11-15. Contrasting Hearts
“The Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy” (James 5:11).
There are two hearts that we learn in the process of suffering: our own sinful heart, and our Father’s loving heart.
“There is a Divine mystery in suffering, a strange and supernatural power in it, which has never been fathomed by human reason. There never has been known great saintliness of soul which did not pass through great suffering. When the suffering soul reaches a calm sweet carelessness, when it can inwardly smile at its own suffering, and does not even ask the Father to deliver it from suffering, then it has wrought its blessed ministry; then patience has its perfect work; then the crucifixion begins to weave itself into a crown.” -T.W.
“There is no place for learning the tender sympathy of the Lord Jesus, and the blessings of the Father’s love and patience and care, as in the trials of the wilderness journey. True, we must first have reached by faith the Canaan to which we have already come in the Lord Jesus. Then we find that this world is not the sphere in which the Father can bless us fully; but that there is no place where our own heart is more thoroughly learned, and the heart of the Lord Jesus, as in the wilderness journey.” -F.G.P.
“‘Ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children; My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of Him’ (Heb. 12:5). I am not to despise the child-training, like a duck in the rain, indifferent to it, braving as it were everything; neither am I to ‘faint when. . . rebuked of Him,’ like a hen in the rain, which is a miserable object. I am neither to be miserable nor indifferent, but thoughtful and exercised.” -J.B.S.
“The Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort” (2 Cor. 1:3).