Post by Admin on Jul 22, 2024 9:25:24 GMT -5
Have you exhausted the sick and suffering to be patient and calm?
Have you comforted them with talk of resignation or submission to the will of God or praise them for bearing their cross without complain.
Perhaps so for such seems to be the accepted and common words of those who seek to comfort uttered most earnestly by sincere child of God, as well as by those who have drifted from him, yet such comfort is not in accordance with the spirit of God's word.
In his word, we do not read of resignation or submission or of reconciling oneself to one's lot. Such ideas come from the stoics of ancient Greece and from the fatalistic Islamic creeds.
One who suffers without complaint may do so for the sake of the world or for the love of self, or the love of God and only the last is true patience. A soldier may be spurred to bravery by thirst, for gain or honor.
Pride and selflove may give him strength to bear hardship and pain without a murmur. Thus he may triumph over his sufferings, triumph without faith in God, perhaps even while mocking at God and religion.
The Stoics of Ancient Greece and the fatalistic Islamist have their counterpart among us, even among Christians. There are men who control themselves with rigid discipline, as if they were above suffering in sorrow.
They pride themselves on being strong characters.
They are ashamed to give way to grief or even to show any emotion. In secret they may occasionally writhe in pain or despair in the presence of other of others.
Never but their strength is not in God. It is in self, in their own enthroned ego.
There are others among the common run off folk who submit to suffering as inevitable. It is the will of God, they say. And they confuse the scriptural doctrine of predestination with fatalism.
It would be useless to protect or murmur.
They resigned themselves to trouble as a prisoner resigns himself to the narrow confines of his self.
They swallow their resentment and they sigh apathetically.
Thus men deaden themselves to feeling.
They deaden themselves to love and Beauty, as well as suffering.
They kill within themselves the capacity to suffer. And they crush the hearts craving for the lost happiness of paradise when the storms of life beat upon them. And the waves of trouble wash over their heads.
They shut their eyes and stop the ears.
They choose rather to sink to near oblivion than to suffer.
By living less, they suffer less.
Men who deny the Christ, can thus make a show of noble strength without dependence upon the source of all strength in their show of noble courage, they ignore him who sends the suffering. They bear it in the strength of their own pride, hardening their hearts, stifling all feeling. And then. man says in his pride that one can overcome sorrow without the man of sorrows, and one can triumph over death without the help of him who conquered death.
Then they tell the tell of the sick how quiet and resigned they are upon their beds, though Godless how calmly and peaceably, peacefully they die they tell it tauntingly because they still dare to confess that there is no peace apart from God And we who confess that great truth ought to blame for this taunt of the Godless because we, with the word of God in our very homes, have helped to dim the light with Jesus shed upon the mystery of suffering.
We have slipped back into the attitude of ignorant heathen.
We too enthrone proud self control and then we imagine that we are thus honoring God and it may even be that we label a deathbed Christian when it is of no it has no other virtues than that of stoical resignation to the inevitable.
In so doing, we make it possible for the non Christian to say we too can die thus and we can die thus without Christ.
Indeed, they can thy thus thus live too calm, patient, submissive, like the bones of Ezekiel's valley of the dead. But that is not life. That is not the life that grows within you. If you are one of those who Christ has breathed life, if you are rejoicing in life from the dead, it is not being sensitive, as was tender Jesus. The mystery of Christians Christian suffering is not a dulling of sensitivity, nor a shrinking from pain, nor a wearing of complete armor about the flesh in the heart, so that no arrow can penetrate and no sore can pass the inner recesses.
But for Jesus sake, the Christian is willing to suffer, willing even to bear the added burden which will be his because he confesses Christ, knowing that just because he is a child of God, he must endure the chastisement of a Father.
The Christian does not invite suffering, neither does he struggle through it tearlessly when it comes. He pleads that it may be shortened but the mist and the mist of the suffering he rises above his distress with a holy joy in the psalm of praise.
How is that possible Says that, though you give your body to be burned and have not love, your suffering would be in vain. Only the glowing warmth of love confused intense suffering and joy into into the song of praise for God. The question then is this, do you suffer for a love of God? Suffer so that you are drawn nearer to him, becoming even more his and he yours. Are you, as a word, tearing your way through the thorns and thistles of life toward the gate of the kingdom to meet him? Your god, such love does not originate with it within us. Love is of God. It is shed forth in our hearts only through the Holy Spirit whom he has sent