"I Was Salted with Suffering"

y NE great use of salt is to preserve y from putrefaction. And one great use of suffering is the same. But salt is not only necessary for preservation it is absolutely necessary also for our full health and for the full strength and the full stability of our bodily life. And so is suffering absolutely necessary for our spiritual life. Peter has a passage exactly parallel to Shepard’s preface where he says with a touch of autobiographic sympathy and authority, ‘The God of all grace, who hath called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye hath suffered awhile, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you.’ That is Peter all over. Peter’s life was spent in a perfect bath of suffering; but what of that, he says, if the God of all grace is thereby perfecting me, and stablishing me, and strengthening me, and settling me, as a salt bath strengthens and settles a frail and an infirm man!

But to go further back than Peter, and to begin at the Beginning: The Wonderful One Himself humbled Himself to be salted with suffering, like all His brethren. There are many literal and repeated and mind-amazing Scriptures for that. Did you ever try to weigh them in your mind? ‘Try it now: ‘The Captain of their salvation was made perfect by suffering.... In that He hath suffered, He is able to succour the who suffer... And, though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things that He suffered.’ As His servant Thomas Goodwin says, our Saviour learned to have a ‘lady’s hand’ by the things that He suffered: a lady’s hand in binding up our broken hearts and in healing all the diseases thereof.

And now for a lesson or two from all that. And first, just think, though it is far above all human thought, yet still continue to think of all the knowledge, and all the wisdom, and all the love of God that is involved and that is employed in selecting and in administering to each several one of His people the very exact suffering that is best suited for each individual soul. It is far and for ever above us. We shall never be able to think aright of such a divine thing as that. But let us labour after it and more and more attempt it. Just think of the wonderful work that the God of all grace has taken upon His mind and upon His heart and upon His hands! Had He no more men to bring home to His eternal glory than are assembled in this house this evening — what wisdom and what grace would be needed to apportion to each one of us just the exact suffering, in kind and in amount, that we shall need to perfect, to stablish, to strengthen, and to settle us! There are no two of us alike in anything; and least of all in our manifold spiritual putrefactions and in our manifold spiritual necessities of all kinds. ‘Think of that, and then multiply this house by the multitude that no man can number, and you will exclaim, Othe depth of His wisdom, and O the far greater depth of His grace!

And then amid all that unfathomable ocean of things, your own salvation will largely lie in your watching for and in your marking and in your constant acknowledging of God’s special dispensations of sufferings, as of all else, to your own individual selves. ‘Thereafter, says one, ‘ I was set by Him to learn a new exercise in His school; which was to consider His end and His design in particular providences towards myself. I was led on to study His ends in all my sufferings, temptations, and afflictions. Till I came upon His mind in some otherwise overwhelming dispensations of His toward me. And in this way I came more and more to see that God was all my life following me about with His greatest loving-kindness.’ My brethren, if it is so good even to read of such wonderful things as these, what must it be to experience them and to discover them in a man’s own lifelong walk with God. It must simply be heaven upon earth.

At the same time that eminent saint confesses to us that he was sometimes so beset behind and before with suffering that he was tempted to take the rod out of God’s hand and thus to counterwork Him. You understand? You are taking the rod out of God’s hand as often as you make an attempt to escape away from a painful providence before you have got the full good out of your pain. It is sometimes put in your power to flee from places and from people who are ordained of God to be His rod for your sanctification. And it isa mark of the very greatest grace attainable in this life when you willingly and joyfully abide under His rod till He Himself sees that it is safe for you that He remove it. Will you think about that all you who are great sufferers of His? And will you wisely and dutifully make personal application of that? Now, will you? ‘I was sometimes sorely tempted,’ says that singularly submissive saint, ‘to take His rod out of His hand, and to do all I could to undermine and to counterwork Him, though I knew all the time that He could be doing nothing else with His rod but working out my salvation. Yes: I would go against him and would counterwork Him even when J could not but see that He was all the time perfecting me, and stablishing me, and strengthening me, and settling me.’ So froward and so hard to sanctify are His very best saints.

Another most difficult but all-important lesson is to learn how you are to look upon and to treat those people who are God’s rod in laying your sufferings upon you. God does not often inflict your sufferings on you immediately, and with His own direct hand, though sometimes He does that also. But for the most part He takes hold of the evil that is in some of your neighbours; He takes up into His own hand the evil that is in their hearts and in their lives and in their characters, and He makes use of that evil for your suffering and for your sanctification. You will see Him sometimes taking the cruelty, and sometimes the pride, and sometimes the envy, and sometimes the jealousy, and sometimes the malice, and sometimes the ingratitude, and sometimes the coarse-mindedness, and sometimes the hard-heartedness, and sometimes the sheer stupidity of some of your neighbours, and employing all that as His rod to break your hearts and thus in the long run to save your souls. But it will take the greatest grace on your part to see that and to accept that and to continue to submit to that. It will take great spiritual wisdom, and great spiritual insight, and great spiritual humility, and the greatest faith in God to lay yourselves and to leave yourselves under God’s hand in all that. When you greatly suffer at the hand of some of your evil neighbours you are tempted to think of them only and to retaliate and strike back at them. You are tempted to think only of the rod and to overlook the Hand that holds the rod. But, taught of God, you must more and more learn to look away from those men who make you so to suffer till you see

Him only who is working out your eternal calling by all your everyday sufferings. I believe that this is about the last and the best grace attainable by you in this life of suffering and sanctification.

And then out of this so noble and so Christlike state of mind this added mind will arise. Every wound that evil men inflict on you; every pang of suffering that makes you swoon with the pain of it; you will come that moment in the twinkling of an eye neither to see nor to hear your evil neighbour, but God only. You will come to this that they will scarcely enter your mind at all, so full will your mind and your heart and your life be of God and of His salvation. You will no sooner again suffer, than that moment you will bow to His wisdom and will rest in His love, sure as you will be that nothing shall separate you from the love of God. And as you enter deeper and deeper every suffering day into God’s deeper and deeper counsels toward you, as your suffering life goes on, you will come to look with a certain holy fear and a certain solemn solicitude and anxiety on those men, good and bad, who are causing you such suffering and such temptation. For though their evil is, for a while, God’s employed and over-ruled rod for your salvation; at the same time, He will one day call them to a strict account for all their ill-intended share in your great sufferings. Even when He makes all their evil to work together for your good, He all the time keeps a strict account of all such things and will one day require it of them in His own time and in His own way. ‘So the angel that communed with me said unto me, Cry thou, saying, Thus saith the Lord of hosts, I am jealous for Jerusalem and for Zion with a great jealousy. And I am sore displeased with the heathen that are at ease. For I was but a little displeased with Jerusalem, and they helped forward the affliction. O cruel daughter of Babylon! I was wroth indeed with my people, and thus I gave them into thy hand, when thou didst show them no mercy: upon my people hast thou no mercy: upon my people hast thou heavily laid thy yoke.’ Instead therefore of striking back at those who cause you such suffering, leave them in God’s hand to forgive them after He has made His full use of them. Look on them with a holy fear and a holy awe, lest the sufferings that will be your salvation should end in being their condemnation. ‘Wherefore, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that despitefully use you and persecute you.’ Yes, actually and often pray for them before God, for their time is coming, unless you pray and they repent. You are salted with such suffering in order that you may be made thus perfect. ‘Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.’