Tag Archives: Suffering

The Banquet House

Posted on by under Jonathan Edwards

Christ is not only a remedy for your weariness and trouble, but he will give you an abundance of the contrary, joy and delight. They who come to Christ, do not only come to a resting-place after they have been wandering in a wilderness, but they come to a banqueting-house where they may rest, and where they may feast. They may cease from their former troubles and toils, and they may enter upon a course of delights and spiritual joys.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

The Depth of a Christian’s Joy

Posted on by under D. Edmond Hiebert

The depth of a disciple’s joy in the Lord may well be measured by the degree of his participation in the sufferings of the Lord.  It is still true that those who pay a great price in suffering to remain true to Christ know a deep measure of this Spirit-wrought joy in their lives.  Perhaps our Christian lives are so lacking in this joy because our Christian profession costs us so little.

D. Edmond Hiebert, The Thessalonian Epistles (Chicago: Moody Press, 1982), 60.

Christ Who Suffered in Our Place

Posted on by under D. A. Carson

My thoughts and prayers are with the grieving families in Newtown, CT. The Christmas season was the beginning of the life of the one who can best identify with them, being the one who Himself is a man of sorrows and well-acquainted with grief. Jesus knows and understands, and He is present with those who suffering at this time.  God bless them all!

Sometimes it is when we suffer, when we observe the universality of death’s decree, when we are debilitated, when we observe an extraordinarily barbaric bit of cruelty, when we are sidelined by a chronic illness, that we are impelled to pause and reflect on the love of God to sinners and rebels such as we are. We serve the Lord Christ, who suffered in our place, who learned obedience through the trials that he suffered. The trinkets and baubles that otherwise capture so much of our attention fade away, and the eternal things assume their rightful place. Then we know what it means to confess that God’s love is ‘as shoreless and endless as eternity.’

D. A. Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1992), 194.

Greater Sufferings Than Man Could Inflict

Posted on by under Jonathan Edwards

So great is his grace, that nothing is too much as the means of this good. It is sufficient not only to do great things, but also to suffer in order to do it, and not only to suffer, but to suffer most extremely even unto death, the most terrible of natural evils; and not only death, but the most ignominious and tormenting, and every way the most terrible that men could inflict; yea, and greater sufferings than men could inflict, who could only torment the body. He had sufferings in his soul, that were the more immediate fruits of the wrath of God against the sins of those he undertakes for.

Jonathan Edwards, The Excellency of Christ