God knows the time for joy and truly Will send it when he sees it meet When He has tried and purged thee duly And found thee free from all deceit. He comes to thee all unaware And makes thee own His loving care.3

The hope of heaven brought him joy, and joy brought him strength, and so, like John Calvin before him and George Whitefield after him (two verifiable examples) and, it would seem, like the apostle Paul himself Ãƒ¢Ã¢'¬Ã‚¦ he was astoundingly enabled to labor on, accomplishing more than would ever have seemed possible in a single lifetime."4 But

La soberanÃ

Of all the books which can be put into your hands, those which relate the labors and suffering of good men are the most interesting and instructive.

I have the profound sense that many people who complain of not being able to rejoice in God treat the knowledge of God as something that ought to be easy to get. They are passive. They expect spiritual things to happen to them from out of nowhere.

God gets glory when two very different and very imperfect people forge a life of faithfulness in the furnace of affliction by relying on Christ.

For Jesus, the demand for joy is a way to live with suffering and to outlast suffering.

When you are tempted to forsake God because of the greatness of evil and misery in the world, may you remember that the BIble has prepared us for this temptation.

In other words, physical evil is a parable, a drama, a signpost pointing to the moral outrage of rebellion against God.

Physical pain is God's trumpet blast to tell us that something is dreadfully wrong in the world.

Even in the greatest afflictions, we ought to testify to God, that, in receiving them from his hand, we feel pleasure in the midst of the pain, from being afflicted by Him who loves us, and whom we love.

Adversity is the state in which man mostly easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.