I received a greeting card yesterday from a beautiful Christian lady in our church. (Not the one with me in this photo.) It encouraged me beyond words, and humbled me.
I have a progressively worsening physical disability. Dark discouragement sometimes weighs heavily on me. Yesterday was the worst. So when her card arrived in the mail it was as if she was hiding in my house and peeking into my heart. (Actually the Lord was!)
These words gleamed on the front of the card: “THE LORD SHALL GUIDE THEE CONTINUALLY–Isaiah 58:11. ” Inside she wrote, ” . . . I just wanted to encourage you to remember that God is using you now in ways you may not see. You may not realize how the picture of your steadfastness and endurance encourages the rest of us to keep pushing on.” She enclosed part of a sermon from Charles Spurgeon . . .
“You look at the weather-beaten sailor, the man who is at home on the sea–he has a bronzed face and mahogany-colored flesh. He looks as tough as an oak and as hardy as if he were made of iron . . . How did the man become so accustomed to hardship, so able to breast the storm, so that he does not care [from where the wind blows]? . . . how did he come to have such strength? By doing business in great waters! . . . Now trial works in the saints that spiritual hardihood which cannot be learned in ease! You may go to school forever, but you cannot learn endurance there! . . . Strong faith and brave patience come of trouble and a few men in the Church who have thus been prepared are worth anything in times of tempest . . .
“Moreover, our trials, when blessed of God to make us patient, ripen us . . . there is a sort of mellowness about Believers who have endured a great deal of affliction that you never see in other people . . . A certain measure of sunlight is needed to bring out the real flavor of fruits–and when a fruit has felt its measure of burning sun, it develops a lusciousness which we all delight in. So is it in men and women–a certain amount of trouble appears to be necessary to create a certain sugar of graciousness in them . . . You must have known such men and such women, and have said to yourselves, ‘I wish I could be like they are–so calm so quiet, so self-contained, so happy–and when not happy, yet so content not to be happy, so mature in judgment, so spiritual in conversation, so truly ripe.’ This only comes to those in whom the proof of their faith works experience and then experience brings forth the fruits of the Spirit.”
Retirement from pastoral ministry driven by a progressively-worsening disability makes me often feel useless. You see then why this dear lady’s card encouraged me. (And even more so because she has long had to cope with physical pain of her own.) It also humbled me, because I know often I feel anything but steadfast and enduring and fruitful and strong in faith and patience! To God be the glory for the fruit he grows in us which often is seen only by others!
Our churches and neighborhoods are filled with discouraged people. This is why we are told . . .
” . . . encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness (Hebrews 3:13).
“Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another–and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10:25).
It’s why Paul and Barnabas returned to the new churches “strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22).
And it’s why we can be assured that behind whatever little encouragement we feel we may have to give is the LORD who “[hears] the desire of the afflicted [ and encourages] them and [listens] to their cry” (Psalm 10:17). Yesterday the Lord spoke through this dear lady to encourage me. The Lord used her, at least in part, because she fills her mind with God’s Word and spends time praying in his presence–and because she herself bears the fruit of faith and patience grown only in weathering the storm of suffering.
So thank you, dear friend in Christ, for encouraging me with the truth of Christ. May your example move us all to encourage one another so that the testing of our faith in suffering will produce endurance and character and hope until the day of Christ’s coming when death itself will be swallowed in victory!
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