Thomas Boston [The Crook in the Lot] writes of a number of benefits of our suffering and afflictions — the crooks (or bent, difficult pathways) in our lots (the circumstances of our lives that have been allotted to us. One of those is the exposure of sin in our hearts: There are some corruptions in […]
Read More A benefit of suffering: it exposes sinBelow is the substance of an email I sent to our church body this morning after the storm in Granbury last night: Dear beloved Church Body, The Lord last night demonstrated His power and authority, along with His grace. During the storm, the words of Psalm 8 were going through my mind: When I consider […]
Read More If you’d like to help…What we deem to be necessary for our lives and what God deems to be necessary for us are often in conflict. We idolize simplicity and solitude and ease. God desires our sanctification and Christlikeness. And sanctification rarely happens in ease and leisure. So God — decreeing what is necessary for us (1 Peter 1:6) […]
Read More Necessities of lifeFrom “Of First Importance:” Sanctified affliction teaches the soul its utter destitution. The believer often commences his spiritual journey with shallow and defective views of the perfect fitness and glory of the Redeemer’s justifying righteousness. There is, we admit, a degree of self-renunciation, there is a reception of Christ, and there is some sweet and […]
Read More Sanctified afflictionSeveral years ago, a friend of mine was diagnosed with late-stage multiple myeloma while in his early fifties. For about a year and a half he fought the cancer and received some measure of response from the treatments and was able to engage in many of his regular activities. And then he contracted spinal meningitis […]
Read More When cancer arrives, how will you be?What does a husband say to his wife when he knows death is imminent? Even more, what does a husband say to his wife when he has been falsely accused of a crime and has been sentenced to death through the injustice? In 1944, pastor Helmuth von Moltke was accused, tried, and convicted of conspiracy […]
Read More “May God be as good to you as he has been to me…”Joel Beeke talks about some lessons he learned about suffering from the puritan Arthur Hildersham that he learned while enduring three rounds of the removal of basal cell skin cancer from his face yesterday: Just as my murmuring began to pick up, I came to a remarkable section of the book about the afflictions that […]
Read More Coping with afflictionReading a book like Revelation can leave one overwhelmed by the relentless onslaught of God’s wrath. Chapter after chapter devastating destruction pours from God’s throne. It is grievous and wearying. Will it ever stop? Will God’s wrath relent? Will suffering cease? Revelation 10-11 provide some hope for the end of God’s wrath and God’s provision […]
Read More Will God’s wrath relent?Some helpful articles I’ve recently read: Some Thanksgiving leftovers: Mark Talbot explains why even suffering is something for which we can praise God. Jerry Bridges reminds us that, “Paul said we’re to come to God “with thanksgiving.” We should thank Him for His past faithfulness in delivering us from troubles. We should thank Him for […]
Read More Grab bagAfter a man and a woman say, “I do,” they often spend the next days and weeks dreaming of what life might be like in 50 or more years. When a husband and wife get pregnant, they not only spend hours tossing names back and forth at each other, testing them to see if they […]
Read More Trusting God, redux“Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share on behalf of His body, which is the church, in filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Col 1:24). Too often the misconception that the Christian life is a life of ease and simplicity without trial and […]
Read More The sufferings of Christ — and our sufferingsOne of the great paradoxes of the gospel in the life of the believer is that while he is always dying, yet he is also ever-living (2 Cor. 4:10). So Paul says the believer is (vv. 8-9) — afflicted, BUT not crushed perplexed, BUT not despairing persecuted, BUT not forsaken struck down, BUT not destroyed […]
Read More Gospel powerSteve Saint, the son of Nate Saint, one of the men martyred by the Auca Indians in the 1950s, recently suffered partial paralysis in an accident at his ministry. He gives a testimony to the grace of God and calls others to the missionary endeavor from his hospital bed: He has previously talked and written […]
Read More A testimony of God’s grace in sufferingYou cannot keep people from sinning against you. You will be treated unjustly. You will be lied to and gossiped about. Ungodly accusations will be spoken against you — and said directly to you. Others will be angry with you — sometimes because they have misunderstood you and sometimes because they understood you. Sometimes people […]
Read More When you are sinned againstJoni Eareckson Tada’s book, A Place of Healing: Wrestling with the Mysteries of Suffering, Pain, and God’s Sovereignty is currently free in the Kindle format from Amazon. I’ve not yet read this book, but have heard the first chapter in audio format and was greatly encouraged by her approach to this topic. This should be […]
Read More Free Kindle book — A Place of Healing
Words of Grace 