I wrote to you out of great sorrow and anguish of heart – along with many tears – not to make you sad but to let you know how much love I have for you. (2 Corinthians 2:4 ISV)
There
is nothing that is precious to the Lord, and which He would make the
property of His people, but there will be suffering for it. It will
only become their property – in that sense – as they suffer for it,
and then woe betide who criticizes that! If you are detached from a
thing, if you are detached from a testimony, from a work of God, you
can do all the criticizing you like. You have no inward
heart-relationship to it, and so you pass your judgments upon it.
But if you are in it and you have suffered, if it has been a costly
thing where you are concerned, then you are seeing more than all the
failings, more than all those faults. The people who can criticize
like that and judge and point out faults are the people who have not
suffered.
On
the other side, we may know all the terms, all the phraseology, all
the doctrine, all the truth, and it may be just objective, something
we have heard; we have lived in the midst of it, it is familiar to
us. But what the Lord will do if that is to become ours is to take
us into travail over the matter. He will relate that thing to our
hearts in a deep, inward way, so that none of us will be able to
say, "I know all about that, I have heard all about that, I could
tell you all that you could tell me about that." The Lord would so
work in a costly, deep and painful way in relation to that, to make
it ours through travail, that we are brought into a new position. We
are not spectators, looking on, criticizing; we are on the inside,
looking out, defending. We are jealous over it. Suffering is a great
purifying thing. It destroys selfishness. It destroys that
self-interest that is the cause of so much of the trouble. It makes
us in a disinterested way jealous for what is of God. Yes, suffering
purifies, and suffering makes this deep, inward link. It gives an
extra feature to things. That extra feature where we cannot just be
occupied with faults and be people of a criticizing attitude, the
extra feature with a love which covers a multitude of sins. We have
suffered together. When we suffer together, what a lot we get over!