“It is necessary to go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.” —Acts 14:22
If we don’t trust the heart and intentions of God, we will naturally resist suffering. But as seventeenth-century Puritan author William Law exhorts us, we must learn to welcome and embrace suffering as a pathway to sanctification and a doorway into greater intimacy with God:
Receive every inward and outward trouble, every disappointment, pain, uneasiness, temptation, darkness, and desolation with both thy hands, as a true opportunity and blessed occasion of dying to self, and entering into a fuller fellowship with thy self-denying, suffering Savior. 1
When suffering comes into my life, I don’t al-ways accept it with both hands. I’m not always quick to think of it as an opportunity to be more like Jesus and get closer to God. But it is. The next time a challenge presents itself, try accepting it. Ask God to give you His strength to endure. And then ask Him to teach you through it.
1 William Law, cited in Daily Strength for Daily Needs, ed. Mary W. Tileston (Boston: Little, Brown, 1899), 17.
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Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, Seeking Him daily program
Scripture taken from The CSB
Make it Personal
How has past suffering helped you enter into a fuller fellowship with Jesus? What has God taught you through those difficult times?