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‘Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial among you, which cometh upon you to prove you … but insomuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings, rejoice; that at the revelation of His glory also ye may rejoice with exceeding joy.’
1Pe_4:12-13 (R.V.)
As it was the eternal purpose of God that His Son should be a partaker of human suffering, even so it was and is His purpose that, through such afflictions as He is pleased to send, and which are borne by us in submission to His will, we should be partakers of the sufferings of His Son.
I. It is obvious that this participation cannot hold good of those ‘sacrificial sufferings which He bore as the one perfect oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.’ But there were sufferings, other than these, which Jesus bore as part of the burden of the human lot. In all the physical, mental, and spiritual pain to which the Man of Sorrows was subjected we can be sharers. In any of the thousand ways in which distress may come upon us, we can enter into the fellowship of His sufferings, by bearing it for His sake and in His spirit. Nothing will make us so strong in bitter pain as the conviction—I am not only bowing to the will of God, but I am bearing something like what Jesus bore? I have Him with me, and He will see me through. The mental and the bodily torture is there all the same, but by laying it on Christ, and holding His hand in ours, there come a fortitude, a resignation, and a peace which will astonish none more than ourselves.
II. There is another truth taught us.—St. Paul is a prisoner in Rome, and is dictating a letter to his Colossian converts (Col_1:24) when, looking at the shackles on his hands which prevented him from writing, a gleam of joy seems to flash upon him. This unspeakable honour and privilege filled the Apostle with a gladness which helped him to bear his burden. These words are just as true of the Christian sufferer to-day as they were of the great Apostle. As each man’s trouble is his own and belongs to no other, each sufferer is entitled to say, My Divine Lord has sent this trouble upon me that, bearing it gladly for His sake, I may fill up something which he sees to be lacking in the sorrows which He bore upon earth. I am certain that you have only to reflect upon it, and, if your day of trial come, to test this much-forgotten truth, in order to learn, as I have done, how much strength and comfort lie in the conviction that you are partakers of the afflictions of Christ.
III. The other great truth of the text is this, that partaking of Christ’s sufferings here is the preparation for partaking of His glory hereafter. His own words on the day of His resurrection are the key-note of this great truth, ‘Ought not Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?’ What is true of Christ is true of the Christian. ‘If we suffer with Him we shall also reign with Him.’ Interwoven with the whole system and spirit of Christianity are these incomparably glorious truths—that suffering is not an end in itself, but only a means to an end; that that end is not directly or mainly material and temporal; that the beneficent results of suffering stretch through the seen into the unseen, and that these results, in their fulness, can be obtained only by those who regard and weigh them not in the light of the temporal but of the eternal. It is in the Cross of Christ, and only there, that you will find the true philosophy of pain and of evil in every form. There, in the fact that God’s eternal Son became man in order that He might suffer and die, and in the fact that His inconceivable sufferings resulted directly from the love of God to man, and were the highest possible expression of that love, a light is thrown on the otherwise insoluble mystery that the universe, so far as we know it, has been constructed on lines of suffering; that all through animated nature back to its first beginnings in our planet, wherever there has been life there have been struggle and pain, and that mainly through struggle and pain has animated nature become what it is. We learn from the Cross that, as it was the love of God which made suffering necessary for the salvation of man, so it was the love of God which made suffering necessary as the means of the physical, intellectual, and moral development of man.
IV. In the Cross we learn that the full meaning, purpose, and results of suffering can be unfolded, not in this world, but in that which is to come. Not only so, we have hints in Scripture that the results of the Redemption accomplished there may reach to the whole animated creation of God. Boundless hopes open up to the soul of man in those great Scriptures, which tell us that if we suffer with Christ we shall also be glorified with Him. The man who from want or weakness of faith estimates the troubles of life only in their effect on the present and the seen, is weighing them in a false balance and putting much too low a value both on himself and them. It is not only the strength and the comfort—it is the dignity of a man to keep up his connection in everything with the unseen and the eternal, and not least on the suffering side of his life. Affliction’s blessed work can be wrought in us only when we realise and are concerned with the spiritual world within us, above us, and before us. The connection between the suffering and the glory is no more arbitrary than the connection between the two states, the seen and the unseen. Here the work, there the wages; here the schooling and apprenticeship, there the service and the true life at last begun.