The Holiest of All By Andrew Murray

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give courage and patience. Consider Him. It will remind you
how necessary suffering
is. If He could not be perfected with
out it, how much more we. If suffering wrought such blessing
in Him, how surely in us too, for whose sake He was made
perfect, to whom God has given Him as a Leader in the path that
leads through suffering to glory. We may be sure of it, all that
is most precious in a Christlike character the virtues that were
perfected in Him through suffering, the meekness and lowliness
of heart, the gentleness and patience and submission of the Lamb
of God, will come to us too if we will but consider Him. Look
ing to Jesus, the suffering One, will bring us
the comfort of His
sympathy, the courage of His victory, the blessed consciousness
of conformity to Him. Ye have not yet resisted unto blood,
striving against sin: the thought of His blood in Gethsemane
and on Calvary, and the insignificance of our own suffering, will
urge us to endure and resist. And we shall neither wax weary
nor faint.
And ye have forgotten the exhortation, which reasoneth
with you as with sons, My son, regard not lightly the
chastening of the Lord. The words from Proverbs warn
against a double danger. On the one hand, we may regard
lightly the chastening of the Lord, and think too little of it.
We may seek to bear up against it with human wisdom ;
looking upon it as the lot of all, counting ourselves too manly to
bow before it, trusting to time and fortune to bring a change.
We fail to recognise the hand of God in it ;
we do not accept
it as indeed God s chastening, and lose all the teaching and the
blessing it was meant to bring. My son, regard not lightly the
chastening of the Lord.
Neither, here is the other danger faint when thou art
reproved of Him. Be not discouraged or downcast as if the