“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30).
“For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17).
“For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake (Philippians 1:29).
“For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ … that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:8, 10).
No one signs up for suffering. I certainly don’t. In fact, I try to avoid it whenever possible.
But suffering comes. It’s real. It’s inevitable. It’s been promised. We have it on good authority.
You may remember Frances Ridley Havergal (1836 – 1879) as the gifted writer of “Take My Life and Let It Be.” In a much lesser-known work, and one of my favorites, the English poet and hymnwriter expressed the truth about our suffering …
“And when amid our blindness
His disappointments fall,
We trust His lovingkindness
Whose wisdom sends them all.
They are the purple fringes
That hide His glorious feet;
They are the fire-wrought hinges
Where truth and mercy meet.”
Frances Havergal is one of my heroes. She was no stranger to suffering. In 1874, she survived near-fatal typhoid fever, and was bedridden for nearly a year. That’s just a taste of the pain that she came to know well. During the last months of her life, Frances wrote a book to encourage other sufferers (published posthumously, 1882). She titled it “Starlight Through the Shadows.” As was the case regarding all of her writings, they were born out of her personal experience with the unquenchable grace and faithfulness of God. In a note to a friend, Frances wrote: “Pain, as to God’s own children, is, truly and really, only blessing in disguise.”
“Only blessing in disguise.” Do we believe that?
It’s true! It may not be a reality that’s easy to hold onto in the middle of the night, but it’s true. Sometimes, friends, it is in the very midst of our personal suffering – “the purple fringes that hide His glorious feet” – where truth and mercy meet in ways only fully understood by Christ.
Frances wrote in her personal journal: “Even in very painful spiritual darkness it has sometimes comforted me to think that God might be leading me through strange dark ways so that I might be His messenger to some of His children in similar distress.” And in another time and place, Frances wrote of God: “There is no bottom to His mercy and love.”
Maybe you’re feeling some of those “strange dark ways” today. Press on, Beloved! It might be good for you and me to consider that God never wastes our pain. Never. In another stanza of the hymn about disappointments with which I started, Frances sounded a note of triumph …
“Our yet unfinished story
Is tending all to this:
To God the greatest glory,
To us the greatest bliss.
Our plans may be disjointed,
But we may calmly rest;
What God has once appointed
Is better than our best.”
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too” (2 Corinthians 1:3-5).
One of the most stop-us-in-our-tracks verses in the Bible is this: “We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). All things! In a world that seems hellbent on keeping God of the equation, we know better. Through our worst trials, God never stops working to deepen our union with Christ. The truth is as old as Scripture’s first book. To the men who’d betrayed him and sold him into slavery, Joseph consoled his brothers: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20).
Frances was right. We who are trusting not in ourselves but in the Lord Jesus have been “predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:11). All things! So Frances could pen her prayer, and ours …
“Take my life, and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee.
Take my moments and my days;
Let them flow in ceaseless praise.”
When Frances died, Charles Spurgeon wrote: “To the great loss of the church, she has left these lower choirs to sing above. Miss Havergal, last and loveliest of our modern poets, when her tones were most mellow and her language most sublime, has been caught up to swell the music of heaven.”
Frances Havergal suffered tremendously during her brief life of 42 years. In a season of particular sorrow, she poured out these words …
“I take this pain, Lord Jesus,
From Thine own hand,
The strength to bear it bravely
Thou wilt command …
‘Tis Thy dear hand, O Saviour,
That presseth sore,
The hand that bears the nail-prints
Forevermore.”
Frances suffered, but she never lost the starlight.
May the same be true of us.
Pastor Charles
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