The Lord sometimes flogs His children home!
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"As chastened, and not killed." 2 Corinthians 6:9
The Lord does not see fit to lay the same chastisements upon all His people. He has rods of different sizes and different descriptions—though all are felt to be rods when God brings them upon the back. The Lord chastises with one hand, and upholds with the other. In your spiritual experience, you may have passed under many chastising strokes. And when they fell upon you, they seemed to come as a killing sentence from God's lips. You feared your illness might end in death. Under your bereavement, you felt as if you could never hold up your head again.
You thought your providential losses might prove to be your earthly ruin. Your family afflictions seemed to be so heavy, as to be radically incurable. All these were killing strokes. But though chastened, you were not killed. You lost no divine life thereby—but you lost much that pleased the flesh—much that gratified the creature—much that looked well for days of prosperity, but would not abide the storm. But you lost nothing that was for your real good. If you lost bodily health—you gained spiritual health. If you lost a dear husband or child—God filled up the void in your heart by making Christ more precious.
If you had troubles in your family—the Lord made it up by giving more manifestations of His love and grace. Your very losses in providence were for your good—for God either made them up, or what you lost in providence He doubled in grace. So that though chastened—you are not killed!
Has anything that has happened to you quenched or extinguished the life of God in your soul? As the dross and tin were more separated—has not the gold shone more brightly? Have you not held spiritual things with a tighter grasp? When God chastens His people, it is not to kill them—it is to make them partakers of His holiness, to revive their drooping graces, to make them more sincere, upright and tender in conscience, to make them more separate from the world, to make them seek more His glory, to make them have a more single eye to His praise, to make them live more a life of faith.
Here is the blessedness—that when God chastises His people, it is not for their injury, but for their profit—not for their destruction, but for their salvation—not to treat them with the unkindness of an enemy, but with the love of a friend! Look at the afflictions, chastenings and grievous sorrows that you have passed through. Have they been friends to you—or enemies? instruments of helping you—or hindrances? ladders whereby you have climbed up to heaven—or steps whereby you have descended into hell? means of taking you nearer to Christ—or means of carrying you more into the world?
If you know anything of God's chastening, you will say, "Every stroke has brought me nearer to God! He has flogged me home!" As a father will seize his truant boy out of a horde of other children and flog him home, so the Lord sometimes flogs His children home! Every stroke laid upon their back brings them a step nearer to their home in the mansions above! In your own experience, you know that God's chastening's have not killed you. But rather they have been the means of reviving and keeping alive the work of grace upon your heart! As chastened, yet not killed.
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