Suffering Is Never For Nothing: 7-Day DevotionalSample

Day 6 

“Anyone who finds his life will lose it, and anyone who loses his life because of me will find it.” Matthew 10:39 CSB

Life comes out of death. I bring God my sorrows and He gives me His joy. I bring Him my losses and He gives me His gains. I bring Him my sins, He gives me His righteousness. I bring Him my deaths and He gives me His life. But the only reason God can give me His life is because He gave me His death.

So these things continually work not only in the spiritual life, but in the natural world as well. Jesus used the very simple illustration of the natural world in the incident where just after His entering into Jerusalem where He was hailed with palm branches and hosannas, two of the disciples came to Him and told Him that there were some Greeks there who wanted to see Him because they had heard about the raising of Lazarus from the dead.

Well, we all love miracles and we all love a miracle worker. If you want to be popular, you perform as many miracles as possible in as visible a medium as possible and people will flock to you. People flocked to Jesus, he said, not because of the words that He spoke, but because of the loaves and fishes. In this case it was raising Lazarus from the dead about which word had spread abroad. So people were crowding into Jerusalem to see this man and the disciples came and told Jesus that they wanted to see Him.

Well, Jesus took that opportunity to turn his disciples’ idea into glory upside-down. The world has an idea of what’s important, what really is the glory of God. Do all the miracles that you can and get everything all sorted out and healed and paid for and solved and that’s God’s glory. And of course, I believe in a God who can make the sun stand still. And He can turn water into wine and make dry land out of rivers. Don’t misunderstand me. 

But when I hear a preacher say what you need is a miracle, I want to say, “I might think that’s what I need, but very often my prayers are really asking for stones. And what God wants to give me is bread, something that will not only feed myself but feed the world as well.” So I can

pray. I might even pray for a miracle. I don’t think I’ve done that very often. But when I was praying for healing for my husband’s cancer, I knew that I was praying for a miracle, humanly speaking. But the bottom line was, “Lord, Thy will be done.”

We need our definitions revised just as the disciples needed to have their definition of glory revised and turned upside-down.

And I think of the words that my first husband, Jim Elliot, wrote when he was twenty-two years old. “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” He was paraphrasing the words of Jesus, “If you lose your life for My sake, you’ll find it” (Matt. 10:39, author paraphrase). He exchanges my weakness, my losses, my sins, my sorrows, my sufferings. When we offer them to Him, He has something to give us in exchange, and that might feed a multitude.