Suffering and Perseverance

For those of you that missed yesterday’s service, I hope you will go online and listen to the powerful words God spoke through Tracy Waal. Today I opened up Streams in the Dessert and was in awe at how the words of L.B. Cowman tied into yesterday’s sermon:

“And I will make you ride on the heights of the earth” (Isaiah 58:14)

One of the first rules of aerodynamics is that flying into the wind quickly increases altitude. The wings of the airplane create more lift by flying against the wind. How was the lesson learned? It was learned by watching birds fly. If a bird is simply flying for pleasure, it flies with the wind. But it it senses danger, it turns into the wind to gain altitude, and flies up toward the sun.

The sufferings of life are like God’s winds. Sometimes they blow against us and are very strong. They are God’s hurricanes, but, they take human life and lift it to higher levels and toward His heavens.

You have seen in the summer time a day when the atmosphere was so oppressive that you could hardly breathe? But a cloud appeared on the western horizon and that cloud grew larger and threw out rich blessing for the world. The storm rose, lightning flashed and thunder pealed. The storm covered the world, and the atmosphere was cleansed; new life was in the air, and the world was changed.

Human life is worked out according to exactly the same principle. When the storm breaks the atmosphere is changed, clarified, filled with new life; and a part of heaven is brought down to earth.

Obstacles ought to set us singing. The wind finds voice, not when rushing across the open sea, but when hindered by the outstretched arms of the pine trees, or broken by the fine strings of an Aeolian harp. Then it has songs of power and beauty. Set your freed soul sweeping across the obstacles of life, through grim forests of pain, against even the tiny hindrances and frets that love uses, and it, too, will find its singing voice.

May God lift you up today. May He be the air you breathe; His holy presence, living in you.