The Need For Sunshine And Shadow

If ye suffer for righteousness’ sake, happy are ye. . . . For it is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well doing, than for evil doing.

1 Peter 3:14, 17

All the masterpieces of art contain both light and shadow. A happy life is not one filled only with sunshine, but one which uses both light and shadow to produce beauty. Persecution can become a blessing because it forms a dark backdrop for the radiance of the Christian life. The greatest musicians as a rule are those who know how to bring song out of sadness. Fanny Crosby, her spirit aglow with faith in Christ, saw more with her sightless eyes than most of us do with normal vision. She has given us some of the great Gospel songs which cheer our hearts and lives. She wrote some two thousand hymns, of which sixty are still in common use.

Paul and Silas sang their song of praise at midnight in a rat-infested jail in Philippi, their feet in stocks, their backs raw from the jailer’s whip. But their patience in suffering and persecution led to the conversion of the heathen prison warden. The blood of the martyrs is mixed well into the mortar which holds the stones of civilization together.

In the words of Thornton Wilder: “Without your wounds, where would your power be? . . . The very angels of God in heaven cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children of earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In love’s service only wounded soldiers will do.”

When was the last time you really suffered for righteousness’ sake? For the cause of Christ?

Our Father and our God, I lift up my voice in songs of praise to You. I bow my head and bend my knee in praise to You. I live victoriously in praise to You. I share the Good News with the world in praise to You. Praise Your holy name! And praise Christ Jesus, my Lord, for His sacrifice on my behalf. In His name I pray. Amen.

Billy Graham, Unto the Hills: A Daily Devotional (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010).