A Path Through Suffering: Walking from Strength to Strength with the Lord Through the Valley

Pilgrim, are you in pain? Are you walking a path of suffering, seeking to endure rather than resting in the One Who is desirous of carrying you through it from “strength to strength”? Nothing has happened to us that God cannot manage and that He cannot use to bring flowers from our thorns. God looks down from Heaven and tells us that the pain and troubles He allows in a life are common to all and that He can use these things – even these - to bring Him much glory and us much good. His desire is for us to trust Him to make beauty out of our ashes, the oil of gladness from our mourning and a garment of praise out of our spirits of despair. His desire is to make all of His children “oaks of righteousness”, plantings of the Lord for the display of His splendor. Oftentimes, the deepest and richest spiritual insights come with the highest cost of suffering. When we feel the most helpless and hopeless God is preparing to birth flowers from our thorns, gladness in lieu of our mourning and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. Nothing touches His child which He cannot manage – transforming all our ashes into beauty.

What are the lines in our story? We often grip tightly to the things we hold ever so dear. Good things. Things perhaps we believed we were doing for the Lord and for our families – proper things – things for His glory and for the advancement of His Kingdom and in a mere nano second it is all taken away. Remember, Jesus learned obedience not by the things He enjoyed but by the things He suffered. We are no different. Jesus had loses but His single aim was to bring glory to His Father. This should be our aim as well. There was no thought of Himself only to do the will of His Father. Jesus laid down His life and as His servants we are to tread the same path. Christ accepted suffering as part of God’s plan and as His servants we are to walk as He walked and do likewise.

In our troubles we are to trust in the “manna” for the moment to sustain us and to remind ourselves of what Andrew Murray once wrote: “Say: I am here by God’s appointment, in His keeping, under His training, and for His time. Such a perspective does not alleviate our circumstances but enables us to keep an even keel and not lose heart.” He will make the trial a blessing, teaching us the lessons He intends for us to learn, and working in us the grace He means to bestow. Elisabeth Elliot once wrote: “We can never lose what we have offered to Christ.”