Spurgeon on the Sweet Uses of Adversity
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: