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December 21 - December 29, 2020
And He had shone all the more brightly through the edges, tears, and thin places of that box as it began to collapse with age. He was radiant in her, shining mightily as she served our family, as she stuck by my side all the years I was in the hospital, and as she gave and gave and gave.
Christ has many things to think of in planning for a saint; He must have in mind what is best for the individual; what is the greatest profit in respect to His testimony; what is required in his relationship to many other saints; and what is to make most for God’s present and eternal glory; and He will hold resolutely, in answering prayer, to that course which will combine in bringing the largest and most enduring good to pass.14
Let us then not say God cannot heal and will not do so. Let us rather say God can heal and will do so if it is for His glory.
The saint is to remember … that God is the judge as to whether or not He will display Himself and His power by a miraculous act, and also when, where, how, and with whom this will be done; and he is to keep constantly in mind that God is just as faithful and loving when He does not so display Himself as when He does.15
4. As with other crucial issues, Satan will seek to push us into nonbiblical extremes on this issue of miraculous healing.
Who am I, that common earthenware jar we talked about, to dictate terms to the master potter and tell Him that He has to heal me right now? Who am I to tell God what He can or can’t do in today’s world?
Sometimes He is willing to heal immediately—and He will perform a miracle that modern medicine can’t begin to explain.
At other times, however—and for reasons we can’t always fathom—He is not willing to heal a particular illness, reverse the course of a disease, or cancel a particular disability. As with the apostle Paul, who had his request for healing denied, the Lord Jesus will give an extra measure of His presence and grace instead.
As long as we give Him the ultimate right of choice, and are as submissive and thankful to Him when He says no as when He says yes, we may freely urge our physical claims upon Him, and this with much expectation. There are many saints who are not well and many others who are not strong, simply because they have never asked God to be their physical sufficiency.20
Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness. —C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Benefit No. 1: Suffering Can Turn Us from a Dangerous Direction
It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees. (v. 71)
Benefit No. 2: Suffering Reminds Us Where Our True Strength Lies
God’s Word never, ever tags along behind human thinking and philosophies, never tries to stay in style, never seeks to accommodate itself or somehow make itself “relevant.”
People who have obvious disabilities more readily get what it means to be weak and feel needy. As a result, maybe the light goes on a little sooner for us when we hear the apostle Paul say, “I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.… For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:9,10).
Who can understand the ways of God? As Solomon noted, “A man’s steps are directed by the LORD. How then can anyone understand his own way?” (Prov. 20:24). The truth is that you and I—if we see anything at all—perceive only the dimmest outline or shadow of God’s plan and purpose. His ways are often mysterious, and it’s beyond our capacity to analyze His actions or predict what He might do next.
Benefit No. 3: Suffering Restores a Lost Beauty in Christ
There’s nothing like real hardships to strip off the veneer in which you and I so carefully cloak ourselves. Heartache and physical pain reach below the superficial, surface places of our lives, stripping away years of accumulated indifference and neglect.
Benefit No. 4: Suffering Can Heighten Our Thirst for Christ
So many of us settle for second-best things that really cannot and do not satisfy.
It is an offense to Him when we Christians know full well that Jesus is the clear, fresh, and satisfying Living Water … and yet we turn to the attractions of this world, telling ourselves that such substitute pleasures truly can and do refresh and satisfy.
That’s where the offense against God comes, when we in effect tell Him that Jesus doesn’t satisfy. That He’s not enough. That He doesn’t refresh. That we need something else—something more. Something better.
Sometimes we become so enamored with our tinny, brackish canteen water that we can’t even see the rushing crystal stream at our very feet. We forget all about it. But then when trials or suffering overwhelm our lives, it dawns on us that all of our God-substitutes fall pitifully short of helping us.
If we allow it, suffering will lead us to the bank of the stream, where we can always find a long, cold drink of the refreshing grace of the Lord Jesus.
Benefit No. 5: Suffering Can Increase Our Fruitfulness
You see, early spring is grafting time. Uncle Don would select his trees, find just the right place on the bark, peel it away, and make a slanting cut into the heart of the wood. He would then take a small branch, whittle its end, then push the graft into the damp center of the tree, covering the union to keep it cool and moist. Later that spring, new life would emerge: blossoms to tiny buds to beautiful fruit.
Conversion is not the smooth, easy-going process some men seem to think. It is wounding work, of course, this breaking of the hearts, but without wounding there is no saving.… Where there is grafting there is a cutting, the scion must be let in with a wound; to stick it onto the outside or tie it on with a string would be of no use. Heart must be set to heart and back to back, or there will be no sap from root to branch, and this I say, must be done by a wound.4
Jesus speaks about grafting in John 15:5. It is here He tells His disciples—and you and me, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”
Just remember what I have learned these many years: Apart from Him, you can do nothing. But in Him, with His life sap flowing through your branch and leaves, you have strength for everything. He said so.
In 2 Corinthians 4:16, Paul tells us, “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.”
For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. (2 Cor. 4:17–18)
We say, then, to anyone who is under trial, give Him time to steep the soul in His eternal truth. Go into the open air, look up into the depths of the sky, or out upon the wideness of the sea, or on the strength of the hills that is His also; or, if bound in the body, go forth in the spirit; spirit is not bound. Give Him time and, as surely as dawn follows night, there will break upon the heart a sense of certainty that cannot be shaken. —Amy Carmichael
Answer No. 1: I can go on … because God moves through time with me.
As a result, He who was ever beyond time decided before time to enter time, experiencing the passing hours and days and years with those He created. He didn’t have to, but He did. And I believe His Holy Spirit “experiences” life with us moment-by-moment, day by day, turn by turn, mile by mile. He is pleased when we obey Him (even though He already knew we would), and He is truly grieved when we disobey (even though He knew it from the foundation of the earth).
I can’t begin to describe to you how important these biblical reassurances about time have been to me in my recent battles with nonstop pain. If I thought that I had a God who set aside the business of eternity from time to time to simply check in on me every few years, I don’t know how I’d survive.
With David, I acknowledge the Lord’s sharp attention to my physical and emotional needs. I am bowed down and brought very low; all day long I go about mourning. My back is filled with searing pain; there is no health in my body. I am feeble and utterly crushed; I groan in anguish of heart. All my longings lie open before you, O Lord; my sighing is not hidden from you. (Ps. 38:6–9)
How precious are your thoughts about me, O God! They cannot be numbered! I can’t even count them; they outnumber the grains of sand! (Ps. 139:17–18 NLT)
Answer No. 2: I can go on … because I know God can use broken instruments to make incomparable music.
Mr. Perlman smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow, and said in a soft, reverent tone, “You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”
Sometimes you have to take what’s left and coax out of life something new and different. Life becomes a recomposition, a series of new chords.
God is the one who finds incomparable beauty and makes matchless music using the most unexpected and unlikely of instruments. He is the one who told Paul, struggling and agonizing over a nettlesome physical infirmity, “My grace is enough; it’s all you need. My strength comes into its own in your weakness.”4
The same is true when we live for God. Sure, our lives resound with praise when He lights our path and we follow Him. After all, a disciple should follow his master. But when there’s no light for your path and you follow Him through dark times, the volume and the intensity of praise to God goes up many more decibels.
Answer No. 3: I can go on … because Jesus is my consolation.
He said, “Jesus cheers us.” Those three little words caught my eye. He cheers us not by His physical presence, but through the Holy Spirit. Yes, the Spirit’s role is to convict and convince us of sin, to illuminate and instruct our hearts. But His main work is to make glad our tired hearts, to uplift and confirm the weak, to encourage and raise up the downcast, and to comfort us. And He does this all through Christ.
And the beautiful promises that made my heart strong on that Sunday afternoon was Isaiah 61, where it is said of Jesus, “He has come to bind up the wounds of the brokenhearted and to comfort all who mourn … to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.”6
The question with which I’ve entitled this chapter, “How can I go on like this?” falls directly into the Holy Spirit’s mission in your life, and He takes it very seriously. He’s already on the job. He’s engaged. And if you listen, He will speak the comforting words of Jesus into the deep places of your soul.
Answer No. 4: I can go on … because right now counts forever.
She is now on the other side with Jesus and my dad, enjoying the wonder of a new, forever-young body and praising God with effortless, endless expressions of joy. But during those days in Maryland on that last visit, her frailty hit me broadside with the awesome fact of my own mortality. I looked at her and it was like the thought had dawned on me for the first time: That’s where I’m heading … where we’re all heading.
Every day of our short lives—even every hour—has eternal consequences for good or ill. Eternity—and the way we’ll live in it—is somehow being shaped by our moment-by-moment responses to the life we have before us to live right now.
But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. (Luke 14:13–14)
