"For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God. So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day" (2 Cor. 4:15�16).
Devotional
O Christian sufferer! Do you wonder why the Lord keeps you so long upon the couch of solitariness and the bed of languishing? Do you wonder why "the tent that is our earthly home" (2 Cor. 5:1) should be taken down by lingering sickness, the corrodings of disease, and the gradual decay of strength?
Hush every anxious, doubtful thought. Your heavenly Father has so ordained it. He who pitched the tent, who owns the tent, has a right to remove it by whatever process he sees fit.
Before long, the mystery of his present conduct will be all explained. Faith and love can even explain it now�"yes, Father, for such was your gracious will" (Luke 10:21).
Yours is an honorable and a responsible post. God still has a work for you to do. You have been waiting year by year, in the quietness of holy submission, the summons to depart. But God has lengthened your period of weariness and of suffering, for the work is not yet done in you, or by you, to effect that for which this sickness was sent.
Oh, what a witness for God you may now be! What a testimony for Christ you may now bear! What sermons your conversation and your example may now preach from that sick bed�converting the careless, confirming the wavering, restoring the wandering, comforting the timid!
And oh, for what higher degrees of glory may God be preparing you through this protracted illness! The higher your attainments in holiness here, the loftier your summit of blessedness hereafter. By God's grace, your present lengthened sickness may be preparing you for these high degrees of heavenly happiness. Sanctified by the Spirit of holiness, the slow fire is but the more perfectly refining. And the more complete the refinement on earth, the more perfectly the sanctified soul will mirror forth the Divine Sun in heaven.
Then, may your beautiful patience of spirit, meek and patient sufferer, increasingly be that of the Psalmist, "O LORD, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me" (Ps. 131:1�2).
