![]() He had been "in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness." He knew what danger was. Five times he received thirty-nine stripes. Paul knew what he was talking about when he came to the subject of tribulation. "When Esau heard the words of his father, he cried with a great and exceeding bitter cry." Life's disappointments - how much we all know about this kind of bitterness! Yes tribulation is indeed a bitter tree. The feeling of disappointment which such circumstances produce was in Esau's mind when he came in to receive his father's blessing, and found that Jacob his brother had heartlessly supplanted him. Some cherished possession is taken away from you, some valuable property is lost, your earthly means of support take to themselves wings and flee away, some object on which you had set your heart is snatched away out of your reach, or some friend whom you had implicitly trusted suddenly proves treacherous and unfaithful. ![]() There is the bitterness of disappointment. Even the Saviour of the world tasted how bitter is the cup of bodily suffering.ģ. No human strength could stand it unaided without giving way to irritation or despondency. It needs a Divine power to bear a life of constant pain. Sleepless nights and weary days of tossing on a bed of sickness - how they tend to take the sunshine out of life! And then there are those trifling ailments, bodily infirmities, for which, perhaps, you get little sympathy, but which keep your body constantly feeble and your mind constantly depressed. ![]() There is the bitterness of bodily suffering. Parents who want to avoid the greatest of all grief, mourning over a child of whom they have no hope for eternity, should lose no opportunity of leading their children to the Saviour.Ģ. What agony of spirit when one who has been the light of your eyes, the joy and comfort of your home, is taken from you! What bitterness of sorrow is to be compared with the grief of parents for their children? How heart-rending is grief like David's, when he went up to the chamber over the gate, and as he went his sorrow overcame him, and he cried aloud, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!" And so, when the Bible wants to picture grief of the intensest kind, it speaks of mourning as one mourneth for his only son, and being in bitterness as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn ( Zechariah 12:10). "The heart knoweth its own bitterness." We all know something of what sorrow means, and how bitter it is.ġ. It is hardly necessary to speak of the bitterness of tribulation. "We glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience and patience, experience and experience, hope." "Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness to them that are exercised thereby." Tribulation is a bitter tree, but look at the fruits which it is capable of yielding. "No!" says the apostle, boldly "we glory even in our tribulations." The sorrows are there, 'tis true, but the light of the cross of Jesus transforms them with a glory all its own, even as the sunshine makes a rainbow of the shower. But it does not therefore follow that we are to postpone all joy until we reach the spirit-land. ![]() True, there are cares and sorrows in this present life. Our joy, however, is not confined to the future. In another place he speaks of himself "as sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing as poor, yet making many rich as having nothing, and yet possessing all things." Here he speaks of the Christian as "glorying in tribulation." He has been speaking of the effects of justification by faith, and ends by saying, "We rejoice in hope of the glory of God" (ver. Paul abound in strange and striking paradoxes.
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