The Works of God

Thank you to Dr. Mark Struck for pointing me to this quote from J.C. Ryle:

Suffering is a part of the process by which the children of God are sanctified. They are chastened to wean them from the world, and make them partakers of God’s holiness. The Captain of their salvation was made perfect through sufferings, and so are they. There never yet was a great saint who had not either great afflictions or great corruptions. Philip Melancthon said it well: “Where there are no cares, there will generally be no prayers.”  

J.C. Ryle

Read Full Post »

My apologies to everyone who has already read the August 31 morning devotion from Charles Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening.

It was such a great help that I wanted everyone to see it!  Here’s the opening:

In seasons of severe trial, the Christian has nothing on earth that he can trust to, and is therefore compelled to cast himself on his God alone. When his vessel is on its beam-ends, and no human deliverance can avail, he must simply and entirely trust himself to the providence and care of God. Happy storm that wrecks a man on such a rock as this!  Charles H. Spurgeon, Morning and Evening for August 31.

You can read the entire devotion here and I highly recommend it.

Read Full Post »

I’ve heard Mark Talbot speak live on suffering and the sovereignty of God on two occasions and read chapters he has written in other books.  I am looking forward to a book he is writing on suffering.

He looks squarely at suffering through the lens of God’s word, and makes Jesus look beautiful:

In a glorious and mysterious way that is currently past our finding out and that in no way excuses our sin, all of this sin and suffering will make it undeniably clear that God’s grace—and God’s grace alone—is sufficient for us, and thus we shall indeed see that his power is made perfect in our weakness.

And therefore it will be our joy and glory in the eschaton to sing gladly of our former sin and suffering, so that Christ’s power and glory may be more apparent.

For God the Father has ordained that the melody of each of our everlasting songs will be how his Son, our glorious Lord, has saved us from all sin and suffering.

There the world’s broken stage will have been completely renovated, and all of our own badness and brokenness utterly removed.

Mark Talbot, “Bad Actors on a Broken Stage,” in With Calvin in the Theater of God edited by John Piper and David Mathis, p. 81.

Read Full Post »

As D.A. Carson unpacks the story of Job, he ends with a focus on God’s questions to Job which cover Job 38-41.  Emphases in bold are mine:

God’s chapters are stunning because at the end of the day he provides no systematic answer that will sort out the entire problem of innocent suffering.  All of his rhetorical questions combine to mean one thing: we human beings are not always going to get explanations, but God is bigger than we are and sometimes we just have to trust him.  At the end, Job repents (see Job 42:1-6) – not of imaginary sins that his “friends” think he needs to confess in order to win back God’s favor, but of his rather presumptuous tendency to insist on answers rather than to trust.

God nevertheless insists that Job basically got the account right. Doubtless Job was becoming a bit pushy toward the end, but God’s displeasure is reserved for the three “friends” who think they have God all figured out.

At the end of the story God restores the fortunes of Job. This should not be surprising. After all, at the end of time, according to the Bible, not only will justice be done, but it will be seen to be done. The restoration of Job’s fortunes is a kind of microcosm of the bigger story of world history under God: justice will prevail in the end.

D. A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God’s Story, p. 99.

I struggle with that desire for answers over trusting.  Most of us will live without a specific answer to why disability has entered our lives.  The answer is always the same – we must trust God.

But the ending will be certain!  Everything we thought we had lost because of disability will be more than restored because we get to be with Jesus.  Every wrong committed against us (and by us) will either be dealt with through Jesus’ free sacrifice or through eternal suffering.

It will be perfect, and it will be seen.

Read Full Post »

It is one thing to talk about cancer and God’s sovereignty.  It is another thing entirely to talk about cancer and God’s sovereignty while it is attacking your body.

Dr. James Boice was the Senior Minister at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia for more than 30 years.  Upon learning of his cancer, which would eventually take his life, he made an announcement to the people he obviously loved.

And he didn’t just love them, he lead them by his own example.  I’ve included excerpts below:

If I were to reflect on what goes on theologically here, there are two things I would stress.

One is the sovereignty of God. That’s not novel. We have talked about the sovereignty of God here forever. God is in charge. When things like this come into our lives, they are not accidental. It’s not as if God somehow forgot what was going on, and something bad slipped by. It’s not the answer that Harold Kushner gave in his book, Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. God does everything according to his will. We’ve always said that.

But what I’ve been impressed with mostly is something in addition to that.

It’s possible, isn’t it, to conceive of God as sovereign and yet indifferent? God’s in charge, but he doesn’t care. But it’s not that. God is not only the one who is in charge; God is also good. Everything he does is good. And what Romans 12, verses 1 and 2 says is that we have the opportunity by the renewal of our minds—that is, how we think about these things—actually to prove what God’s will is.

And then it says, “His good, pleasing, and perfect will.” Is that good, pleasing, and perfect to God? Yes, of course, but the point of it is that it’s good, pleasing, and perfect to us. If God does something in your life, would you change it? If you’d change it, you’d make it worse. It wouldn’t be as good. So that’s the way we want to accept it and move forward, and who knows what God will do?

Read Full Post »

My sister forwarded this, courtesy of ‘Christian Quote of the Day – August 21, 2011,’ which also happened to be the day we finally got the formal diagnosis of seizures:

All our difficulties are only platforms for the manifestation of His grace, power, and love.

Hudson Taylor

Amen

Read Full Post »

From a sermon by Charles H. Spurgeon on Matthew 9:36 “He was moved with compassion.”

There is nothing sweeter to a forlorn and broken spirit than the fact that Jesus has compassion.

Are any of you sad and lonely? Have any of you been cruelly wronged? Have you lost the goodwill of some you esteemed? Do you seem as if you had the cold shoulder even from good people? Do not say, in the anguish of your spirit, “I am lost,” and give up. He hath compassion on you. . .

And thou, broken down in health and broken down in fortune, scarcely with shoe to thy feet, thou art welcome in the house of God, welcome as the most honoured guest in the assembly of the saints. Let not the weighty grief that overhangs thy soul tempt thee to think that hopeless darkness has settled thy fate and foreclosed thy doom. . .

He is never happier than when he is relieving and retrieving the forlorn, the abject, and the outcast. He despises not any that confess their sins and seek his mercy. No pride nestles in his dear heart, no sarcastic word rolls off his gracious tongue, no bitter expression falls from his blessed lips. He still receives the guilty.

Pray to him now. Now let the silent prayer go up, “My Saviour, have pity upon me; be moved with compassion towards me, for if misery be any qualification for mercy, I am a fit object for thy compassion. Oh! save me for thy mercy’s sake!” Amen.

Charle Spurgeon, The Compassion of Jesus, published December 24, 1914.

 

Read Full Post »