Paul says in Romans 5:3 that there is a way for us to actually rejoice when life hurts, because God is using those very hardships to shape something precious in us. That sounds impossible until we realize that our Father never wastes a tear, and that every pressure we feel is allowed by a loving hand, aimed at a glorious end. Today is an invitation to look at the pain you know too well—and dare to believe it can become a doorway to deeper joy, steadier faith, and unshakable hope.

Rejoicing Where It Hurts Most

Rejoicing in suffering is not pretending everything is fine or calling evil “good.” God never asks you to deny real pain; Jesus Himself wept and groaned. The call is to rejoice in Him within the pain—to anchor your heart in who He is when everything else is shaking. When Paul says, “we also rejoice in our sufferings” (Romans 5:3), he is not celebrating the suffering itself, but the God who sits over it, ruling wisely and lovingly. That kind of joy is an act of warfare: it says, “My circumstances are loud, but my Savior’s faithfulness is louder.”

James says something similar: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you encounter trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance” (James 1:2–3). Joy in trial is not a feeling you wait to “catch”; it is a decision grounded in what you know to be true about God. You choose to interpret your suffering through His promises rather than interpret His character through your suffering. When you do, your tears and your praise can coexist—and both become precious offerings to Him.

What Pain Is Producing

Romans 5 tells us there is a holy chain reaction hidden inside our afflictions: “we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance” (Romans 5:3). Suffering presses you, and when you refuse to run from God, that pressure produces perseverance—a rugged, staying faith that doesn’t fold when the wind rises. That perseverance, Paul continues, forges proven character, and that character blossoms into hope that does not put us to shame (Romans 5:4–5). What feels like destruction is often construction; the Spirit is building a soul that can carry weight.

This is why Scripture dares to talk about our pain in almost scandalous terms: “For our light and momentary affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory that is far beyond comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17). Your trials are not just something to survive; in Christ, they are actively “producing” something—glory, depth, eternal reward. “And we know that God works all things together for the good of those who love Him, who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). Even the things you would never have chosen are being woven into that “good,” refining your faith and fitting you for forever.

Seeing Jesus in the Fire

None of this is abstract. Jesus Himself walked this path before you. He embraced a road of rejection, misunderstanding, and excruciating pain, trusting His Father’s purpose on the other side of the cross. Peter reminds us, “To this you were called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in His footsteps” (1 Peter 2:21). When you step into suffering with faith, you are not exploring unmapped territory; you are walking where your Savior has already gone, with His nail-scarred hand on yours.

And He is not only your example—He is your companion. “In all their affliction, He too was afflicted” (Isaiah 63:9). When the heat rises, you are not alone in the furnace; the Fourth Man is in the fire with you. Ask Him to open your eyes to see what He is producing in you, even today. Ask Him to turn your sighs into prayers, your questions into seeking, and your pain into perseverance. As you do, you will find that your suffering, held in His hands, becomes a place of encounter—and your heart begins to echo Paul: “we also rejoice in our sufferings.”

Lord Jesus, thank You that no suffering in my life is wasted in Your hands; today, teach me to rejoice in You right in the middle of my trials and to walk in faithful perseverance as You lead.

One consequence of our failure to see clearly the true nature of revival is that we wait for years for some supernatural manifestation that never comes, overlooking completely our own individual place in the desired awakening. Whatever God may do for a church must be done in the single unit, the one certain man or woman. Some things can happen only to the isolated, single person; they cannot be experienced en masse. Statistics show, for instance, that 100 babies are born in a certain city on a given day. Yet the birth of each baby is for that baby a unique experience, an isolated, personal thing. Fifty people die in a plane crash; while they die together they die separately, one at a time, each one undergoing the act of death in a loneliness of soul as utter as if he alone had died. Both birth and death are experienced by the individual in a loneness as complete as if only that one person had ever known them.

Three thousand persons were converted at Pentecost, but each one met his sin and his Savior alone. The spiritual birth, like the natural one, is for each one a unique, separate experience shared in by no one. And so with that uprush of resurgent life we call revival. It can come to the individual only. Though a visitation of divine life reaches seventy five persons at once (as among the Moravian Brethren at Dusseldorf), yet it comes to each one singly. There can exist no collective body of believers that can be revived apart from the units that compose the body.

Understood aright these are truths full of great encouragement and good hope. Nothing can hinder you or me from experiencing the revival we need. It is a matter for God and the solitary heart. Nothing can prevent the spiritual rejuvenation of the soul that insists upon having it. Though that solitary man must live and walk among persons religiously dead, he may experience the great transformation as certainly and as quickly as if he were in the most spiritual church in the world.

There the Lord will be with us in majesty, a place of broad rivers and streams. - Isaiah 33:21

The love of God in Christ Jesus is as broad as humanity. As all the stars lie in the firmament, so all creatures rest in the heaven of His love. Mankind has many common characteristics. We all suffer, we all sin, we all hunger, we all aspire; and, blessed be God! we all occupy precisely the same relation to the love, the Divine love, which lies in Jesus Christ. There are no step-children in His great family, and none of them receive a more grudging or less ample share of His love and goodness than every other. Broad as the race, and curtaining it over as some great tent may enclose on a festal day a whole tribe, the breadth of Christ’s love is the breadth of humanity. And it is universal because it is Divine. No human heart can be stretched so as to comprehend the whole of the members of mankind, and no human heart can be so emptied of self as to be capable of this absolute universality and impartiality of affection. But the intellectual difficulties which stand in the way of the width of our human affection, and the moral difficulties which stand still more frowningly and forbiddingly in the way, all disappear before that love of Christ’s which is close and tender, and clinging with all the tenderness and closeness and clingingness of a human and lofty and universal and passionless and perpetual, with all the height and breadth and calmness and eternity of a Divine, heart.

And this broad love, broad as humanity, is not shallow because it is broad. Our human affections are too often like the estuary of some great stream which runs deep and mighty as long as it is held within narrow banks, but as soon as it widens becomes slow and powerless and shallow. The intensity of human affection varies inversely as its extension. A universal philanthropy is a passionless sentiment. But Christ’s love is deep, though it be wide, and suffers no diminution because it is shared amongst a multitude. It is like the great feast that He Himself spread, five thousand men, women, and children, all seated at a table, "and they did all eat and were filled."

The whole love is the property of each recipient of it. It is not as it is with us, who give a part of our heart to this one and to that one, and share the treasure of our affections amongst a multitude. All this gift belongs to every one, just as all the sunshine comes to every eye, and as every beholder sees the moon path across the dark waters, stretching from the place where he stands to the centre of light.

There are two ways of arguing about the love of Christ, both of them valid, and both of them needing to be employed by us. We have a right to say, "He loves all, therefore He loves me." And we have a right to say, " He loves me, therefore He loves all." For surely the love that has stooped to me can never pass by any human soul. What is the breadth of the love of Christ? It is broad as mankind, it is narrow as myself.