"Nobody withstands 'The Machine...'"

"Thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress." (Psalm 4:1.)

This is one of the grandest testimonies ever given by man to the moral government of God. It is not a man's thanksgiving that he has been set free from suffering. It is a thanksgiving that he has been set free through suffering: "Thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress." He declares the sorrows of life to have been themselves the source of life's enlargement.

And have not you and I a thousand times felt this to be true? It is written of Joseph in the dungeon that "the iron entered into his soul." We all feel that what Joseph needed for his soul was just the iron. He had seen only the glitter of the gold. He had been rejoicing in youthful dreams; and dreaming hardens the heart. He who sheds tears over a romance will not be most apt to help reality; real sorrow will be too unpoetic for him. We need the iron to enlarge our nature. The gold is but a vision; the iron is an experience. The chain which unites me to humanity must be an iron chain. That touch of nature which makes the world akin is not joy, but sorrow; gold is partial, but iron is universal.

My soul, if thou wouldst be enlarged into human sympathy, thou must be narrowed into limits of human suffering. Joseph's dungeon is the road to Joseph's throne. Thou canst not lift the iron load of thy brother if the iron hath not entered into thee. It is thy limit that is thine enlargement. It is the shadows of thy life that are the real fulfillment of thy dreams of glory. Murmur not at the shadows; they are better revelations than thy dreams. Say not that the shades of the prison-house have fettered thee; thy fetters are wings--wings of flight into the bosom of humanity. The door of thy prison-house is a door into the heart of the universe. God has enlarged thee by the binding of sorrow's chain.--George Matheson.

"Did you say 'I do'?" "Uh, no. We sort of skipped that part..."

"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble." (Psalm 46:1.)

The question often comes, "Why didn't He help me sooner?" It is not His order. He must first adjust you to the trouble and cause you to learn your lesson from it. His promise is, "I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him and honor him." He must be with you in the trouble first all day and all night. Then He will take you out of it. This will not come till you have stopped being restless and fretful about it and become calm and quiet. Then He will say, "It is enough."

God uses trouble to teach His children precious lessons. They are intended to educate us. When their good work is done, a glorious recompense will come to us through them. There is a sweet joy and a real value in them. He does not regard them as difficulties but as opportunities.--from Streams in the Desert

"My Westley will always come for me..."

We often hope to be spared trouble or suffering, and surely it is legitimate to pray that we may be ("Lead us not into temptation" is a prayer Jesus taught us to pray). Jesus Himself asked the Father to take away the "cup"; Paul prayed for the removal of his "thorn." In both cases, the answer was no. But God did not give a mere no--He sent what had not been asked; strength to endure. An angel was immediately dispatched to Gethsemane, "bringing him strength" (Lk 22:43 NEB). His suffering did not cease--in fact, "in anguish of spirit He prayed the more urgently and his sweat was like clots of blood" (Lk 22:44).

The apostle was suffering in some physical way, it seems. The things was called "a messenger of Satan," and he did well to ask for its removal. The answer was no--but something unasked was given: grace. There was plenteous grace to enable Paul to endure. What God give in answer to our prayers will always be the thing we most urgently need, and it will always be sufficient.

--from A Lamp for My Feet, by Elisabeth Elliot

"Will you promise not to hurt him? ....If we surrender and I return with you, will you promise not to hurt this man?"

When we suffer, sometimes one of the first prayers is that others whom we love may not suffer in that way. This is just a faint reflection of His love, for He, Who was led into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil, taught us to pray, Lead us not into temptation. Yet often we are sorely tempted. Help comes by remembering that love is behind even that. "This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased. Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness." There is wonderful comfort in that Then.

....Out of wilderness experience our wonderful Lord gives us something to use for the help of others. It was so with Him: "In that He Himself hath suffered being tempted, He is able to succour them that are tempted." Is it not worth while to go through anything if only in the end others may be helped?

--from Edges of His Ways, by Amy Carmichael (emphasis mine)

"The prince and the count always insist on everyone being healthy before they're broken."

"Let the bones that you have broken rejoice." Psalm 51:8

I must admit it; I have a low tolerance for difficulty. I am a project-oriented person, so I tend to have an agenda for every day. I know exactly what I want to accomplish and what a successful day will look like. I don't want to have to deal with interruptions or obstructions. I want the situations, locations, and people around me to willingly participate in my plan. All of this means that it's counterintuitive for me to view difficultly as something beneficial. I've little time and tolerance for "broken bones."

My problem is that my Redeemer is the redeemer of broken bones. Maybe you're thinking, "Paul, what in the world are you talking about?" "Broken bones" is a physical metaphor for the pain of redemption. In case you've noticed, God's work of delivering you from your addiction to self and sin and molding you into his image isn't always a comfortable process. Sometimes, in order to make our crooked hearts straight God has to break some bones. I gotta confess, I don't like broken bones.

I love the way the prophet Amos talks about this (Amos 4). It's a bit of a disconcerting passage until you wrap your brain around what the prophet is saying about why God is doing what he's doing. Listen to the "broken bones" phraseology of this passage:

"I gave you cleanness of teeth in all your cities,
and lack of bread in all your places."
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"I also withheld the rain from you 
when there were yet three months to the harvest;
I would send rain on one city...
one field would have rain,
and the field on which it did not rain would wither;
so two or three cities would wander to another city
to drink water, and would not be satisfied."
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"I struck you with blight and mildew;
your many gardens and your vineyards,
your fig trees and your olive trees the locust devoured."
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"I sent among you a pestilence after the manner of Egypt;
I killed your young men with the sword,
and carried away your horses,
and I made the stench of your camp go up into your nostrils."
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"I overthrew some of you, as when God overthrew Sodom and 
Gomorrah,
and you were as a brand plucked out of the burning."

AMOS 4:6-11

Now, you have to ask, "Why would a God of love do this to the people he says he loves?" Well, there's a phrase that's repeated after every stanza of this scary poem that's the answer to this question. Pay attention to these words: "yet you did not return to me." These acts that seem like the product of vengeful anger are actually acts of redemptive love. You see, in doing these things God is actually fulfilling his covenantal commitment to satisfy the deepest needs of his people. And what is it that they need most? The answer is simple and clear throughout all of Scripture; more than anything else they need him!

But this is exactly where the rub comes in. Although our greatest personal need is to live in a life-shaping relationship with the Lord, as sinners we have hearts that are prone to wander. We very quickly forget him and begin to put some aspect of the creation in his place. We very soon forget that he's to be the center of everything we do, and we put ourselves in the center of our universe. We easily lose sight of the fact that our hearts were made for him, and that deep sense of well-being that all of us seek can only be found in him. We rapidly forget the powerfully addicting dangers of sin and think we can step over God's boundaries without moral cost. So, God in the beauty of his redeeming love will "break our bones." He'll bring us through difficulty, want, suffering, sadness, loss, and grief in order to ensure that we are living in pursuit of the one thing that we desperately need--him.

It's time for us to embrace, teach, and encourage others with the theology of uncomfortable grace. As long as sin still lives inside of us, producing in each of us a propensity to forget and wander, God's grace will come to us in uncomfortable forms. You may be wondering where the grace of God is in your life, when actually you're getting it. But it's not the grace of release or relief; no, you're getting the uncomfortable grace of rescue, relationship, and refinement.

So, if you are God's child, resist the temptation to doubt his goodness in the middle of your stress. It's time for us to stop thinking that our difficulty is a sign of his unfaithfulness and inattention. If you are God's child and you still recognize the battle of sin within, then those difficulties are sure signs of rescuing redemptive love. God isn't withholding his grace from you. No, you're experiencing uncomfortable grace, grace that's willing to break bones in order for your heart to be true. This grace is unwilling to give up. This grace will not turn its back. This grace will not accept the status quo. This grace will not compromise or grow cynical. God hasn't forgotten you. He loves you with real love, and he's giving you real grace. And he'll continue to do so until you're finally free of your propensity to wander away. Now that's real love.

--from Whiter Than Snow: Meditations on Sin and Mercy, by Paul David Tripp (emphasis mine)

"So it's to be torture then? I can cope with torture..."

"There he proved them." (Exod. 15:25.)

I stood once in the test room of a great steel mill. All around me were little partitions and compartments. Steel had been tested to the limit, and marked with figures that showed its breaking point. Some pieces had been twisted until they broke, and the strength of torsion was marked on them. Some had been stretched to the breaking point and their tensile strength indicated. Some had been compressed to the crushing point, and also marked. The master of the steel mill knew just what these pieces of steel would stand under strain. He knew just what they would bear if placed in the great ship, building, or bridge. He knew this because his testing room revealed it.

It is often so with God's children. God does not want us to be like vases of glass or porcelain. He would have us like these toughened pieces of steel, able to bear twisting and crushing to the uttermost without collapse.

He wants us to be, not hothouse plants, but storm-beaten oaks; not sand dunes driven with every gust of wind, but granite rocks withstanding the fiercest storms. To make us such He must needs bring us into His testing room of suffering.  Many of us need no other argument than our own experiences to prove that suffering is indeed God's testing room of faith. --J. H. McC.