To Encourage You

Hebrews 5:7-9 “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him.”

Sometimes you just can’t have it both ways. Sometimes the best things are not the expedient things. For example, if we are suffering from a pain of some type, we may seek deliverance from that pain by means of some medicine. And although that deliverance may be good, it may ultimately not be the best thing for us, as when an operation and its additional pain may be what is really necessary to ultimately heal us. And just as this is true in the physical realm, it is also true in the spiritual.

We see perhaps the most significant example of this in all the world in the passage from Hebrews 5 above. Here the writer reflects on Jesus as He faced the cross. It was a horrible and painful reality, one that, not surprisingly, Jesus prayed to be saved from, knowing that God was fully able to deliver Him. As Jesus told Peter when Peter tried to defend Him from arrest with his sword, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53). But He didn’t pray that prayer. Note that this was after Jesus had prayed for physical salvation in the Garden of Gethsemane, which is the prayer to which reference is being made in the passage from Hebrews 5 above. In His prayers for physical deliverance from suffering, Jesus had realized that the best path for Him (and us) was obedience through suffering. It was because Jesus was not saved that He, wonderfully, “became the source of eternal salvation” to all who would put their faith in Him. He learned, i.e., experienced, obedience through what He suffered, and by that obedience the very best things came to all.

That’s always the case, by the way. It is in obedience to the Father, come what may, that the best things will always ultimately come. It is often by the patient endurance of suffering that God is working to accomplish much more in our lives and in the lives of others around us than if the expedient course of deliverance from the suffering were to be given to us.

Which brings us to the question, just what do we want? What is the ultimate objective for which we are living? Is it that things would always go well for us? Is it that we would never experience sickness, or pain, or grief, or hardship and trials of any kind? Wouldn’t that be so wonderful? Isn’t that what everyone so naturally desires? Or do we want more than anything to glorify God? Do we want what He deems is ultimately best for us, even if pain may have to come first? Do we want what is best, eternally speaking, or is the expedient the ultimate priority in our life? Well, whatever your mindset, remember that if we call ourselves Christians, it is the example of Christ that we are to follow. Remember that “if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps” (1 Peter 2:20-21). It was by the obedience of Jesus through suffering that salvation has come to us. And so, in this world full of sin in which suffering is sure, may God give us the faith to endure whatever comes our way, especially when deliverance through that suffering is the best thing, even if deliverance from such suffering would be good.