Take Up Your Cross and Follow Me - Part III

We continue to turn to John Calvin to teach us the ways that the Lord uses suffering to grow us in faith.

There are many reasons why we ourselves must spend our lives subject to a constant cross....there's the fact that unless our own weaknesses are regularly displayed to us, we easily overestimate our own virtue, being by nature inclined to attribute all good things to our own doing....Thus, we're drawn into a foolish and inflated view of our[selves]. And then, trusting in our own [selves], we brazenly exalt ourselves before God Himself, acting as if our own abilities are sufficient without His grace. There's no better method for God to curb such arrogance than by demonstrating to us through experience our weakness and frailty. He afflicts us with disgrace, poverty, childlessness, illness, and other troubles. And we, for our part, quickly crumble before such blows, being far from able to withstand them. Thus humbled, we learn to call on His strength, which alone can make us stand under the weight of such affliction. Indeed, the holiest among us know they stand by God's grace and not by their own virtues. Yet they would nevertheless become too confident in their own courage and constancy if they weren't led to a more intimate knowledge of themselves by the testing of the cross....When they have so cast themselves on the grace of God, they experience the presence of divine power in which there is sufficient and abundant help.

In our afflictions and struggles, God is working to help us love Him more making those afflictions means to better lives in the Lord.