| The Joy of Service |
Chapter 5 |
Page 7 |
Our affairs are also a part of this deposit. We soon learn that we cannot be master of our own condition and circumstances. We cannot make our environment helpful to our spiritual growth. We cannot bring good out of evil, blessing out of pain, victory out of defeat. Take the story of Joseph as an example. Wrong and cruelty seemed to be utterly destroying his young life in its early years. But the strange, tangled experiences were in the hands of God, and out of them all came in due time great blessing for Joseph and for the world. To have broken into that story with human interference at any point, in those days of trial, would have been to spoil the outworking of a beautiful divine plan.
“Because I was impatient, would not wait,
But thrust my impious hands across Thy threads,
And marred the pattern drawn out for my life–
O Lord, I do repent.”
There is a special phase of the lesson which emerges at this point. You are suffering wrong from others. They are unkind to you, unjust, treating you injuriously. What is your duty as a Christian in this case? Is it not the quiet committal of all the hurts and wrongs into Christ’s hands? You are not a judge; you have nothing whatever to do with judgment. Your whole duty is to put the matter absolutely and forever out of your own hands into Christ’s, and to leave it there. It is not your province to set wrong things right, to vindicate yourself from false blame, to avenge injustice or injury inflicted upon you.
In another passage of the Scriptures we are told what Jesus Himself did with the wrongs He suffered: “Who, when He was reviled, reviled not again; when He suffered, threatened not; but committed Himself to Him that judgeth righteously.” We have also this counsel: “Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit their souls in well doing unto a faithful Creator.”
Page 7