We can trust our God. He created the world; he has limitless power. He designed everything; he sustains it. Think of those ancient hills and mountains, they have stood for centuries, millennia. What a powerful God. He creates, he keeps. When you were born again, he re-created you. He gave you a new nature, he made you a new person. You were a new creation, Paul says, in Christ and he will keep you also just the same. He put within you a living Spirit, eternal life, and he will keep it and maintain it now and for ever. Therefore – given the inevitability of suffering, not only because of the presence of a hostile world, but also because God is actively working in the lives of his children using their trials to prepare them for heaven, then do not fret at the hardships which, as Christians, you endure. Not all will suffer for their faith all the time, but let those who do suffer learn to view their sufferings in a positive way.
We need to be sure that suffering is no accident; it happens according to the will of God, and he does nothing unnecessarily. If God allows us to suffer, then it must be for our advantage. But he does not measure our advantage as we tend to do, by considering only the short-term earthly benefits. Measured by these alone we would say that suffering brings a decided disadvantage. But from God’s point of view, since all that we have in this life is temporary and is due to be taken away and replaced with something much more enduring, then if lessons in holiness and Christian character come at the expense of earthly loss, this is really no loss at all; it will all be made up for by something far better in the world to come. His wisdom sees it this way, and if God supplies us with all that we need on a day-to-day basis, then why should we complain.
Yes, we are to commit our souls to him – to the very one who wills that we should suffer. This is the strongest expression of trust and tells the Lord that we believe that, in spite of the unpleasant nature of suffering, he does it for our good. We are ready to believe that he has our good at heart and that his assessment of what is good for us is better than our own. Indeed, we would rather resign the management of our lives entirely into his hands since we lack the wisdom to design our own sanctification program.
At the same time we must continue to do good, in obeying all God’s commandments. Our sufferings do not give us an exemption from well-doing. This is true both because we cannot take revenge on those who may persecute us, and because we do not refuse to obey out of resentment at what the Lord allows. Our conduct is to be perfect towards those that are outside the kingdom of heaven, for we never cease to have a mission to the lost even among those who do us harm. The unreasonable way in which we return good for evil is a powerful testimony to them of the truth of the gospel, for they are forced to ask what motivates us so powerfully to do good. And why should we be angry with the Lord when the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us?