No discipline seems
pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of
righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Hebrews 12:11
If God has singled you out to be a special
object of His grace you may expect Him to honor you with stricter discipline
and greater suffering than less favored ones are called upon to endure.
If God sets out to make you an unusual
Christian He is not likely to be as gentle as He is usually pictured by the
popular teachers. A sculptor does not use a manicure set to reduce the rude,
unshapely marble to a thing of beauty. The saw, the hammer and the chisel are
cruel tools, but without them the rough stone must remain forever formless and
unbeautiful.
To do His supreme work of grace within you
He will take from your heart everything you love most. Everything you trust in
will go from you. Piles of ashes will lie where your most precious treasures
used to be.
Thus you will learn what faith is; you will
find out the hard way, but the only way open to you, that true faith lies in
the will, that the joy unspeakable of which the apostle speaks is not itself
faith but a slow-ripening fruit of faith. You will learn, too, that present
spiritual joys may come and go as they will without altering your spiritual
status or in any way affecting your position as a true child of the heavenly
Father.
Then you will also learn, probably to your
astonishment, that it is possible to live in all good conscience before God and
men and still feel nothing of the “peace and joy” you hear talked about so much
by immature Christians!
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