Don't Waste Your Sorrows

By Paul E Billheimer

A sequel to Destined for the Throne, Don't Waste Your Sorrows offers an eminently satisfying answer to "Why, Lord?" It makes sense of sorrows and leads the sufferer to triumph over them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CLC Publications
• Release date: Jan 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781936143665

Book preview

1

What Price Glory?

In order to understand this passage from Second Corinthians 4 (see opposite page), it is necessary to define the term affliction. It is probable that Paul was thinking primarily about the persecutions, opposition, deprivations and hardships which he and the early Christians faced in their devotion to and promotion of the gospel message.

Those which Paul himself suffered are partially detailed in Second Corinthians 11:23–33. Among them were many experiences which produced physical suffering and possibly permanent injury. Many doubt that Paul’s thorn in the flesh (2 Cor. 12:7) was physical illness, but that is not an impossible interpretation—in which case it too would be an affliction.

The original Greek word which is translated affliction simply means pressure. According to Webster’s New World Dictonary, affliction is anything causing pain or distress—any sorrow, suffering or heartache imposed by illness, loss, misfortune, etc.

Some believers conclude that God may use other types of affliction to discipline an erring saint or one who needs further child-training but not physical illness, because Jesus took upon Himself our infirmities and bore our pains upon the cross (Isa. 53:4–5). Because of this they believe that it is never necessary for one to accept illness as disciplinary. Since the price has been paid for deliverance, they insist that a believer should be able to exercise faith for immediate healing without waiting to learn the new lesson God may be seeking to teach in the