Made Perfect Through Suffering

It is in the gymnasium of affliction that men are modelled and fashioned in the beauty of holiness, and all their spiritual powers are trained for harmonious action. It was meet also that they should suffer, in order to complete their service. Like their Lord, they had to be made perfect through suffering; and if they had not suffered they had not finished the work which he had given them to do. They needed tribulation, moreover, that they might be made like their Savior; for a saint untroubled, how can he be like the man who wore the thorn crown? Never smitten, never slandered, never despised, never mocked at, never crucified, then how could we be like our Head? Shall the servant be above his Master, or the disciple above his Lord?

From a sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon entitled "What And Whence Are These?," delivered February 25, 1872.

“Earth is crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who sees takes off his shoes.”    ~ Elizabeth Barret Browning