What Our Crosses Do

Unlearning the Need for Comfort Part 2

This is week two of the chapter on unlearning the need for comfort and learning the need for afflictions. You should read the first part before reading this one if you haven’t read it already HERE.

John Calvin has his own list of the benefits of affliction. He says our crosses:

1.     Lead us to perfect trust in God’s power[i]

Without suffering we cling to “stupid and empty confidence in the flesh” rather than live a life of humility and God dependence. When pride begins to reign, God “afflicts us either with disgrace or poverty, or bereavement, or disease, or other calamities.”

We resent afflictions in exact proportion to our ignorance of our pride and our blindness to pride’s spiritual devastation. We think we’re patient, until God gives us something that tries our patience. We think we can forgive, until we are asked to forgive something so heinous, we realize we just can’t on our own. We think we are strong until we are faced with a temptation that overwhelms us.

Need I go on? We think, but God knows, and he uses afflictions to reveal to us what he already knows and we don’t.