
God is never in a hurry but spends years with those He expects to greatly use. He never thinks the days of preparation too long or too dull. The hardest ingredient in suffering is often time. A short, sharp pang is easily borne, but when a sorrow drags its weary way through monotonous years and day after day returns with the same dull routine of hopeless agony, the heart loses its strength, and without the grace of God, we are sure to sink into the very sullenness of despair.
Joseph’s was a long trial, and God often has to burn His lessons into the depths of our being by the fires of protracted pain. “He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver,” but He knows how long, and like a true goldsmith, He stops the fires the moment He sees His image in the glowing metal. Like Joseph, let us be more careful to learn all the lessons in the school of sorrow than we are anxious for the hour of deliverance.
There is a “need-be” for every lesson, and when we are ready, our deliverance will surely come, and we shall find that we could not have stood in our place of higher service without the very things that were taught us in the ordeal. God is educating us for the future, for higher service and nobler blessings; and if we have the qualities that fit us for a throne, nothing can keep us from it when God’s time has come.
Don’t steal tomorrow out of God’s hands. Give God time to speak to you and reveal His will. He is never too late; learn to wait and rest.
Acts 7:30,32,34
And when forty years were expired, there appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai an angel of the Lord in a flame of fire in a bush...saying...I have seen the affliction of my people which is in Egypt, and I have heard their groaning, and am come down to deliver them. And now come, I will send thee into Egypt.
- Unknown Author