For thought and meditation

[rl69]

Let those who suffer according to the will of God commit their souls to Him in doing good… 1 PETER 4:19
Choosing to suffer means that there must be something wrong with you, but choosing God’s will— even if it means you will suffer— is something very different. No normal, healthy saint ever chooses suffering; he simply chooses God’s will, just as Jesus did, whether it means suffering or not. And no saint should ever dare to interfere with the lesson of suffering being taught in another saint’s life.
The saint who satisfies the heart of Jesus will make other saints strong and mature for God. But the people used to strengthen us are never those who sympathize with us; in fact, we are hindered by those who give us their sympathy, because sympathy only serves to weaken us. No one better understands a saint than the saint who is as close and as intimate with Jesus as possible. If we accept the sympathy of another saint, our spontaneous feeling is, “God is dealing too harshly with me and making my life too difficult.” That is why Jesus said that self-pity was of the devil (see Matthew 16:21-23). We must be merciful to God’s reputation. It is easy for us to tarnish God’s character because He never argues back; He never tries to defend or vindicate Himself. Beware of thinking that Jesus needed sympathy during His life on earth. He refused the sympathy of people because in His great wisdom He knew that no one on earth understood His purpose (see Matthew 16:23). He accepted only the sympathy of His Father and the angels (see Luke 15:10).
Look at God’s incredible waste of His saints, according to the world’s judgment. God seems to plant His saints in the most useless places. And then we say, “God intends for me to be here because I am so useful to Him.” Yet Jesus never measured His life by how or where He was of the greatest use. God places His saints where they will bring the most glory to Him, and we are totally incapable of judging where that may be

[USMC87]

Amen, I totally agree.

[Blackwater]

Amen! What a crucial lesson for us to learn, and separate the one from the other! Nobody WANTS to suffer, except maybe massochists. But suffering because you're taking the way the Lord is leading you DOES happen sometimes, and when it does, we need to bear it as happily as we know how to do that.

This world was never meant to be a Garden of Eden, but a testing and proving ground - a means of separating the wheat from the chaff in this world, so that when God re-populates Heaven, there will be no discord and no dissension at all. All that will have to go to another place, apart and far removed from God. It's been likened to a huge pyre, but I can't help but wonder if it's not terribly lonely and cold - two things we humans tend to hate the most. But those who go there will have had to have CHOSEN that path, so ..... God doesn't send them there, really. They send themselves, probably by just being too haughty, self-obsessed and mean spirited to even TRY to find God. What a loss for them!