| The Golden Gate of Prayer |
Chapter 3 |
Page 6 |
Fatherhood assures us of wise and loving discipline, “What son is he whom the Father chasteneth not?” This true of earthly father. Children who are not brought up under restraints, who are not taught nor disciplined, are brought up for sorrow and failure in life. Our heavenly Father does not permit his children to grow up without correction and chastening. He does not give them their own way when their own way would work only their hurt, perhaps their ruin. Sometimes children of God complain at what seem hard things in their experience. They ask, “Can it be that God loves me and yet lets me endure these losses, disappointments, and trials?” Really it is just because he loves them that he deals thus with them — he would save them, train them for spiritual life, teach them higher lessons.
“The ills we see,
The mysteries of sorrow, deep and long,
The dark enigmas of permitted wrong,
Have all one key:
This strange sad world is but our Father’s school,
All chance and change his love shall grandly overrule.
“How sweet to know
The trials which we cannot comprehend
Have each their own divinely purposed end:
He traineth so
For higher learning, ever onward reaching
For fuller knowledge yet, and his own deeper teaching.
“What though to-day
Thou canst not trace at all the hidden reason
For his strange dealings through the trial season,
Trust and obey.
In after life and light all shall be plain and clear.”
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