Green Leaf in Drought [antikvár]

FOREWORD God does not waste suffering, nor does He discipline out of caprice. If He plough, it is because He purposes a crop. This book shares with us the secret of that purposing and lets us see sometliing of the crop. Peter counsels: "Do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal coming among you to put you to the test," and the writer to the Hebrews assures us that "it afterwards yields to those who have passed through its training the peace of a righteous life" (Weymouth). So life apparently is meant to be a series of tests in the school of God. The tests He sends or permits are in reahty His vote of confidence, for He undertakes not to allow us to suffer any testing beyond our powers of endurance. In those He permitted Arthur and Wilda Mathews to experience, they discovered His beneficent purpose, and transmuted them into occasions to bring glory to their God. God staked much on the faith and uprightness of Job, and allowed Satan to test him to the limit in order to vindicate His confidence, rout Satan, purify Job, and edify Job's friends. Did He test these two children of His in China with similar ends in view—to show what He could be to His own when all other resources failed, to reveal the "secret source" of their "greenness"; to discomfit their enemies who foxmd they could not starve God's children; to gloriously enrich and refine and temper their own lives, and to strengthen the suffering Chinese believers who witnessed their triumph? This poignant story is written to the glory of God and to demonstrate what He can be to those who gladly embrace His will and accept His discipline, no matter how inscrutable. J. Oswald Sanders