Finding Joy in Suffering: Joni Eareckson Tada on God's Purpose in Pain

I was 17 years old, athletic, took a dive and bang! I can't use my hands, I can't move my legs. Everything is paralyzed, I'm a quadriplegic.

The doctor announced that I had severed my spinal cord at the fourth cervical level, that I would never use my hands or my legs for the rest of my life, and he walked out of the door.

I can't live like this, and I just sank into depression. A Christian friend shared with me, "Joni, God permits what He hates to accomplish that which He loves."

I realized God takes no pleasure in my spinal cord injury, but He loves the way He is changing me in it and encouraging others through it. Psalm 10 says that God hears the cry of the afflicted.

His heart goes out to those with disabilities. He is filled with compassion for those with special needs. I am Joni Eareckson Tada.

I am a Christian, author, speaker, advocate, and painter. Oh my goodness, I can't believe I do all those things, but I do them because I want people to know the God that I love.

I would not trade this intimacy with God, this sweetness, this nearness, this tenderness, this preciousness of faith come alive in my life. I wouldn't trade it for any amount of walking.

There are one billion people with disabilities in the world, eighty percent of whom live in developing nations. That is to me overwhelming.

I want to do everything I can to make a difference in their lives. I think God is using people with disabilities to wake up the church. God is up to something big.

Outwardly, our bodies are wasting away, but inwardly we are being renewed day by day. It looks as though the foot pedals need to come up just a little bit. Certainly.

My husband Ken and I love doing Joni and Friends together. Whether it's going to a family retreat and hanging out with other couples, whether it's delivering wheelchairs and Bibles.

Is the Bible in the Spanish language? We want to get the word out. God has not abandoned those with disabilities, no.

He is working through them. God's power always shows up best through weakness. The Bible says, "Speak up for those who cannot for themselves.

Defend the rights of the weak and the needy." And we do that at Joni and Friends. Through our Christian Institute on Disability, we are advocates.

We are championing the disabled. Whether it is right to life, end of life issues, physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia, we speak God's truth.

Joni and Friends stands for the spark that started the movement to take the gospel where the world is bleeding out of control. I want to be there.

I've got a message to share. I would rather be in this wheelchair knowing Him than on my feet without Him, and that is worth living for.

Thank you. Thank you, friends! Oh please, greet my husband also.

Yes, thank you. Thank you, friends. Ken and I are so excited to be here with you, and I am just so sorry that we could not also

have here Dr. R.C. Sproul. Oh, my goodness.

When I got out of the hospital in 1968, somebody gave me a book called The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination by Dr. Loraine Boettner, and I read it. And after I read it, I thought to myself, "Isn't there someone who can make this a little

bit easier to understand?" And that's when someone gave me a cassette tape from Ligonier Ministries, and I never looked back.

R.C. and I became good friends, and when Ken was my main caregiver helping me through my cancer journey in 2010, R.C. wanted to cheer him up because that was a real hard duty taking care of me during that

difficult time. And what shows up in the mail, but a ten-foot fly rod, one of the best you can buy from Orvis.

God bless Dr. Sproul. And you've got before you this afternoon the aging quadriplegic, and my lungs aren't quite what they used to be.

So would you mind praying with me that God will give me strength and perhaps you as well as we hear His message. Lord Jesus, You promised that when we are weak, You are strong, and oh Lord, God, I

do need Your strength physically especially and so use something that I might say to bless my dear friends here to encourage them in their own struggles that they might see the connection between suffering, Your sovereignty, and awakening.

I ask in Your name, amen. You know stories of Christians who have suffered and suffered greatly, yet graciously, always inspire us all.

They certainly do inspire me, and when those stories lead to a national awakening, well, they're worth telling to a new generation. And such is the story of Helen Roseveare.

Let me share with you what happened back in the 1950s in the Belgian Congo. After studying medicine in the United Kingdom, Helen Roseveare went to the Congo to serve as a medical missionary.

While she was there, she helped build a network of medical clinics and training centers. Many people, including scores of young African nurses, came to Christ under her ministry. However, during her tenure in the Congo, a vicious, brutal civil war broke out, and Helen

was taken prisoner by rebel forces, the same forces that demolished many of those training centers and medical clinics. Helen remained a prisoner for five months and later on, recounting her capture in an

interview, listen to what she wrote: "Government soldiers came to my bungalow, ransacked it, then grabbed me. I was beaten and savagely kicked, losing my back teeth through the boot of a rebel soldier.

They broke my glasses, so I could not see to protect myself from the next blow. Then one at a time, two army officers took me to my own bedroom and raped me. They dragged me out into a clearing, tied me naked to a tree and stood laughing.

While I was there, beaten and humiliated, a soldier discovered in my bungalow the only existing handwritten manuscript of a book that I had been writing about God's work in the Congo over an eleven-year period.

They brought it out, put it on the ground in front of me, and burned it." Thankfully, villagers who loved Helen dearly secured her release, but in all this chaos, in all this madness, the horror of this terrible civil war, God began to do a strange, new

work. Her interview continues: "Our Field Director had just returned to our province from a part of the Congo where he had witnessed an unusual movement of the Holy Spirit, a movement of

repentance and revival. He stood up in the hall of our Bible school and began reading from God's Word. Suddenly we heard a hurricane begin to blow, which was odd for the July season.

The rushing wind frightened us and when the elders got up to take down the shutters, we looked outside. The palm trees were standing absolutely still in a moonlit sky.

There was a terrific noise, and the building shook. Our director stood up and yelled loudly, 'This is of God. Let us just pray.

Pray and do not be afraid. Pray.' It was as if a force came in and some were thrown to the ground, but no one was hurt.

One woman stood with her arms upraised, an African woman crying out, 'It is because of our sin. It is because of our sin.

O God, have mercy!' A wave of confession and repentance broke out, everyone calling out to Jesus and asking for the mercy of God."

Wow! You know, most of those people lost their homes, lost their families, all their property, and you'd think that they would be bitter and full of resentment against God.

But pain and loss and grief were not their focus. Their sin was their focus, and the mercy of God was their focus. No wonder revival spread across the Congo.

Here were a people of God whose humble response to deep suffering revealed hearts bent on holiness. Now, most of us have never experienced the horrors, the ravages of war.

Most of us have never been savagely beaten or raped, and yet still this story should speak to you and me today because national revivals, national awakenings, all of them begin with personal ones.

And after living so long with Christ, I am still partnering with His Holy Spirit every day in a personal revival, and I am so grateful that I have got more than 50 years of quadriplegia and a daily battle with chronic pain and a battle with cancer in years past.

I've got these things helping me because friends, we don't need, we don't need a civil war such as in the Belgian Congo. No, we don't need to lose homes, we don't need to lose property or family members.

True, the Spirit may use grief on that scale, but He does not require suffering of that magnitude in order to set the stage for awakening. All that God wants is for us to steward well the suffering He has already given us.

Do we steward well that suffering that He's given us? A simple test of that today might be, I don't know, Philippians chapter 2 verse 14, "Do everything without grumbling."

Can we do that, do everything without grumbling? The Bible seems to think we can. I am afraid that Christians, and I am speaking to all of us, myself included, we have a fundamental

fear of suffering. Not long ago, I was reading a Gallup Poll, which indicated that thirty-two percent of evangelicals believe that physician-assisted suicide is morally permissible.

Now this tells me that we as Christians don't know how to engage suffering, we don't know what to do with it. We avoid it.

We escape it. We try to drug it. We try to surgically exorcise it.

We divorce it. We institutionalize it. We tolerate it, deny it, do everything but actually live with it.

Matthew chapter 16 verse 24 is an embroidery on our wall. It's a screensaver on our computer. It's a plaque on our bedroom dresser reminding us of Jesus' words, "Whoever wants to be My

disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow Me." But do we deny ourselves? And as Jesus says, do we do it daily?

Do we daily take up our cross and follow Jesus Christ down that difficult, hard, rocky, bloodstained path to Calvary? Or do we imagine that we do it?

We live in a culture of so many virtual realities. Sometimes I wonder, is our walk with Christ a virtual reality because not a one of us is inclined to go to the cross?

Not a one of us is humanly inclined to go to Mount Calvary. No, not the cross. It rubs against every grain of human inclination within us and so God, our wise and sovereign

God gives us a little help in getting to Calvary. He gives us suffering, suffering sometimes in the form of a sheepdog. Elisabeth Elliot used to speak of suffering as a sheepdog snapping and growling and gnarling

and biting at your heels, driving you down the road to the cross where otherwise you would not normally go. You would not normally go.

Suffering is God's ice-cold splash on the soul, waking us up out of our spiritual slumber so that we might face, as those people in the Congo faced, so that we might face our sin.

Suffering is God's lemon that when He squeezes, out may trickle a little crabbiness, a little crankiness, a little sour disposition in the morning when you get up and you don't have your coffee.

Let God squeeze that lemon a little bit harder and out might pour doubts and anxieties and fears of the future. Let God crush that lemon with some unbelievable bad medical report or you being hit broadside

with some affliction that is overwhelming, and what might come out but rebellion, perhaps anger and maybe even bitterness against God. Most of all, suffering is God's textbook.

It's a textbook that keeps teaching us who we really are, not who we'd like to think we are. We are not all the paragons of virtue that we would like to think we are.

Suffering will reveal who we really are and how much, how desperately much we need Jesus, a Savior. You know, living most of my life without using my hands or my legs has taught me the fundamentals

of Matthew chapter 16. The basics of personal revival, daily denying myself, taking up my cross, and following Jesus, because I will tell you friends, and maybe some of you have heard me say this,

I still after 50 years cannot do quadriplegia. I just can't do it. I mean I wake up in the morning.

Just yesterday, I woke up in the morning feeling absolutely overwhelmed. Yes, by my quadriplegia, but also my chronic pain and I am thinking, "Jesus, without You I cannot do anything.

I can't even get up in the morning. Please Jesus, would You help me." And so right from the onset, I've got to deny myself the luxury, the momentary luxury of

pitying myself, and I have to pick up my cross and follow Jesus and die to a complaining spirit. Yesterday, when I did get up, I had to ask my friend Rainey, one of my get-up girls,

"Rainey, please before you give me a bed bath, before you give do my toilet routines, before you do my leg exercises, before you get me dressed, before you put me on my wheelchair, before you brush my hair and brush my teeth and blow my nose and do all of that, pray

for me. Put your cool hand on my forehead and pray for me. I can't do this."

But I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. So you can understand why my favorite words of Jesus are found in John chapter 6, where He says, "I tell you the truth."

Don't you love it when He says that? Listen up. This is really important.

"I tell you the truth. Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.

Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood remains in me and I in him." Oh my goodness, we could not find a more graphic description of what it means to abide in Christ. That's how much I need Jesus.

I need Thee, Oh I need Thee. Every hour -- no, every hour -- no, every minute -- every 30 seconds, I need Thee. My afflictions have given me this, I don't know how to put it.

It's a sinewy, it's a visceral, it's a tenacious requirement of Jesus Christ. All because my disability has sandblasted my soul raw. And if I've got pneumonia or if I have to be in bed with pressure sores, and I'm tempted

to think that God is piling on too much and I deserve some time off from obeying Him, the Holy Spirit will take that sin and He'll hold it up to my face and He'll say to me, "Joni, don't you look the other way.

Look at this. This is what you are doing. Don't look away because this little trickle of resentment is going to become a torrent

if you don't do something with it now." How good of the Holy Spirit to be that exacting with me. Affliction makes me deal with it because where else am I going to turn.

Where else would you turn? No one has the words of life. Only Jesus has the words of life for people whose suffering is unchartered wilderness.

So every morning, I do all things through Christ whose blood I drink and whose flesh I eat, and I taste and see that He is all together lovely. He is all together lovely and the fairest of ten thousand.

That wonderful friend of mine. And oh, what a friend He is. A friend who sticks closer than a brother, who sharpens like iron sharpening iron.

I am so grateful to the Holy Spirit for being that exacting. For when God wants to drill a man and thrill a man, when God wants to create so great and bold a man that all the world shall be amazed, watch His methods.

Watch His ways, how He ruthlessly perfects those whom He royally elects. How He hammers them and hurts them and with mighty blows converts them into trial shapes of clay that only God can understand while man's tortured heart is crying, and he lifts

beseeching hands. Do not be concerned. God knows what He's about, but what do you do?

What do you do when the sheepdog does not relent, when suffering doesn't get fixed, when the migraines do not get healed, when the marriage does not get mended? Well, there are always more ice-cold splashes of suffering in the face to wake us up to

the ever-increasing beauties of the gospel and the loveliness of the Lord Jesus. It happened to me a decade ago or so when chronic pain began to encroach. Pain in my lower back and hip became all-consuming, robbing me of the ability to virtually focus

on anything. In the morning, I would get up and I would get in the van and drive to the headquarters of Joni and Friends and immediately upon arrival, I would have to lie down and try to do my

work from my little office sofa bed. Chronic pain made my quadriplegia feel like a walk in the park, and I would dread the nights because I could not turn in bed to make myself comfortable and I dare not ask

my husband Ken to get up a second or a third or a fourth time to turn me, and I would dread the mornings because in the mornings I would know that my pain would be worse. Once again, I was being driven to the cross by that sheepdog snapping and snarling and

growling and biting at my heels to go to the cross, not just a place to die to sin that is a complaining spirit, a whining spirit, a sour disposition, anxiety, fears of the future, will this pain get worse, yada, yada, yada, yada.

No, but to find there at the cross the power of God, as it says in 1 Corinthians 1:18. It's a place of power. Let me explain.

Just recently, one morning on the way to work -- Ken had me tied down in my wheelchair in the back of the van and he's driving, and we're looking at each other, talking through the rearview mirror, and I am hurting so bad and I can't do this, and I was so tempted

to ask Ken to please take the next exit, turn around, let's go home, put me back to bed. I can't do this. But I kept thinking of that verse in Jeremiah chapter 12 verse 15.

You know, the one which says, "If you don't learn how to compete with men in a foot race, how are you going to learn to compete with horses?" Well, my quadriplegia had taught me how to compete in a foot race with men.

I was in a horserace, and I'm not about to throw in the towel. I have not come this far to throw in the towel spiritually or emotionally, and so I did not ask Ken to turn around.

Instead, I said loud enough for him to hear me in the front seat: "The Holy Spirit just gave me Psalm 119 verse 50, 'My comfort and suffering is this. Your promises renew my life.'

And so, God, I am going to recount as many promises I can remember from Your Word because I know that You are good on Your Word, and You will come through on those promises, and they will be my comfort and not just my comfort, they will revive and restore my life today.

And so Jesus, I'm so grateful that You promised that Your faithfulness will never fail me, that You promised You will hide me in the cleft of Your rock. You promised that You are my ever-present help in all my troubles.

You promised that Your grace is more than sufficient. You promised that You will carry to completion that which You've begun in Christ Jesus concerning me.

You promised that You will never leave me or forsake me." And I am going on and on recounting these promises so that Ken can hear them all. And by the time we got off at the exit, at the Joni and Friends headquarters and stopped

and the van lift went down, I wheeled out and oh my goodness, my pain had not gone away, but I had courage and I not only had courage, I had joy. You know, the kind of joy when Jesus said He endured His cross for the joy set before

Him? I had endured my cross for the joy set before me. And it was the joy of the Lord that was my strength that morning.

I had His courage and not just courage, perseverance and endurance and godliness and self-control, such good things. All those good things listed so beautifully in 2 Peter chapter 1 verse 6.

You know, interesting, those things do sound good, don't they? But there was a time when I thought that walking would be a good thing, having use of my hands would be a good thing.

I mean, "Jesus, You tell me in Your Word in Psalm 84, 'No good thing will You withhold from them who walk uprightly.' And You say in Jeremiah 32.

You Yourself say, 'With all My heart and soul, I will do good to Jacob.' And You also tell me in James chapter 1 verse 17, 'Every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights.'

And besides You tell me in Matthew chapter 7, 'Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give them a stone or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much

more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask Him?'" Makes sense, doesn't it? Isn't walking a good thing if I were to ask to walk?

Why would Jesus give me a snake? Why would He give me a stone? Well, the answer can be found in another portion of Scripture in which Jesus tells us in Matthew

chapter 5 verse 30, He has been healing withered hands and He has been healing blind eyes, but what does He say in Matthew chapter 5? "If that eye causes you to sin, gouge it out.

If that hand leads you astray, cut it off." God's idea of good is perseverance, is courage, is right living and righteousness. It's purity of heart and soul.

It is holiness. It is longsuffering. It is godliness.

It is self-control. There are more important things in life than walking. There are more important things in life than having use of your hands.

And I'll take courage, I'll take perseverance, I'll take holiness, I'll take a pure heart, I will take endurance and longsuffering and godliness any day over walking. Then in 2010, another ice-cold splash of suffering in the face.

There came my diagnosis of stage III cancer. A mastectomy, a long recovery in bed, a difficult season of chemotherapy and in those times Jesus surprised me, and I am sure you would agree in times when your suffering seems to

overwhelm you, Jesus seems to surprise us with such sweet, sweet, happy, serendipitous occurrences of His presence. One day, another day while Ken was driving me down the 101 freeway from the hospital

back to the house, again I was tied down in the back and we were talking through the rear-view mirror, and I was feeling utterly sick, nauseous. I had lost a lot of weight.

My bones were thin and tired. The chemo had been very rigorous and arduous. And so we just started discussing how suffering is like a little splash-over of hell, you

know a little spoonful of hell come early to kind of like, whoa, wake you up again out of your spiritual slumber and get you seriously appreciating the actual hell from which Christ rescued you.

So God gives us in the form of suffering, these little splash-overs of hell to wake us up. And so then we wondered as we drove, "Well, then, what are splash-overs of heaven?"

Are those splash-overs of heaven times of easy-breezy bright days when all the medical bills are paid, and your hopes are high and the sun is shining, the birds are singling and all looks bright on the horizon, or joy comes effervescent and easily?

Are those splash-overs of heaven? And as we pulled up in the driveway and Ken turned off the ignition, in the silence I said, "No, you know I think a splash-over of heaven is finding Jesus in your splash-over

of hell. Nothing is more sweet. Nothing is more poignant and tender and beautiful and lovely than finding Jesus in the middle

of your hell." I tell you that moment for me was a moment straight out of 2 Corinthians chapter 3 verse 18, you know how you are changed from glory to glory as we behold Him.

It happens every time we allow suffering to aid us, to be a friend to us, a strange friend, yes, but a friend nonetheless. A guest, but an unwelcome guest, nonetheless a guest pushing us down the road to the cross.

But here is my point, and this is what I really want to get across. There is a greater glory in the gospel to see, and there is even more loveliness in Jesus Christ to witness in suffering.

And let me explain, I have always been grateful for Hebrews chapter 4 verse 15. You know that verse well. The portion of Scripture where we are told that Jesus is our high priest, and as such,

He empathizes with our weaknesses. Well, through many decades of quadriplegia and even pain, it helped to know that I had a Savior who was wounded with my miseries so that He could be my merciful high priest.

It was so good to know that He resonated with me. He identified with me. He was looking out for me.

He was in it with me. So much me. So much me.

But now, now seeing Jesus precious in my hell was a divine invitation to identify with Him, not so much Him with me. No, but me with Him, to see Him suffering on His cross, to grieve over the sins that

caused Him such pain, to delight in Him, to resonate with Him, to have your heart broken with the things that break His heart and before you know it, you just, you can't contain the joy.

The human container just cannot contain the joy and you simply must, "Jesus, I am resting, resting in the joy of what Thou art. I am finding out the greatness of Thy loving heart.

Thou hast bid me gaze upon Thee, and Thy beauty fills my soul. For by Thy transforming power, Thou hast made me whole." I tell you what.

In that moment, it was as though Jesus were taking my hands and laying them on His breast, letting me feel His heartbeat. How His heart broke over the sin that has caused the world's suffering.

And my reaction, oh my goodness. My sin caused the apple of God's eye to turn brown with the rot of my transgression. Oh my goodness, how dare I cling to the very sins that caused such misery for my Jesus.

You want to get on your heart and you want to unpluck every talon of every hidden transgression, every sin that entangles. I want to know Christ.

That's the endgame. I mean I want to know Him and the power of His resurrection to help pursue His holiness. It takes the power of the resurrection to defeat sin in your life.

That's the whole purpose of the power of the resurrection. So that I might embrace Him more fully in the inner sanctum, having Him beckon me further into the inner sanctum of sharing in His sufferings.

I want to become like Him in His death. That is, I want to pick up my cross daily and die to the sins that He died for on His cross.

That's what it means to be like Him in His death in Philippians chapter 3, verses 8 to 10. To become like Him in His death is to daily pick up your cross, and you die to the sins

that He died for on His cross. Oh friend, not merely because it's the right thing to do. Not merely because it is the righteous thing to do or that it advances our sanctification,

but we do that in order to delight Him, to please Him, to give Him glory, to bring Him great gladness, so that it's like Him saying to the disciples in Luke chapter 22 verse 28, don't you love this?

"You," He's talking to the disciples here, "You are those who stayed with Me in My trials." "You are those who stayed with Me in My trials." Wouldn't you love to hear Jesus say that to you?

"You are those who resonated with Me, who identified with Me. Your heart breaks over the sins that break My heart." Don't you want to hear that from your wonderful Savior?

So friend, oh my goodness. We're talking about awakenings at this conference. Please rid yourself of every transgression that entangles, every iniquity that enslaves,

every hidden fault, every secret habit, every sin you try to housebreak or domesticate to make it look respectable. You know we do that, don't we?

We try to make our little sins look so housebroken and domesticated. Oh we don't gossip with anybody but just this one person. But boy does that one person get an earful.

Let go of the pride that you've foolishly thought you had tamed. Put to death the itchiness, the itchiness to get things your way, the fudgings of the truth, the manipulating of those precisely timed phrases, the smug self-righteousness.

Only then can your soul be better bonded. When your soul is sandblasted of sin, when you have confessed these things, repented from them, turned from them and delight in Jesus, only then can your soul be better bonded,

hot glued as it were, hot glued to the heart of your Savior. Get your heart pumping in rhythm with His, and then you're going to experience that marvelous joy of the Lord, God's joy flooding and cascading over heaven's walls, spilling down into your

heart, and flowing out in streams of encouragement to everyone else around you and then effervescing and rising back up into an ecstatic fountain of praise to the Lord. God shares His joy on His terms, and those terms call for us His children to, in some

measure, suffer as His precious Son suffered. Then when that happens, when you are effervescing in the overflow of desire, His desire and His delight, you are experiencing Christ's purpose in coming to save, that His joy in

us might be complete and that our joy in Him might be complete, John chapter 15 verse 11. The glory of the God is to share His joy. Happy day, happy day, when Jesus washed my sins away!

He taught me how to watch and pray, and live rejoicing every day. Happy day, happy day when Jesus washed my sins away. Friends, there have been so many times in bed at night, not the last two nights.

Those were pretty agonizing, but there have been so many times in bed at night when I have been in such pain and I am so happy. I'm just so happy.

I'm just lying there face up because gravity is my enemy when I'm in bed and I can't move. I mean, at least I can move a little bit like this but when in bed I can look straight up and sing to Him, "O love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee.

I give Thee back the life I owe that in Thy sunshine blaze its -- I'm getting the words all wrong -- may richer, fuller be." That's what the Christian life should look like.

You know my motto for the Christian life, "Die to self, rise to Jesus." You've got to die to self and rise with Jesus. Every day, dying to self and rising with Jesus.

Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. Having nothing, and yet possessing everything. Being poor, yet making many rich.

Not that I have already obtained it or have already been made perfect. No, I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me, and that is His joy.

His joy. It's what personal revival looks like, and like any revival you simply cannot keep it to yourself, can you?

You must tell others that Jesus, Jesus is ecstasy beyond compare, and it is worth anything, any amount of suffering to be His friend, to be His best friend. He is altogether that lovely.

And then the lovely fragrance of awakening will sweep your family and your neighborhood. Awakening will sweep your church or perhaps a campus. Awakening will sweep a community and perhaps even a nation.

One final word about Helen Roseveare, who I was privileged to meet in 1989. Knowing what I did about her life in Africa, when I met her I was struck that she was so happy.

She seemed to bear no scars, but those delightful eyes of hers just danced and twinkled behind her glasses, and she had the most beautiful, winsome smile. There seemed to be no scars, no emotional wounds, no inkling of the victim.

Only the spirit of victory. So in light of that, I will allow her to have the final word from her book, A Living Sacrifice, her reflections on her own suffering.

And this is what she writes: "Could I see that God wanted to transform my life from a somewhat ugly, useless branch into a straight arrow, a tool usable in His hands?

To be thus transformed was I willing? Am I still willing? Oh, I ask myself that every day.

Am I still willing to die to self and rise to Jesus? Am I willing? Am I still willing for the sandpapering, the stripping, the whittling processes that are

necessary. The ruthless pulling off of leaves, even flowers and thorns. Removing flowers might mean doing without conveniences or perhaps remaining single in

order to see a job done. The snapping of thorns could be drastic dealings with hidden jealousies and unknown pride or giving up cherished rights in leadership.

The final stripping of the bark might include dying to self, dying to self-defense, self-pity, self-justification, self-vindication, self-sufficiency, and so many more selves. Am I prepared for the pain, which may at times seem like sacrifice in order to be whittled

into a holy tool in His service?" Now get this. "My willingness will be a measure of the sincerity of my desire to express my heartfelt gratitude

to Him, Jesus Christ, for His so great a salvation. Can I see such minor sacrifices in light of the great sacrifice of Calvary where Christ gave all for me?"

Helen Roseveare would be the first to say that God cares most not about making us comfortable. No, He doesn't care most about making our lives free of trouble. He cares most about teaching us to hate our sin and to grow up spiritually to love Him

and adore Him and find joy in Him. Thus, one form of evil, suffering, is turned on its head to defeat another form of evil and that is our transgressions, and all of it to the praise and honor of glory of God's

wisdom and the building up of His Kingdom through awakenings, whether they be small or great, national or personal. I'd like to sing a hymn and I need your help.

I just bet there are plenty of people here who can hum harmony and hum it really beautifully, and all I need you to do is hum your harmonies or hum your melodies if you wish. But in closing, I want this to be a song that is for the listening pleasure of the Lord

Jesus only, imagining Him cupping His ear and hearing this beautiful, beautiful sound of harmony, melody and praise. "My Jesus, I love Thee, I know Thou art mine; to Thee all the follies of sin I resign.

I love Thee for wearing the thorn on a head. If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus tis now." That last line, "If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus 'tis now."

And let's sing the Amen, "A-men." God bless you and thank you for listening.