All things includes not only Divine desertion, as we saw last month, but also Divine affliction. It is true, afflictions can be very heavy. "If sin is the head of the serpent," Erskine wrote, "affliction is its tail"; and Luther once told his students, "Though the devil's head is eternally bruised by Christ, I find that he still has enough power in his tail to knock my conversion out of me." And yet, people of God, do not afflictions also serve as medicine in the hands of your Great Shepherd to your eternal, spiritual health and welfare?

1. Through afflictions the Lord humbles His people deeply, showing them who and what they are and remain in themselves – nothing but sin and corruption. He teaches them the same truth He taught Israel in Deuteronomy 8, "I led thee through the great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, and I fed thee in the wilderness with manna, that I might humble thee, to prove thee, to do thee good at thy latter end." Affliction not only makes God's Church humble, but it keeps them humble, for the tree that bears most fruit shall hang lowest to the ground. Affliction vacuums away the fuel that feeds their pride. Like the prodigal son, the Lord brings His people into humbling want, so that they shall not want in the end (Gen. 49:19).
2. Through affliction God's flock learn what sin is in its God-dishonouring, defiling, and damning nature. Through affliction, they learn that sin has the devil for its father, shame for its companion, and death for its wages. They learn through affliction what sin is over against the attributes of God, as John Bunyan writes, "sin is the daring of God's justice, the rape of His mercy, the jeering of his pa­tience, the slighting of His power, and the contempt of His love." They learn through affliction that sin is the strength of their death and the death of their strength. In the time of affliction the inward Jerusalem of their soul is searched with candles (Zeph. 1:12) for secret and open sins. Affliction drags sin out into the light, and places it in the light of God's holy countenance. Affliction strips off the Adam-like-fig-leaf covering God's child strives to cling to by nature. "The sins of God's people are like birds' nests;" wrote Puritan William Bridge, "As long as leaves are on the trees you cannot see them, but in the winter of affliction when all the leaves are off, the bird nests appear plainly." Through sanctified affliction, sin becomes and remains sin.
3. Rooted in godly sorrow not to be repented of, the Great Shepherd uses affliction, in the third place, as a medicine to destroy the deadly disease of sin in His flock, and to cause them to bring forth healthy and godly fruit, some thirty, some sixty, and some hundred-fold. When sin bends the soul away from its Shepherd, the Shepherd must send the rod of affliction to set the crooked soul straight. Affliction is the Shepherd's dog, sent out not to devour the sheep, but to bring them back into the fold again. Sanctified affliction cures sin by grace. "Before I was afflicted I went astray," David says, "but now have I kept Thy Word" (Ps. 119:67). By grace, the afflicted soul gives sin gall and vinegar to drink, and with the spear of mortification, lets out the heart-blood of it.
4. It is as good for a child of God to be chastised with affliction as it is for a young tree to be pruned (John 15:2), for the pressure of affliction presses out not only the awful stink of sin, but also sends forth the fragrant smell of Divine graces. Do not historians uncover a great spiritual truth when they teach us that in some countries trees will grow, but will bear no fruit because there is no winter there? The life of God's children is like a bell – the harder they are hit, the better it sounds. They learn more under the rod that strikes them than under the staff that comforts them. No, He is not drowning His sheep when He washes them nor killing them when He shears them. Rather, His washings are needed cleansings; His shearings are necessary strippings; His corrections are essential lessons; His lashes are important instructions; His scourges are good school­masters; and His chastisements are indispensable admonitions.
5. Affliction brings forth golden fruit for it mines, smelts, refines, and forms God's jewelled flock until the Divine Goldsmith can see His reflection in the work of His own hands, and they must confess with Job, "When He hath tried me I shall come forth as gold." "Affliction," said the godly Leighton, "is the diamond dust that heaven polishes its jewels with."
6. The Lord uses affliction to spiritual welfare as a means to cause His people to seek Him, to bring them back into communion with Himself, and to keep them close by His side. As sheep will stay close by their shepherd in storms, so the Lord said of Israel, "In their affliction they will seek me early" (Hos. 5:15). The storms and stones of affliction only force God's sheep closer to their Shepherd. All the stones that hit Stephen only knocked him closer to the chief cornerstone, Jesus Christ, and opened heaven all the more for his soul. Afflictions are often the rusty locks that open the gate once more into the presence-chamber of the King. Affliction drove a woman of Canaan to the Son of David; it drove a dying thief to a dying Savior. Not Manasseh's crown, but Manasseh's chains were used to bring him to the knowledge that "the Lord was God." Even the magnet of God's rich mercy does not bring nor keep Jehovah's flock so close to the Great Shepherd as the cords of affliction.
7. Again, the Lord uses afflictions for good to conform His flock to Christ, making them partakers of His suffering and His image. "Christ was chas­tened for our profit," Paul wrote to the Hebrews, "that we might be partakers of His holiness" (Heb. 12:10). God had but one Son without sin, but none without affliction. His afflicting rod is a pencil to draw Christ's image more fully upon His people. Through the way of suffering to glory they become followers of the Lamb of God who walks before His flock. Every path of affliction they encounter has already been travelled, overcome, and sanctified by their Shepherd Whose stream of substitutional blood, from His circumcision to His cross of death, is their sure pledge that no affliction or trial shall be able to separate them from the love of God in and through Christ Jesus. Their deserved suffering leads them to Christ's substitutional suffering, which in turn, makes them exclaim, "His yoke is easy and His burden is light." People of God, is not the time of your sufferings usually when you have most communion with Jesus Christ in His suffer­ings – Whose entire life, as Calvin says, was nothing but a series of sufferings? Can you then complain of the light crosses you have to bear as guilty sinners when you behold the heavy crosses Christ had to bear as the Innocent One?
8. Further, spiritual afflictions work for good be­cause the Lord balances them with spiritual comfort and spiritual joy. "Your sorrow," Christ tells His disciples, "shall be turned into joy" (Jn. 16:20). He brings His people into the wilderness to speak com­fortably to them (Hos. 2:14). Where godly suffering abounds, godly consolation abounds (2 Cor. 1:4, 5). The Shepherd's rod has honey at its end. God's Pauls have their prison-songs. The sweet shall follow the bitter. Joy shall come in the morning. The Lord turns their water into wine. Rutherford once wrote: "When I am in the cellar of affliction I find the Lord's choicest wines." In affliction, God's sheep sometimes may experience sweet raptures of Divine joy which fly them to the very borders of the heavenly Canaan. At such moments they may confess with Eliphaz the Temanite, "Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For He maketh sore and bindeth up: He woundeth and His hands make whole, He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee" (Job 5:17-19).
9. Affliction also works for good by keeping God's child walking by faith and not by sight. If sensible enjoyments were always allowed to believ­ers in this world, they would begin to love this life and live of their provisions instead of their Provider. Therefore, with their sweet meals, the Lord orders some sour sauce to help their digestion, in order that they may live not by sense, but by faith. In prosperity God's people talk of living by faith, and often darken counsel by words without knowledge; but in adversity they come to the experi­mental knowledge of what it means to live by faith.
10. Affliction works for good in weaning Jeho­vah's flock away from the world. A dog never bites those who live in its home, but only strangers. Affliction bites God's child so deeply because they are too little at home with the Word and ways of God, and too much at home with the world. If they were more often at home with their Master and Shepherd in heavenly places, the afflictions would be both less and easier to bear. "God," says Thomas Watson, "would have the world hang as a loose tooth which, being twitched away, does not much trouble us."
11. Finally, affliction is profitable in preparing God's people for their heavenly inheritance. Affliction elevates their soul heavenwards, to look for "a city which hath foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God" (Heb. 11:10). Affliction paves their way for glory. "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory" (2 Cor. 4:17). "He that rides to be crowned," John Trapp wrote, "will not think much of a rainy day."

Children of God: is it not enough to convince you that affliction is for your spiritual welfare – that you, indeed, "shall not want" anything necessary or good for you, both temporally and spiritually? Though the wind of affliction is contrary to your flesh, yet it pleases God to use this cross-wind to blow His saints towards heaven. Your afflictions are tailor-made to fit you with Divine precision. Affliction is the loving Shepherd's rod that disciplines God's sheep from hell to heaven, so that on the day of earthly departure they may be enabled to confess by grace with Thomas Hooker on his deathbed, "Today hell shall enter heaven."