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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadQuiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Personal Problems: 44. The Mission of Pain.
TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Personal Problems (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 44. The Mission of Pain.
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The Mission of Pain.
This leads at once to the question of the mission of pain. Pain has a great mission. While God does not send pain, He lets it stay, though He might intervene and take it away. While as a rule, with possibly rare exceptions, it comes through sin, it remains through the deliberate purpose of God. God has a great purpose of love in pain. He uses it as His teacher. It is the greatest of all His great teachers. It charges the very highest rates, insists upon the severest discipline, will tolerate nothing short of the highest ideal, needs our sympathetic help in working, and produces the very finest results.
God's greatest struggle has been with the human will. He made man a sovereign in his will, and right well man has proven his sovereignty. All of the great wealth of God's love and planning can be given only by our own free consent. Sin has twisted our eyes. We prefer something else to God's way. Our preference is not good; it is bad; only His is good. He insists upon giving His best. It can be given only through our consent. So His greatest task has been with man's will, to get man's consent to live on God's plan, and receive the wealth of God's planning. A great task it has been; God's hardest task; sometimes an impossible task; some men won't yield. It has been a stupendous task, for man's will has in it the strength of God's will. And sin has swung the will's natural strength over to the extreme of obstinacy.
And so God has had to use the greatest thing He could find to overcome the bad, weak obstinacy in man's will. Pain is His severest, most thorough, oftentimes his only successful agent. He does not make it. Sin made it. He uses it. It is a bit of the diplomacy of love that takes a result of bad, and uses it to offset the bad, and get good. His love must be very great to hold Him steady to His purpose; for what pains any man pains God too, because it pains the man.
There is nothing that so breaks the stubbornness of a man's spirit, and bends the obstinacy of his will, as pain. It comes eating its way in so subtly, so cuttingly, so relentlessly and insistently, that all the footing slips out from under a man, his jaws relax, and his fist loosens into a hand again. Frequently the stiffest-set jaws will consent to relax only under the peculiarly persuasive edge of the knife of pain.
In that old rare gem of literature, the book of Job, the evil that came to Job came through natural channels, at the secret instigation of the evil one, by permission of God, and strictly within the limits He set. When the purpose of God in the moulding of Job's character was secured, the pain was quickly removed, and greater blessings than ever he had known were poured out lavishly upon him.
There is an intensely vivid picture of God's love, its yearningness, and strong patience, and dissatisfaction with less than the best. It is in Malachi's prophecy. The expert workman in refining metals sits patiently over the pot of liquid metal, picking out the dross sent up to the surface by the intense fire, watching keenly for every speck and spot, until by and by his own face is clearly reflected in that over which he is working. Then, the process complete, the metal pure, the fire is withdrawn. Its work is done.
So, we are told, God does. Pain is a fire, sometimes heated seven times hotter than usual. God's love and great ideal for us hold Him steady while the dross is being removed. He is not content until He sees again clearly reflected that great likeness of Himself in which we were originally made. When the likeness is clear and full the fire is withdrawn. And in the after glory that shall come the pain will seem light, and the time only a moment; yet how impossible that often seems at the time of suffering.
The last time I heard Mrs. Margaret Bottome she told of meeting an old friend in Europe. This friend was an unusually gifted woman, who knew much of the world's culture and prestige. She had had a bad break in health, and was seeking to find recovery abroad. As Mrs. Bottome met her, so great was the change in her friend's appearance through the [illness that she involuntarily exclaimed, "What a wreck!" And the friend quickly replied, with her soul in her voice, "Any wreck for such a shore!" She was already getting a taste of the after-glory. Yet had she gone to school to God with her will earlier, her bark would have reached the same shore by straight sailing instead of by stranding.