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November 17 Daily Devotional

A First Book of Daily Readings

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)

A wonderful fashion of teaching He hath
And wise to salvation He makes us through faith.

[The apostle] says: ‘I have learned’, or better, ‘I have come to learn’. I thank God that Paul said that. Paul was not always like this any more than any one of us. He had ‘come to learn’. He has another interesting word also. He says, ‘Everywhere and in all things I am “instructed” both to be full and to be hungry’ ... what he really says is, ‘I have been initiated’, ‘let into the secret’, ‘let into the mystery’.

Paul says that he has come to learn how to be in this condition. Now there are many intimations in the New Testament that this was particularly difficult for him. Paul was sensitive, proud by nature, and, in addition, he was an intensely active being. Nothing could be more galling for such a man than to lie in prison. He had been brought up as a Roman citizen, but here he is enduring bondage, not spending his life among great intellectual people, but among slaves. How does he manage it? ‘Ah’, he says, ‘I have come to learn, I have been let into the secret, I have been let into the mystery.’

How did he come to learn? ... In the first place it was by sheer experience. [2 Corinthians 12:9–10 tell] about ‘the thorn in the flesh’. Paul did not like it. He struggled against it; three times he prayed that it might be removed. But it was not removed. He could not reconcile himself to it. He was impatient, he was anxious to go on preaching, and this thorn in the flesh was keeping him down. But then he was taught the lesson, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee’. He came to a place of understanding.... He had to learn, and experience teaches us all. Some of us are very slow to learn, but God in His kindness may send us an illness, sometimes He even strikes us down— anything to teach us this great lesson and to bring us to this great position.

Spiritual Depression, pp. 283–4

 

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