more darkness, bitterness and terror.

John Owen

Sickness, Poverty, and Weakness serve a Purpose

I am mended by my sickness, enriched by my poverty, and strengthened by my weakness…. Thus was it with…. Manasseh, when he was in affliction, “He besought the Lord his God”: even that king’s iron was more precious to him than his gold, his jail a more happy lodging than his palace,Babylona better school thanJerusalem. What fools are we, then, to frown upon our afflictions! These, how crabbed soever, are our best friends. They are not indeed for our pleasure, they are for our profit.

Abraham Wright

One Purpose of Poverty and Affliction

Poverty and affliction take away the fuel that feeds pride.

Richard Sibbes

This Life is conforming us to what we shall be

This life therefore is not righteousness but growth in righteousness; not health but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not what we shall be but we are growing toward it; the process is not yet finished but it is going on; this is not the end but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory but all is being purified.

Martin Luther