Learning Through Suffering

Read Acts 7:30 - 34

This passage demonstrates a long wait in preparation for a great mission. It is important to understand that when God delays, He is not inactive. He is preparing His instruments, He is maturing our powers; and at the appointed moment we shall arise equal to our task. Even Jesus of Nazareth, God manifest in the flesh, was thirty years in privacy, growing in wisdom before He began His work.
God is never in a hurry but spends years with those He expects to greatly use. He never thinks the days of preparation too long or too dull. Moses spent 80 years before his ministry started. He went through 40 years of Egypt so that he would know how to deal with the Egyptians. He went through 40 years in the field and then God led him to his mission. He must have suffered through amazing obstacle to get where the Lord wanted him.
The hardest ingredient in suffering is often time. A short, sharp pang is easily borne, but when a sorrow drags its weary way through long, monotonous years, and day after day returns with the same dull routine of hopeless agony, the heart loses its strength, and without the grace of God, is sure to sink into the very sullenness of despair. A paper cut that hurts for a moment is no comparison to an amputation. Joseph's was a long trial, and God often has to burn His lessons into the depths of our being by the fires of protracted pain. "He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver," but He knows how long, and like a true goldsmith He stops the fires the moment He sees His image in the glowing metal. We may not see now the outcome of the beautiful plan which God is hiding in the shadow of His hand; it yet may be long concealed; but faith may be sure that He is sitting on the throne, calmly waiting the hour when, with adoring rapture, we shall say, "All things have worked together for good."
I believe that there are too many people that have prayed their way out of the classroom of suffering without ever realizing that if they prayed for endurance instead of deliverance, God would fill them with wisdom from on high. Many people have to take “remedial” suffering class because they prayed themselves into deliverance before the lesson that was being taught was grasped. We need to pray, “Thy will be done” in the midst of suffering instead of “Get me out of this mess.” Like Joseph, we need to be more careful to learn all the lessons in the school of sorrow than we are anxious for the hour of deliverance. There is a "need-be" for every lesson, and when we are ready, our deliverance will surely come, and we shall find that we could not have stood in our place of higher service without the very things that were taught us in the ordeal. God is educating us for the future, for higher service and nobler blessings; and if we have the qualities that fit us for a throne, nothing can keep us from it when God's time has come.
Don't steal tomorrow out of God's hands. Give God time to speak to you and reveal His will. He is never too late; learn to wait. "He never comes too late; He knoweth what is best; Vex not thyself in vain; until He cometh--REST." Do not run impetuously before the Lord; learn to wait His time: the minute-hand as well as the hour-hand must point the exact moment for action.

“Patience is passion tamed.”
- Lyman Abbott