Afflicted for His Glory
- Message Excerpt by
- Scripture: 2 Corinthians 12:9–10 Topic: Suffering
Audio Transcript
When God makes your body and your soul a theater of revelation and pain, for the sake of your humility, Satan’s shaming, and Christ’s shining, how will you respond?
Will you respond like the world: murmuring, complaining, questioning, accusing? Or will you be like Paul? “I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities” (2 Corinthians 12:9–10).
“Father, would you grant me the miracle to be most glad and well pleased in weakness?”
And if, in a few years, you conclude that God has not given you one thorn, but a crown of thorns, will you not pray, “Father, if I might get a glimpse of heaven, if I might be saved from pride, if Satan and his ugliness might be exposed as worthless in my life, if I might magnify the beauty of Jesus, then Father, would you grant me the miracle to be most glad and well pleased?”
And I ask you, thoughtful, serious, Christian Hedonists, would that not make the power and the grace of the Lord Jesus look magnificent in your life to everybody around you? God brought you to Bethlehem so that you would learn to see these things in the Bible, and live them in your body. And as you go, we will pray for you, that the fruit of these years will be that.
Read, watch, or listen to the full message:
