The Privilege of Suffering for Christ

“Because to you it hath been granted in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on Him, but also to suffer in His behalf” (Phil. i. 29, 30).

And so there are gradations of privilege, and the fairest garlands are won on the harvest fields. In the world the coveted “plums” are the places of ease, and men are accounted lucky in proportion as they attain to a leisured indolence. But in the kingdom of our Lord ease is placed at discount, and the lucky ones are those who are privileged to suffer in His behalf. I have sometimes heard men confess with real gratitude that they have been “greatly favoured,” inasmuch as they have never experienced an hour of suffering. And, indeed, it is a favour, but quite an elementary one, a favour of the first standard, and not belonging to the more advanced endowments among the gifts of grace. For here is the superlative favour, to be appointed a sufferer “in the behalf of Christ”; these are the favoured ones in the family, who “bear the marks of the Lord Jesus,” and who “fill up that which is lacking in the afflictions of Christ.” So that when the fisherman seer lifts his astonished eyes upon the most conspicuous presences in the multitude of the blest, the radiant ones with their white, shining robes and their palms of triumph and their exultant songs, and wonderingly asks who they are, and whence came they to this glorious eminence, he is told that they “came out of great tribulation,” they have been among the suffering warriors in the marching hosts, and are “therefore” now “before the throne of God.” The bloody track led to the heights; crucifixion led to the throne. We shall therefore have to revise our standards and judgments, and pay reverence to all sufferers for Christ’s sake as the very bodyguard and most immediate companions of the Lord.

“It hath been granted to suffer.”

It is a sort of royal warrant, a divine election to a sacred office. We are accustomed to think of men receiving the royal favour to preach and to evangelise, and to make a path of light to peoples far away. But here is the supreme distinction, the royal grant “to suffer”! And it is just this consciousness of divine election which makes many a sufferer fill the midnight with his songs. It was in the midnight, when Paul and Silas were smarting under the scourge, that they “sang praises unto God,” and the prisoners heard them. Our great missionary, Dr. Griffith John, has told us that one day, when he was surrounded by a hostile Chinese crowd, and violence was used, he put up his hand to his smitten face, and when he withdrew it, and saw it bathed in blood, he was possessed by an extraordinary sense of exaltation, and he rejoiced that he had been “counted worthy to suffer for His name.” David Hill records a similar experience of unspeakable ecstasy, when his hand hung limp from a brutal blow. But, indeed, the witnesses are multitudinous; they can be found in every corner of the great fields of service, suffering men and women, wearing their scars like medals, feeling as though there had been conferred upon them some heavenly title and degree, and stepping out in the assured companionship of the once crucified but risen Lord.

“Having the same conflict which ye saw in me, and novo hear to he in me.” And so the Apostle and his Philippian brethren were kinsmen in suffering; they were fellow-gladiators, contending with the fierce hostilities of the world. Our mutual sympathies are deepened when we pass through common suffering. When soldiers have fought together, their relationships are transfigured. A Church which never engages in a stern and bloody warfare with the devil can never know the real mystery of the “communion of saints.” It is the suffering ranks who best know the secret of the Lord, and who experience vital union in the fellowship of the Holy Ghost. “Partakers of the sufferings,” they are also “partakers of the consolation,” and in that rich festivity heart leaps to heart in generous recognition. There are hidden treasures in the life and teachings of the Apostle Paul which will never be unveiled to us, and which we can never share, until we have “the same conflict” which we see in him, and share his sufferings with the Lord. These underground correspondences are exceeding wealthy, and nothing but the agonies born of great moral and spiritual crusades can ever make them operative. We may well pray that we may be counted worthy to enter into these buried treasures by having it granted unto us “to suffer in His behalf.” “I will give unto these the treasures of darkness.” When life is a mere picnic, its pleasures are shallow and superficial, and the deeper joys are never touched. When Marie Antoinette was going to her wedding in Notre Dame, she gave orders that all cripples and beggars, and everything savouring sorrrow and calamity, should be removed from the road, in order that her marriage bliss might be pure and unalloyed felicity. It was a short-sighted and perverse expedient. Marie Antoinette was unconsciously violating one of the venerable laws of the moral universe, and she was taking the surest means of diluting and impoverishing her own happiness. Felicity is not gained by avoiding suffering, but by sharing it. We reach our Olivet of ascension by the darker height of Calvary. If Marie Antoinette had given special care and service to crippled folks on her wedding morn, and had sought to ease their yoke and make their burden light, she would have been amazed at the warm sunny radiance with which the Lord would have visited her own heart, and the wedding bells would have rung a merrier peal in her ears. “If any man would be My disciple, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.” “These things have I said unto you, that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”