Spiritual Education

I was reading the book "The Ultimate Issue of the Universe" from T. Austin Sparks and there were a couple paragraphs that really stood out to me. The first one is as follows; 

"What lies behind spiritual education? Look at every fragment and phase of your spiritual education, the way the Lord deals with you, and leads you; the history that there is with God lying behind. What is the outcome of it all? Suffering, trial, perplexity, adversity, and all that which goes to make up our Christian experience - and there is so much of it - what is the outcome of it all - God has His way? Let us look at ourselves, the way we have with God, the way He has taken us through the depths; through suffering, affliction, trial and difficulty, sometimes to the point almost of despair, like Paul, despairing of life, having the sentence of death. But what is the result? If the Lord has His way, is it not that He has a larger place, and the enemy a much smaller place through it all? That is the marvel of it all. Sometimes when you are going through it, you come to a rock-bottom experience, as you think, and you feel the devil is going to gain, the Lord is losing. But when you come up out of it, the Lord has much more ground, He has something more that He can work upon. What He has done is to get rid of a lot that was in His way. Suffering is a great purger. Christian experience is all with one object in view, where the Lord is concerned, in His dealing with us as He does. It is worship, worship in this sense, that God is coming into His own and Satan is losing ground. We have often feared that it would be just the opposite, while we were going through it, but God is faithful and it does work out to a larger measure of the Lord."

The whole book can be read HERE.

Hope that you are encouraged by this.