Suffering According to the Will of God ~ Oswald Chambers

Wherefore let them also that suffer according to the will of God commit their souls in well-doing unto a faithful Creator. v. 19.If the springs of suffering we have been considering arise in mystery, this spring overwhelms its own source in mystery, as well as the soul it covers. The great tides lift here, the splendid solitude of God’s purpose transfigures agony into Redemption, and the baffling hurricanes speed the soul like a flaming arrow on to God’s great Day. G. K. Chesterton, writing on Job, says in his own individual, sufficient way—But God comforts Job with indecipherable mystery, and for the first time Job is comforted. Eliphaz gives one answer, Job gives another answer, and the question still remains an open wound. God simply refuses to answer, and somehow the question is settled. Job flings at God one riddle, God flings back at Job a hundred riddles, and Job is at peace; he is comforted with conundrums.When all the trite things, the sentimental things, the poetic things and the explanatory things have been said, the still small voice of the Spirit introduces the perpetual conundrum–‘Hast thou considered My servant Job?’ And after a pause, when our commonplace shoes are off our feet and we stand before the Cross, the conundrum is put still more deeply and more perplexingly–‘Thou art My beloved Son; in Thee I am well pleased.’ ‘Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He hath put Him to grief’, and we bow our head while our spirit murmurs, ‘Who hath believed our report’ (or, ‘that which we have heard?’) ‘and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed?’This spring of suffering, suffering ‘according to the will of God’, is a great deep. Job did not know the preface to his own story, neither does any man. Job was never told that God and the devil had made a battleground of his soul. Job’s suffering was not for his own sake, not for his perfecting or purifying, that was incidental; Job suffered ‘according to the will of God’.When shall we learn that God’s great work is the production of saints? It is humbling beyond words to be told by our Father that it was not for love of the Truth that we had been bold, but that the great labour allowed us was the means of releasing our imprisoned hearts and was for our own peace. God seems careless over what men do at times.The words of our Lord sound from those blessed Palestinian days with a deeper, truer significance ‘If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me’, that is, I must never do God’s will according to my will. That surely is the very essence of Satan’s temptation of our Lord, and of every sanctified soul–‘Take your right to yourself and do God’s will according to your own sanctified understanding of it’. ‘Never!’ said Jesus, ‘For I am come down from heaven, not to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me’; and in the hour when dilemma perplexes him, the waves and the billows overwhelm him, and the noise of the water-spouts deafen him, the disciple learns the meaning of his Master’s ‘Follow Me.’In the course of a sermon preached by Father Frere in St. Paul’s Cathedral some years ago on ‘The Fourfold Attitude towards Suffering,’ he said this–‘Have you, I wonder, ever had to do something to a pet dog in order to get it well, something which hurt it very much—pulled a thorn out of its foot, or washed out a wound, or anything of that sort? If so, you will remember the _expression of dumb eloquence in the eyes of the dog as he looked at you; what you were doing hurt him tremendously and yet there seemed to speak from his eyes such a trust of you as if he would say, “I don’t in the least understand what you are doing, what you are doing hurts, but go on with it.”’That is an apt illustration of suffering ‘according to the will of God’. It is very necessary to be brought to the stage of trust in our experience of suffering; perhaps we are brought to it most acutely when in the case of someone we love we have to look up mutely to God and say, ‘I don’t understand it at all, but go on with what You are doing’. That marks a real stage of learning to trust in God, and it is a step towards something still further on. Spiritual experience has begun; suffering has already deepened the soul. To look on at suffering with eyes that know not God is to make the mouth slander the Highest. To sympathize with men who suffer, without first knowing God, is to hate Him.Therefore gird up thyself, and come to standUnflinching under the unfaltering hand.That waits to prove thee to the uttermost.It were not hard to suffer by His handIf thou couldst see His face;—but in the dark!That is the one last trial:—be it so.Christ was forsaken, so must thou be too-How couldest thou suffer but in seeming, else?Thou wilt not see the face nor feel the hand,Only the cruel crushing of the feet,When through the bitter night the Lord comes downTo tread the winepress.—Not by sight, but faith,Endure, endure,—be faithful to the end!H. E. Hamilton King.Oswald ChambersChristian disciplines : Containing the disciplines of Divine Guidance, Suffering, Peril, Prayer, Lonliness, Patience.

“Out of the Wreck I Rise”Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. Romans 8:37God does not do what false Christianity makes out—keep a man immune from trouble, there is no promise of that; God says, “I will be with him in trouble.”The moral frontier where Jesus Christ works is the great dominant note in the New Testament, the external manifestation comes later. At present it is the relationship on the inside that is being dealt with—the personal preference of the soul for God, which is the great fruit of Christianity. No matter what actual troubles in the most extreme form get hold of a man’s life, not one of them can touch the central citadel, viz., his relationship to God in Christ Jesus.This is one of the greatest assets of the spiritual aspect of Christianity, and it seems to be coming to the fore just now. Before the War* it may have been imaginary to talk about these things in the universal sense but now they are up-to-date in thousands of lives. The “wrecks” are a fact. Mental, moral, physical and spiritual wrecks are all around us to-day. The Apostle Paul is not talking of imaginary sentimental things, but of desperately actual things, and he says we are “more than conquerors” in the midst of them all, super-conquerors, not by our wits or ingenuity, our courage or pluck, or anything other than the fact that not one of them can separate a man from the love of God in Christ Jesus, even though he should go into the “belly of hell.” We are inclined to ask God to do the magic business, to perform a miracle which will alter our external circumstances; but if we are ever going to understand what the God whom Jesus Christ presents is like, we have to remember that that is not His first job. The first thing God does is to alter a man’s disposition on the inside, and then enable him to deal with the “mess” on the outside. God never coerces a man, he has to take God’s way by his own moral choice; we reverse the order and demand of God that He does our work. The tawdry things that have been presented as the findings of Christianity make one impatient.The Cares of TribulationWho shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation . . . ?The word “tribulation” has its root in the Latin tribulum—a sledge for rubbing out corn; literally, a thing with teeth that tears. Christianity is not prayer meetings and times of fellowship, these are magnificent and essential in certain conditions for the manifestation of the Christian life, but when tribulation is tearing you to bits, they cannot be. Tribulation describes a section of a man’s life. Rightly or wrongly, we are exactly in the condition we are in. I am sorry for the Christian who has not some part of his circumstances he wishes was not there! People with psychological “elbows” bring tribulation. Let the tribulations be what they may—exhausting, galling, fatiguing—they are never noble things, “Beelzebub” miseries that buzz over the windows of a man’s soul so that he cannot see out—we can be “more than conquerors” in them if we maintain our belief in the relationship God has to us in Christ Jesus.“To him that overcometh . . .” God does not give us the overcoming life: He gives life to the man who overcomes. If in every case of tribulation, from gnats to the cruelty of the sword, we take the step as if there were no God to assist us, we shall find He is there. The idea is not that we get the victory, but that the Victor has got us. “But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest through us the savour of His knowledge in every place” (2 Corinthians 2:14 rv).*World War I (1914-1918)

The Waters of Anguishor anguish . . . ? (rv)“Anguish” comes from a word meaning to press tightly, to strangle, and the idea is not a bit too strong for the things people are going through. They are not sentimental things, but real things, where every bit of a man’s life is twisted and wrung out to the last ebb. Can the love of God in Christ hold there, when everything says that God is cruel to allow it, and that there is no such thing as justice and goodness? Shall anguish separate us from the love of God? No, we are more than conquerors in it, not by our own effort but by the fact that the love of God in Christ holds. If we look for God in the physical domain we shall see Him nowhere; if we look for Him in the kingdom on the inside, in the moral relationships, we shall find Him all the time. We lose faith in God when we are hurt in the physical domain and God does not do what we want; we forget that He is teaching us to rely on His love. Watch some people and you will wonder how a human being can support such anguish; yet instead of being full of misery, they are the opposite; they seem to be held by a power that baffles all human intelligence, to have a spiritual energy we know nothing of—what accounts for it? “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; . . . when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned.” The waters are real, and the fire is real, but Paul claims that the relationship to God holds.“And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled.” When men’s hearts are fainting for fear, does Jesus Christ expect us to be undisturbed? how is it to be done? have we to become callous and indifferent, or so worn out that we have not enough vitality to feel things? Jesus Christ means that the relationship He can bring us into with Himself can hold us undisturbed in the midst of every disturbance there is. If there is anything supernatural, that is! Human pluck cannot stand these things, there is a limit. No human being can stand calamity and anguish without going under or getting into a panic. Panic is a sudden terror, our whole being gets into a flutter and we don’t know where to turn, we can take a forlorn stand, but it barely stills the panic inside. If we are going to be more than conquerors in calamity, it can only be in the marvellous way by which God “ships in” the supernatural and makes it natural.The Mutinies of Persecutionor persecution . . . ?Immediately we get hold of a particular thing in the spiritual domain we are going to be systematically vexed by those who don’t intend us to have it; they are set on gibing it out of us, because if we are right, they are wrong. Mutiny, a rise against authority, comes from persecution. There is any amount of weakness in us all, but deep down there is red-handed rebellion against the authority of Jesus Christ—“I’ll be damned before I yield.” Don’t take a poetical view of things that go beyond science. At bottom, sin is red-handed mutiny that requires to be dealt with by the surgery of God—and He dealt with it on Calvary.The Spectre of Famineor famine . . . ?Can a man remain true to the love of God when he is famine-stricken? God does not prevent physical suffering because it is of less moment than what He is after. “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul” (Matthew 10:28). Famine is a most appalling spectre, it means extreme scarcity. Can I not only believe in the love of God, but be more than conqueror while I am being starved? Either the Apostle Paul is deluded, and Jesus Christ is a deceiver, or some extraordinary thing happens to a man who can hold on to the love of God when the odds are all against His character.The Scare of Povertyor nakedness . . . ?The scare of poverty is the most effectual onslaught. If we know that obedience to God means absolute poverty, how many of us would go through with it? The scare of poverty will knock the spiritual backbone out of us unless we have the relationship to God that holds. It is easy to fling away what you have, child’s play to sell all you have got and have nothing left, the easiest piece of impulse, nothing heroic in it; the thing that is difficult is to remain detached from what you have so that when it goes you do not notice it. That is only possible by the power of the love of God in Christ Jesus.The Cruelty of the Sword. . . or peril, or sword?In every one of “these things” logic is shut up. A logic-monger can silence the man who is suffering with his facts, but suppose the man who is suffering has got hold of Reality and the logic-monger finds he is only “slinging” actualities? Did you ever try to justify God in what He allows? God is not justified unless He can work things out on the line Paul brings out, and we only get there by a moral revolution. The one who deals with the logical rational side has the best of the argument just now though not the best of the facts, and one of the biggest humiliations is that you cannot say a word, you must let the chattermagging* go on. You can shut the mouth of the man who has faith in God, but you cannot get away from the fact that he is being kept by God. That is a domain which logic must shut out resolutely until it is realised that logic is an instrument only. A man can go through tribulations which make you hold your breath as you watch him; he goes through things that would knock the wits out of us and make us give way to blasphemy and whimperings. He is not blind or insensitive, yet he goes through in marvellous triumph—what accounts for it? One thing only, the fact that behind it all is the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Spiritually, morally, and physically the saint is brought clean through, triumphant, out of the wreck wrought by tribulation, anguish, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril and sword. Whatever may be the experiences of life, whether terrible and devastating or monotonous, it makes no difference, they are all rendered impotent, because they cannot separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus Our Lord.“Out of the wreck I rise” every time.Zeitoun, Egypt Sunday morning service, November 12, 1916Oswald Chambers The servant as His Lord.

By the Surgery of ProvidenceBut when he came to himself . . . (Luke 15:17 rv)It is difficult to realise that it is God who arranges circumstances for the whole mass of human beings; we come to find, however, that in the Providence of God there is, as it were, a surgical knife for each one of us individually, because God wants to get at the things that are wrong and bring us into a right relationship to Himself. At first we trust our ignorance and call it innocence; we trust our innocence and call it purity, until God in His mercy surrounds us with providences which act as an alchemy transmuting things and showing us our real relation to ourselves. To say, “Oh, I’m sick of myself,” is a sure sign that we are not. When we really are sick of ourselves we will never say so, but will gladly come to the end of ourselves. So long as we say, “I’m tired of myself,” it is a sign that we are profoundly interested in ourselves.(a) The Sin of Self-ImportanceFather, give me the portion of thy substance that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living. (Luke 15:12 rv)This is a picture of one who has become spiritually independent; the portion of goods from the Father has been received, there has been a real experience of God’s grace, but there is the letter “I” about it, a self-assertive determination to carry things out in my own way. The most powerful type of spiritual delusion is produced in this way; it is based on ignorance of what we should do with the substance the Father has given us: we should devote it absolutely to Him. If we forget this we are certainly in danger of the sin of self-importance. It begins with the realisation that God does do His recreating work through us if we are children of His—“Yes, God did use me,” you say. God will use anything or anyone (cf. Matthew 7:21-23). Unless there is abandonment to the Lord Jesus self-importance will always be inclined to utilise God’s blessing for its own ends. No man can abandon to Jesus Christ without an amazing humiliation to his own self-importance. We are all tremendously important until the Holy Ghost takes us in hand, then we cease to be important and God becomes all-important.(b) The Sordidness of Self-IndulgenceAnd not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country; and there he wasted his substance with riotous living. . . . (Luke 15:13 rv)The soul that has claimed its portion and become spiritually independent may ultimately be degraded into feeding pigs and eating with them. More awful things are said about backsliding than about any other sin. If we do not maintain a walk in accordance with the perception given, we shall fall as degradingly low as we were high before. The depth of degradation is measured by the height of attainment. Don’t deal with it on the surface and say, “I’m not built that way, I have none of those sordid tastes.” The nature of any dominating lust is that it keeps us from arriving at a knowledge of ourselves. For instance, a covetous man will believe he is very generous. Thank God for the surgery of providence by means of which He deals with these absurdities. The way God brings us to know ourselves is by the kind of people He brings round us. What we see to condemn in others is either the discernment of the Holy Ghost or the reflection of what we are capable of ourselves. We always notice how obtuse other people are before we notice how obtuse we ourselves are. If we see meanness in others, it is because we ourselves are mean (Romans 2:1). If we are inclined to be contemptuous over the fraud in others it is because we are frauds ourselves. We have to see ourselves as God sees us, and when we do it keeps us in the right place—“My God, was I ever like that to Thee? so opinionated and conceited, so set on my own ends, so blind to myself?” These things, which are most unpalatable, are true, nevertheless. Beware of any belief which makes you self-indulgent; it comes from the pit however beautiful it sounds. It is an indication of a wrong relationship that does not spring from the attitude of abandon; and we become perverse and remain ignorant of the fact that we need to be guarded by God.(c) The Sorrow of Self-IntrospectionBut when he came to himself he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish here with hunger! (Luke 15:17 rv)There is no pain on earth to equal the pain of wounded self-love. Unrequited love is bad enough, but wounded self-love is the cruellest thing in human life because it shifts the whole foundation of the life. The prodigal son had his self-love wounded; he was full of shame and indignation because he had sunk to such a level. There was remorse, but no repentance yet, no thought of his father.“I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight: I am no more worthy to be called thy son. . . . And he arose, and came to his father.” That is repentance. The surgery of Providence had done its work, he was no longer deluded about himself. A repentant soul is never allowed to remain long without being gripped by the love of God.Man, what is this, and why art thou despairing? God shall forgive thee all but thy despair.Let the surgery of providence drive you straight to God. The Spirit of God works from the standpoint of God, i.e., from a standpoint inconceivable to the natural man. The words “miraculous” and “supernatural” are disliked to-day through the influence of modern psychology on spiritual work, i.e., the attempt to define on psychical lines, materialistically psychical lines, how God works in a soul. The surgery of the providence of God will break up all ignorance of ourselves. It is impossible for a human being to guard his unconscious personality, only God can do it. If we have not abandoned to Jesus Christ we are likely to be trapped on every hand by our complete ignorance of ourselves, and panic will result. Panic leads us away from the control of God and leaves us not only beyond our own control but possibly under the control of other forces. The one safeguard is abandonment to the Lord Jesus, receiving His Spirit, and obeying Him.The servant as His Lord