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Spurgeon on the Sweet Uses of Adversity

by Kyle Newcomer

A fellow pastor recommended a good COVID-19 reading strategy: find Spurgeon's sermons on Scripture texts having to do with trials and illness. Looking through some of his sermon collections, I stumbled upon this one on Job 10:2. After reading it a couple of weeks ago, It's been coming back to mind quite often. Here's the text:

"I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me." Or as the KJV has it, "Shew me wherefore thou contendest with me."

Pastor Spurgeon offers five reasons that the Lord might contend with the believer. I think you'll find them challenging yet encouraging, but before he gets there, he says this in his introduction:

"You will all perceive at once that there must be love even in this apparently angry word. This contention must, after all, have something to do with contentment, and that this battle must be, after all, but a disguised mercy, but another shape of an embrace from the God of love. Carry this consoling reflection in your thoughts while I am preaching to you. And if any of you are saying today, “Show me wherefore you contend with me,” the very fact of God contending with you at all, the fact that He has not consumed you, that He has not smitten you to the lowest hell, may thus, at the very outset, afford consolation and hope."

Here are brief snippets of his five reasons:

by Kyle Newcomer

A fellow pastor recommended a good COVID-19 reading strategy: find Spurgeon's sermons on Scripture texts having to do with trials and illness. Looking through some of his sermon collections, I stumbled upon this one on Job 10:2. After reading it a couple of weeks ago, It's been coming back to mind quite often. Here's the text:

"I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me." Or as the KJV has it, "Shew me wherefore thou contendest with me."

Pastor Spurgeon offers five reasons that the Lord might contend with the believer. I think you'll find them challenging yet encouraging, but before he gets there, he says this in his introduction:

"You will all perceive at once that there must be love even in this apparently angry word. This contention must, after all, have something to do with contentment, and that this battle must be, after all, but a disguised mercy, but another shape of an embrace from the God of love. Carry this consoling reflection in your thoughts while I am preaching to you. And if any of you are saying today, “Show me wherefore you contend with me,” the very fact of God contending with you at all, the fact that He has not consumed you, that He has not smitten you to the lowest hell, may thus, at the very outset, afford consolation and hope."

Here are brief snippets of his five reasons:
"1. My first answer on God’s part, my brother, is this—it may be that God is contending with you that He may show His own power in upholding you. God delights in His saints. And when a man delights in his child, if it be a child noted for its brightness of intellect, he delights to see it put through hard questions, because he knows that it will be able to answer them all. So God glories in His children. He loves to hear them tried, that the whole world may see that there are none like them on the face of the earth and even Satan may be compelled, before he can find an accusation against them, to resort to his inexhaustible fund of lies....


"2. Let me give you a second answer. Perhaps, O tried soul! the Lord is doing this to develop your graces. There are some of your graces that would never be discovered if it were not for your trials. Do you not know that your faith never looks so grand in summer weather, as it does in winter? Have you not heard that love is too often like a glowworm, that shows but little light except it is in the midst of surrounding darkness? And do you not know that hope itself is like a star—not to be seen in the sunshine of prosperity and only to be discovered in the night of adversity?...


"3. Another reason may be found in this. It may be the Lord contends with you because you have some secret sin which is doing you sore damage. Do you remember the story of Moses? Never was a man better beloved than he of the Lord his God, for he was faithful in all his house as a servant. But do you remember how the Lord met him on the way as he was going to Egypt and strove with him? And why? Because he had in his house an uncircumcised child. This child was, so long as it had not God’s seal upon it, a sin in Moses. Therefore, God strove with him till the thing was done....


"4. I have now another reason to give, but it is one which some of you will not understand. Some however will. Beloved, you remember that it is written, that we “must bear the image of the heavenly,” namely, the image of Christ. As He was in this world, even so must we be. We must have fellowship with Him in His sufferings, that we may be conformable unto His death. Have you never thought that none can be like the Man of Sorrows unless they have sorrows too?...


"5. To the child of God I shall give only one more reason. The Lord, it may be, contends with you, my brother, to humble you. We are all too proud. The humblest of us do but approach to the door of true humility. We are too proud, for pride, I suppose, runs in our very veins and is not to be gotten out of us any more than the marrow from our bones. We shall have many blows before we are brought down to the right mark. And it is because we are so continually getting up that God is so continually putting us down again...."

Read the rest here: http://www.spurgeongems.org/sermon/chs283.pdf

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