October 6 Daily Devotional

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends

God uses varied methods in the process of our sanctification. He is our Father who has ‘loved us with an everlasting love’.... [His] great concern for us primarily is not our happiness but our holiness ... and He employs many differing means to that end.

Our failure to realize that often causes us to stumble and, in our sin and folly, at times even to misunderstand completely some of God’s dealings with us. Like foolish children we feel that our heavenly Father is unkind to us and we ... feel that we are being dealt with harshly ... it is all due to our failure to realize God’s glorious purposes with respect to us....

Sometimes God promotes sanctification in His children by chastizing them (Hebrews 12:5–11), and especially by enabling them to understand the meaning of chastisement.... ‘Look at the things you are suffering’, says the writer. ‘Why are you suffering them?’ The answer is that they are suffering these things because they are children of God ... God is doing these things to them for their good.... What this man is really saying is that the whole of salvation is God’s work from beginning to end, and that God has His ways of producing it. Once God starts working He goes on with that work ... when God starts His work upon His people He is going to complete that work. God has an ultimate objective and purpose for them and that is that they might spend eternity with Him in glory. Much that happens to us in this world is to be understood and explained in the light of that fact; and it is as definite as this, according to this man’s argument, that God will bring us to that condition, and nothing shall prevent us coming into that condition.

Spiritual Depression, pp. 235–6