THE VALUE OF HARD PLACES - - Author Unknown

THE VALUE OF HARD PLACES

- Author Unknown -

Trials are valuable in revealing to us ourselves and showing us our insufficiencies and failures. They are God's great blasting processes in the work of spiritual excavation, which is necessary for the work of building up the life and character. We never know what graces and qualities we possess until the test comes, and then the faith and courage that glowed with such a flame in the moment of enthusiasm and inspiration finds its true level, and the soul is thrown back in its nothingness and helplessness upon Christ alone, to find in Him its all in all.

This was the meaning of Jacob's trials, to bring him to the end of self. This was the purpose of Job's afflictions, to slay his self-righteous confidence. This was the blessing that came from Peter's fall, that it broke his pride and self-sufficiency and sent him forth to lean upon his Lord and find his strength outside himself in Christ alone. This is why the Lord still tries you, to convince you thoroughly that your estimate of your own strength is utterly false and. exaggerated and to bring you to that place where it will be truly "Not I, but Christ liveth in me" (Gal.

2:20) .

                  Trials Make Christ Real

Trials make Christ real, just as real as the trouble is. They are God's heavenly messengers to communicate His grace and blessing to our souls and make them stand out in relief in our lives, so everybody can see it and feel it.

God cuts and burns His messages into human lives until Christ becomes to us as real as the tears we have shed, the fears under which we have trembled, the sorrows that were ready to over-whelm us, and the difficulties which rose like mountains before us, so that the sweetest memories of our lives are the hard places which have become stepping stones and monuments of divine and heavenly things.

Trals are Occasions for Victory

Trials win for us eternal crowns. They become occasions for victory and rewards which will never pass away. When history is forgotten and the records of time are obliterated, when the solar system has vanished away, and new heavens and new earth are sweeping in the orbits of immensity, the eternal results of these trials will shine in our lives as we share with God Himself the new heavens and the new earth, and the glories of the coming age for which all things are now preparing.

Beloved, shall we seek to profit from our sorrows? Shall we win a crown? Shall we get out of the things that are happening to us today all that Christ has for us? Shall we be "more than conquerors through him that loved us"? (Rom. 8:37). And shall we endure hardness as good soldiers of Jesus Christ? If so, we shall someday hear Him say to us: "Well done, thou good and faithful servant; . . . enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."

Trials Teach us to Know the Resources of God

Trials help us, to know the resources of God. It is only in difficult circumstances that we learn to know His all-sufficiency. Israel at the Red Sea must first stand still and behold the salvation of God (Ex. 14:10-14). So He tells them that the reason He led them through the wilderness, and exposed them to a situation where there were no natural supplies of any kind, was to teach them that He was adequate for every need, and that "man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God" (Matt. 4:4). God becomes real to us up to the measure of our sense of need He meets. So every difficult situation is just a vessel for Him to fill and an occasion for Him to show Himself in His infinite wisdom, power, and grace. The Apostle tells us that he was exposed to every sort of difficulty in order that the power of Christ might rest upon him according to his needs, and therefore he welcomed each new situation as another occasion for Him to say. "My grace is sufficient for Thee" (2 Cor. 12: 7-10).

Beloved, are we thus proving and finding Him equal to all the conditions of our lives and glorying in being able to tell the world that our God shall supply all our need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus?

Trials Teach us Faith

Trials teach us faith. Trial is the fruitful soil of trust. Difficulties are the divine incentives which demand and develop our confidence in the divine faithfulness and love. The eagle can only teach her young to fly by tearing up her nest and hurling them out in midair, where, thrown upon their own resources, they must either fly or fall. Then it is that they must learn the undeveloped power in their little pinions, and as they strike out upon the air in desperate struggles, they find the secret of a new life and gradually learn to beat their way through the pathless firmament and fly upon the wings of the wind and in the face of the sun.

So God teaches His children to use the wings of faith by stirring up their nests, taking away their props, and flinging them out often-times into an abyss of helplessness, where they must either sink or learn to trust and throw themselves upon the seeming void, to find that God is there beneath them like the supporting wing which the eagle stretches forth beneath her faint and struggling brood.

It is so easy for us to lean upon the things that we can see, and feel that it is an entirely new experience for us to stand alone and walk with the unseen God as Peter walked upon the sea. But it is the lesson we must learn if our souls are ever to dwell in God's eternal calm where faith must be our only sense, and God be our all in all.

Very gently does He suit the test to our feeble strength and lead us on as we are able for more and more. Are we thus trusting Him in life's hard places and growing strong as we endure hardness as good soldiers of Jesus Christ?

Trials Teach us to Pray

Trials teach us to pray and constrain us to be much alone with God. They drove Jacob to his knees at the fords of Jabbok (Gen. 32:23-30). They taught the Psalmist to find "the secret place of the most High" (Ps. 91). They made the life of Paul one ceaseless dependence upon the presence of his Lord, and they have inspired as well as sustained the divine communion which we have learned to prove as the supreme resource and solution of our lives.

It is very humbling that it should be true that God must press His children to His breast by suffering and need, but it is, alas, too often the case that ease and comfort lead us to, at least, a partial independence of Him, and our most spiritual seasons and the times that have brought God most near to us have been the times of which we could say, "Thou hast known my soul in adversities."

                     Trials Teach us Love

Trials teach us to love, and when God wants to soften and refine our spirit and answer our prayers for patience and love, He has to let the discipline of ill-treatment, injustice, and often the severest wrong compel us to go to Him for the love that "beareth all things," that "endureth all things" (1 Cor. 13:7). Of course, we find out first that we have not the love adequate for the test, and as the Holy Spirit convicts us of our sins, He leads us to the source of strength; then, as we gradually learn the humbling lesson, He leads us on from day to day in deeper testing and sweeter refining until we can thank Him for the fire that brought us more of His Spirit's grace and His own overcoming love.

Trials Teach us Patience

Trials teach us patience. It is a thorough school to learn to endure, and patience is the crowning grace of the Christian life. When it has its perfect work, then we become "perfect and entire, wanting nothing" (James 1:4). Often therefore, the crowning lesson of the spiritual life is learned in the school of sufferin

Trials Teach us Courage

Trials teach us courage. They take away the fear of suffering, the dread of pain, as we experience God's sustaining grace and enable us to put on His strength and courage and rise above the power of fear until we welcome the conflict and stand with scars of the conflict and victory as good soldiers of Jesus Christ.

Trials Make us Patterns

Trials make us patterns and object lessons for the help of others and for the glory of God, showing to the world what Christ can do for His children, and what Christ-filled lives can accomplish where others fail. God wants us to be living epistles of Christ (2 Cor. 3:3) unto the world, to angels and to men, showing to them in our example that Christ can keep in every situation, and that the power of His grace is practical, supernatural, and adapted to every human life.

Trials Fit us to Help Others

Trials fit us to help others by the lessons we have learned in our own experience. (2 Cor. 1:3, 4). The callous and immature heart is little qualified to comfort, counsel, and bless a suffering world. God has to burn in us first what we are to give out to our fellows. The painful ordeal of a real experience qualifies us to comfort, strengthen, and encourage the souls to whom He has to send us, and to whom we can say, "I have been there, and I can tell you from the depths of my own experience that 'my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus'" (Phil. 4:19).

JESUS is THE TRUE GOD!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BFtxXI2iaE

Believing CHRIST died, that’s HISTORY. Believing CHRIST DIED for YOU and ROSE again that’s SALVATION. Read: Romans 1:16 and 1. Corinthians 15:1-4




Posted by Cecil Spivey
cspivey1953@gmail.com 

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