The Trial of Our Faith as a Means of Grace to Others.
By H. Clay Trumbull
OUR troubles, and our deliverances from trouble, are often the means of more good to others than anything in the line of our unbroken prosperity could prove to be. It is what the men of God in olden times suffered, rather than what they enjoyed, that lifts them up into prominence for the encouragement of our faith. All of Job's sons and daughters, and sheep and camels and oxen and she-asses, would have done little to make him a pattern for believers, or to have fastened the world's attention on his story, if it had not been for the robbers, and the thunder-bolts, and the cyclone, and the boils, and the carping friends, which were the cause of so much worry to him. And so all the way down the Bible record—including Joseph and Daniel and Jeremiah and John the Baptist—to the list of Paul's countless disasters, and the assurance of his upholding in and through them all. Even if we fail to see what good has come to us through that which has tried us most severely, in the providence of God, we may be comforted in the thought that if we commit our cause to the Lord, and rejoice in his saving and sustaining grace, others shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord, as they would not have been led to but for that which was a cause of such sorrow and trial for us in its passing. God has the good of others in view, as well as of ourselves, in all his dealings with us in the sight of others. This ought to be a comfort to us.—H. Clay Trumbull.