A short detour from Owensiana to my favorite devotional book and the words of John Newton, that most happy and healthy of preachers. This reminder of the importance of suffering for the believer, from a 1791 letter to John Ryland, Jr:

There is no school like the school of the cross. There men are made wise unto salvation, wise to win souls. In a crucified Savior are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. And the tongue of the truly learned, that can speak a word in season to them that are weary, is not acquired like Greek and Latin by reading great books--but by self-knowledge and soul exercises. To learn navigation by the fireside will never make a man an expert mariner. He must do his business in great waters. And practice will bring him into many situations in which general theory could give him no conception.

This is the testimony of those believers before us who were faithful to the end. Thomas Brooks, in his (1659) The Mute Christian under the Smarting Rod, a (short) book length meditation on Psalm 39, writes of the work of temptation and suffering, those very things we might most avoid and pray to be rid of, in making us more like Jesus:

Temptations are the tools by which the Father of spirits does more and more carve, form, and fashion his precious saints into the similitude and likeness of his dearest Son. . . . "My grace shall be sufficient for you (2 Corinthians 12:9)." Paul never experienced so deeply what almighty power was, what the everlasting arms of mercy were, and what infinite grace and goodness was, as when he was under the buffetings of Satan.


Brooks enjoins us to look on our sufferings with "Scripture spectacles," to see them as, for example, Paul did. Then he calls us to remember what we may forget under a long season of struggle:

When Hagar's bottle of water was spent, she sat down and began to weep, as if she had been utterly undone, Genesis 21:17-19; her provision and her patience, her bottle and her hope were both out together; but her affliction was not so great as she imagined, for there was a well of water near, though for a time she saw it not. So many Christians, they eye the empty bottle, the cross, the burden that is present upon them, and then they fall to weeping, whining, complaining, repining, and murmuring, as if they were utterly undone; and yet a well of water, a well of comfort, a well of refreshment, a well of deliverance is near, and their case is no way so sad, nor so bad as they imagine it to be.

These are not shallow words, nor Disney-esque, but part of the solid joys that are built on the dependable promises of God's Word, seen with His eyes; the way things really are.