HH, Sir Godfrey Gregg D.Div
“And he cried unto the Lord; and the Lord shewed him a tree, which when he had cast into the waters, the waters were made sweet: there he made for them a statute and an ordinance, and there he proved them,” (Exodus 15:25).
I listened to a young man telling his story about his job in the test room of a great steel mill. This is how he gave his story, “All around me were little partitions and compartments. Steel had been tested to the limit and marked with figures that showed its breaking point. Some pieces had been twisted until they broke, and the strength of torsion was marked on them. Some had been stretched to the breaking point and their tensile strength indicated. Some had been compressed to the crushing point and also marked.” He looked at me and said to relax because the master of the steel mill knew just what these pieces of steel would stand under strain. He knew just what they would bear if placed in the great ship, building, or bridge. He knew this because his testing room revealed it. When I had the opportunity to speak I thanked him for his experience and ask him if that is his only job to which he replied that, “he is a pastor and loves his jobs”.
It is often so with God’s children. God does not want us to be like vases of glass or porcelain. He would have us like these toughened pieces of steel, able to bear twisting and crushing to the uttermost without collapse.
He wants us to be, not hothouse plants, but storm-beaten oaks; not sand dunes that are driven with every gust of wind, but granite rocks withstanding the fiercest storms. To make us such He must bring us into His testing room of suffering and trials so He can break us, bend us and twist us into the shape He wants to make us better men and women to work in His army.
Many of us need no other argument than our own experiences to prove that suffering is indeed God’s testing room of faith. Brethren we need to be tested and not to be in the gossiping room, but in the testing room of Almighty God. God wants to make something out of you today. He wants to make you a better person fit and equipped for the journey.
God is tired with these soft men and women of the faith without backbone to call out sin and to minister the word of God in season and out of season. Men and women to testify the truth and to be watchmen calling sinners to this Gospel feast. What we notice today is there’s no difference in the church and the world. These weak pastors, “pointers” within the faith that have no guts to preach the Bible except to gossip in the pulpit. It is wrong and God is going to bring you into judgement and you will have to answer to God for leading the church to destruction.
It is very easy for us to speak and theorize about faith, but God often casts us into crucibles to try our gold, and to separate it from the dross and alloy. Oh, happy are we if the hurricanes that ripple life’s unquiet sea have the effect of making Jesus more precious. Better the storm with Christ than smooth waters without Him. For with Christ in our vessels, we can smile at every storm.
What if God could not manage to ripen your life without suffering? Where would you be today? Take the suffering with a grain of the salt of His word. For if the salt lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted. God bless and keep us.
