More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tony Reinke
Read between
March 15 - March 27, 2016
“God in Christ is our Father and our Shepherd. Heaven is our home; and all things we meet by the way are appointed and overruled in a subservienc...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Afflictions awaken us to our sins because they often push our idols out of reach. In other words, trials are designed to prevent us from living at peace with our idols and remaining sin. Much of our sin appears hidden and dormant until the whip-snap of affliction rouses the indwelling sin to stand up and show itself, or stand up and hiss, or stand up and strike. It is more necessary for us to see the sins remaining in our hearts and to flee to Christ for grace than it is to live blissfully ignorant of the cancers in our soul.
Trials are medicines of kindness applied to serious diseases called indwelling
God would not send the pain if he did not intend to rouse the vipers and drive them out.
Trials make us feel the power of the sins residing in our hearts, and such awareness is essential to the
Normally our prayer lives are unimpressive. Sin degenerates the beauty of prayer into a painful chore.
Trials breathe new desperation—new life—into our prayers.
“Experience testifies, that a long course of ease and prosperity, without painful changes, has an unhappy tendency to make us cold and formal in our secret worship.”14 Easy lives weaken our communion with
Trials give new life to prayer, Trials lay us at his feet, Lay us low...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
By showing us the insufficiency of our human comforts, God drives us to our knees in trials and prepares us for praise when deliverance arrives.
Newton learned this lesson from Psalm 116:1–2. Trouble excites prayer, prayer brings deliverance, deliverance produces praise, and likewise teaches and encourages us where to go for help next time—yea, as long as we live. We do not come to the Lord upon a mere peradventure whether he will hear us or not, for he has heard us often; nor can we, nor need we say, that if he will help us but this one time, we will not trouble him again. We shall always need his assistance, and he is always ready to afford it. While we live in this poor world, trials of one kind or another will come in succession.17
No matter how comfortable we make our lives, trials in the Christian life “are necessary to discipline us, and to keep us from wandering.”19
Trials are intended to humble us and launch a frontal assault on our pride.
If we are to live a holy life—a truly joyful life—we must learn to live a self-less life
“A smith, when about to make a poker, puts his iron into the fire. The Lord, when he means to make his people more holy, puts them into the furnace.”24
Trials remind us that our idolatrous securities and our self-centered sufficiencies only bring spiritual weakness, not strength.
When rust and moth and robbers eliminate our securities, when cancer arrives, or when we find ourselves speechless in the company of a suffering friend, in this place we feel deep in our bones that this world cannot be the eternal rest our hearts long for.
Trials remind us of the vanity of this life, and the vanity reminds us that this world is fallen, and the fallenness reminds us that it is a deeply unsatisfying world. For all the entertainment and the joy offered here, trials make us uneasy and set our hearts on things above, where Christ is (Col. 3:1–4). “Let us adore the grace that seeks to draw our hearts above!
When life is easy, we start to unpack our bags and make a nice home for ourselves here in this world. Sometimes, in the wisdom of God, the house blocking our view of Christ will be burned to the ground. The loss is
“It is happy for us if we have suffered enough to make us desire a better country.
It is good for our lives to be emptied of selfish comforts to make room for what is greater. “Self-will, self-dependence, the affections cleave to the dust. Affliction shows them what they are, what the world is, and makes them look upward and long for their rest.”31
To live in the world without world-separating and Christ-magnifying trials would be ruinous to our souls. For redeemed sinners who are lured toward worldliness, trials are a sort of death, a redemptive death, a death to spare us from a worse death. Nisi periissem, periissem—unless I had died, I would have
Trials are medicines measured out with care and prescribed by our wise and gracious Physician. He proportions the frequency and the weight of each dose exactly to what the case requires.
The Bible is studded with promises for sufferers. Passages like Isaiah 41:10 and 43:2 are stars in a constellation of promises blazing before the eyes of the suffering reader. How grand and magnificent is the arch over our heads in a starry night! But if it were always day, the stars could not be seen. The firmament of Scripture, if I may so speak, is spangled with exceeding great and precious promises, as the sky is with stars, but the value and beauty of many of them are only perceptible to us in the night of affliction.38
Trials open Scripture and offer us deep experiences of joy and glory. Trials help us “find peace and comfort within when things are disagreeable and troublesome without.
Suffering proves the reality of grace in our lives, because it strips away all the artificial supports we try to lean on. If we trust in cleverly devised fables or worldly comforts and securities, trials will expose those false supports. “By trials our graces are proved, exercised, and strengthened, and the power and goodness of the Lord towards us are more manifested and glorified.”40
By default we grow confident and secure in ourselves and in the world around us over time, and those false securities must be shaken. Trials are earthquakes to test our foundations and assure our souls of God’s design in our lives.
We are naturally so shortsighted we cannot see the worse things our trials prevent, nor the best things our trials are producing
Indeed, “I have reason to praise him for my trials, for, most probably, I should have been ruined without them.”43
Suffering and affliction are truly among our chief mercies, counterintuitive gifts for the Christian
Years of health are mercies—intervals of sickness are mercies likewise—to the flesh they are not joyous but grievous; but there is a need-be for them, and peaceful fruits of righteousness to be gathered from them, if not immediately yet afterward (Heb. 12:11). Afflictions are either small daily medicines which our Physician and best friend sees that our spiritual maladies require, or they are furnaces to prove and purify our graces; or, lastly, they are occasions which his providence appoints for the clearer manifestation of his power and love to us, in us, and by us. When he darkens our sky,
...more
All suffering in the Christian life has an aim and an end, “an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:17). Every moment of our suffering is a “love token,” proof of God’s favor, proof of his enduring love, proof of his fatherhood over us, proof of his divine claim on us, proof of his friendship to us, and proof of our preciousness to him.45 The same Christ who was pierced for sinners is the Christ who governs and rules over every trial, measuring every sting with “a love which can give no unnecessary pain to those for whom he died upon the cross.”46
When trials hit, Satan deceives. And here are four of his evil designs, according to Newton:48 1. Futility. Satan aims to persuade the believer that God has no design in suffering, that the suffering is vain, and that God is essentially powerless to stop it. Satan despises the idea that his power and influence on us are governed by God for our good. 2. Complaint. Satan tempts us to charge God with “impatient” speeches, to complain and to decry God, which is “like letting in wind upon a smothering fire, which will make it burn more fiercely.” When the believer complains in the trial, it only
...more
Satan’s attempt to pry us away from the throne of grace in our trials is his effort either to stop our prayers or to frustrate them. Our prayers seem most feeble and short and empty when the trials come, but we must press toward the throne and not run away. Satan entices us to think our short and feeble prayers are ineffectual and vain, and yet “short, frequent, and fervent petitions, which will almost necessarily arise from what is felt when temptation is violent, are best suited to the case.”51 In other words, Satan’s work amid trials is to further aggravate the pain with disillusionment and
...more
Writes Newton, “All shall work together for good: everything is needful that he sends; nothing can be needful that he withholds.”58 All of the sending and the withholding in our lives is managed by God for our ultimate flourishing. But do we believe it? “How happy are they who can resign all to him, see his hand in every dispensation, and believe that he chooses better for them than they possibly could for themselves!”59 The truth is that our peace depends on our sin being subdued, and Christ subdues our sin through the wisely chosen medicine called “trials.” Therefore, look upon him as a
...more
When his daughter Eliza endured deep depression, Newton wrote: “My trial is great, but the all-sufficient Lord is my support. I am sure this affliction did not spring out of the ground. I trust the event will be to his glory and our good.”64
The Lord’s doing—his mysterious will—will not make the pain less painful, but it puts the pain into eternal perspective. He is wise, and we are not. He sees the whole path of our lives; we cannot. Therefore it would be foolish for us to plan our lives or determine what is good for us.
Christians can embrace trials for one reason: Christ reigns supreme over the trials for our eternal good.
“Faithful are the wounds of that friend who was himself wounded and slain for us, and who now reigns over all.
“What a comfort to be assured that our afflictions do not happen to us at random, but are all under the direction of infinite wisdom and love, and all engaged to work together for good to them that love the Lord.”69
No pain or suffering is felt in life that is not sovereignly coordinated by the plan and will of God for our lives. “Diseases hear his voice,” said Newton of Christ.70 So also the wind and the waves. No storms, no pain, no disease, no depression, no poverty, and no disability will ever enter our lives contrary to the overruling purpose and design of Christ.
All our unhappiness is triggered by unbelief.
When trials hit, grief exists alongside faith; but excessive grief is the product of unbelief.72
The ultimate aim of trials is to prepare us for eternal joy in Christ.
The immediate value of suffering is its potential to draw us toward Christ and into a fuller experience of our union with him. Trials are a doorway into deeper communion with Christ as we share in his sufferings (Rom. 8:17; 2 Cor. 1:5; 4:10; Phil. 3:10; Col. 1:24; 1 Pet. 4:13).
Certainly, trials are the hammer blows that chisel off sins and idols and worldliness from the sculpture of grace God is fashioning in us. But most importantly, in each trial, we are drawn to find our all-sufficiency in Christ.
Part of why trials make Christ beautiful to our eyes is that trials break off all our worldly securities, and in the moment of suffering, we see that wealth and notoriety and possessions and lust and all the other allurements of the world are emptied of their appeal, and we are left, like the bankrupt prodigal, running home. “When great trials are in view,” Newton writes, we run simply and immediately to our all-sufficient Friend, feel our dependence, and cry in good earnest for help; but if the occasion seems small, we are too apt secretly to lean to our own wisdom and strength, as if in such
...more
Trials remove every false support in our lives to make it possible for us to deepen our delight in Christ.
The more pain we feel, the more aware we become of our weakness and Christ’s all-sufficiency. Joy in Christ is the key to enduring trials.
There is no wasted pain in the Christian life if that pain draws us closer to Christ, for Christ is never more all-sufficient for us than when Christ is all we have. The ultimate aim of suffering is to ready us to worship Christ eternally (sight). The immediate aim of suffering is to draw us closer to Christ in communion (faith). To live in trials is Christ.
