Joy in Suffering

The way to ever deepening joy in God is suffering. There are joys unspeakable and glorious in knowing God. Do you want to experience the fullness of Christ? Do you want to be overwhelmed with the vision of this one who is the chief of 10,000? Do you want to be emptied of yourself and swallowed up in Christ? Would you want to see his glory as the mediator between God and man? Do you long to have a full sense of his wonderful, pure, sweet grace and his meek and gentle condescension to such as we? Do you want to glory in his excellence and so that the glory of him swallows up all thought? Do you want to love him with pure and holy love, to trust in him, and live on him and serve him and delight in him above all and be lost in the fullness of Christ?

Paul says, I want Christ! If suffering and weakness is a means of bringing me into the experience of Christ in all his glory, give me suffering. Give me insults and hardship and persecutions and difficulties. If that is what God is doing in affliction, then let me embrace God in this affliction so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. I will glory in the weaknesses that bring the fullness of Christ to me.

—Tedd Tripp

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Discipling the Flock
Discipling the Flock: A Call to Faithful Shepherding
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Shepherd Press