SUFFERING THE PRELUDE TO GLORY
‘If so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together.’
These words had a special meaning and application for the days of the Apostles. But they have a meaning for ourselves too. We have need of help as much as the people of the Early Church, though not exactly in the same ways, and we can get our help in remembering the unseen, as they did.
How shall we learn to be quiet and content knowing that if we suffer then we shall be glorified? Let us turn to the help.
I. The help of Christ. Of course our first and greatest help is in the life and death of our Lord Jesus Christ.—As we remember His life and sufferings, and as we claim our membership with Him, we learn His love and power, and help comes. This is a very familiar thought, some know its truth well. But, after all, this too is a matter of faith, and faith is not always strong; faith does not always seem able to lay hold on these things.
Let me speak to you of another way of help, perhaps not quite so much thought of, a way in which we may strengthen even faith itself.
II. The help of our own past experiences.—Now, it is quite true that we have not had the experiences of St. Paul. We have never been blessed with the vision of heaven. We have never been made happy by a sense of the presence of angels, and the holy beings of the unseen world.
But yet we may have had experiences which have helped us, and from which we may now draw courage, strength, and hope.
(a) First in the matter of pain. Think of some one who has suffered much and endeavoured to bear the pain well. He has not said much about it, but has rather tried to be silent.
(b) So also with poverty. It may bring with it a great sense of loss. If all has been borne quietly, making the best of what there was, submitting to the will of God when a thing could not be done, waiting in hope of better times to come, may not the man, the real man, be the better and the stronger for it?
(c) Very much the same may be said of sorrow. Murmuring, fretting, temptations, even doubts of God, may easily make sorrow much harder to bear. The man who will not let these things be found in him, who keeps his sorrow to himself, not going about asking sympathy from all he meets; the man who recognises the many little things that may come, that do come, in the way of comfort, that show that God has not forgotten, has not left him alone, and is grateful for them; does not such a man become stronger in self-restraint and faith in God?
(d) Or think of temptation. To any self-respecting man, any man of honour, much more to any man who knows what his life should be before God, temptation is a real suffering. But if he watches against it, if he overcomes it, and though he may be very near falling, yet is able to say, ‘No, I did not do it, I am thankful to say’; is not such an one a better man for it? Does it not add something to his life?
(e) The same thing is true of persecution. If a true man is persecuted for doing what is right he gains a firmer hold on the right itself. He studies it more, and so becomes more sure of his duty to uphold it, to stand by it, and so if need be to suffer for it.
We may find that far more than we knew at the time, the life of Christ has been our life, and that we have power, and have gained something in that to which we hope to come, ‘the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,’ and think what will it be when we are perfected! Think what will be the glory when the suffering is ended!
—Bishop E. W. Osborne.