At a women's retreat someone asked me if the Christian life must be all crosses and suffering. "Is there no happiness for a believer?" My message that day had been on the great principle of the Cross: My life for yours, and I had tried to show how, though we must die many deaths if we truly follow Christ, life will always lead to the song, the laying down of life always to a resurrection. It is the enemy who would have us think always of death--any kind of death--as a dead end. Christ showed us that it is always, for the Christian, the gateway to life.
Nothing but crosses? No happiness?
"Thy will but holds me to my life's fruition" (George MacDonald, Diary of An Old Soul, April 25). In the path of obedience we shall find the only pure joy to be found anywhere in earth or heaven.
"Goodness and love unfailing, these will follow me all the days of my life" (Psalms 23:6).
--from The Music of His Promises, by Elisabeth Elliot
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Monday, August 1, 2011
"Death cannot stop True Love. All it can do is delay it for a while."
"My Father is the husbandman." (John 15:1.)
It is comforting to think of trouble, in whatever form it may come to us, as a heavenly messenger, bringing us something from God. In its earthly aspect it may seem hurtful, even destructive; but in its spiritual out-working it yields blessing. Many of the richest blessings which have come down to us from the past are the fruit of sorrow or pain. We should never forget that redemption, the world's greatest blessing, is the fruit of the world's greatest sorrow. In every time of sharp pruning, when the knife is deep and the pain is sore, it is an unspeakable comfort to read, "My Father is the husbandman."
Doctor Vincent tells of being in a great hothouse where luscious clusters of grapes were hanging on every side. The owner said, "When my new gardener came, he said he would have nothing to do with these vines unless he could cut them clean down to the stalk; and he did, and we had no grapes for two years, but this is the result."
There is rich suggestiveness in this interpretation of the pruning process, as we apply it to the Christian life. Pruning seems to be destroying the vine, the gardener appears to be cutting it all away; but he looks on into the future and knows that the final outcome will be the enrichment of its life and greater abundance of fruit.
There are blessings we can never have unless we are ready to pay the price of pain. There is no way to reach them save through suffering. --Dr. Miller
It is comforting to think of trouble, in whatever form it may come to us, as a heavenly messenger, bringing us something from God. In its earthly aspect it may seem hurtful, even destructive; but in its spiritual out-working it yields blessing. Many of the richest blessings which have come down to us from the past are the fruit of sorrow or pain. We should never forget that redemption, the world's greatest blessing, is the fruit of the world's greatest sorrow. In every time of sharp pruning, when the knife is deep and the pain is sore, it is an unspeakable comfort to read, "My Father is the husbandman."
Doctor Vincent tells of being in a great hothouse where luscious clusters of grapes were hanging on every side. The owner said, "When my new gardener came, he said he would have nothing to do with these vines unless he could cut them clean down to the stalk; and he did, and we had no grapes for two years, but this is the result."
There is rich suggestiveness in this interpretation of the pruning process, as we apply it to the Christian life. Pruning seems to be destroying the vine, the gardener appears to be cutting it all away; but he looks on into the future and knows that the final outcome will be the enrichment of its life and greater abundance of fruit.
There are blessings we can never have unless we are ready to pay the price of pain. There is no way to reach them save through suffering. --Dr. Miller
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