A man’s spirit sustains him in sickness, but a crushed spirit who can bear? ((Proverbs 18:14))

This world is not the Garden of Eden, and you cannot make it to be so. It is like that garden in this respect, that the serpent is in it, and the trail of the serpent is over everything here.

[Thus,] everyone will have to bear a weakness of some sort or other. To bear that weakness is not difficult when the spirit is sound and strong. The spirit that will best bear weakness is, first of all, a gracious spirit worked in us by the Spirit of God. If you want to bear your trouble without complaining, if you want to sustain your burden without fainting, you must have the life of God within you, you must be born again, you must be in living union with him who is the Strong One and who, by the life that he implants within you, can give you from his own strength. I do not believe that anything but that which is divine will stand the wear and tear of this world’s temptations and of this world’s trials and troubles.

Further, I think that a sound spirit that can sustain weakness will be a spirit cleansed in the precious blood of Christ. “Conscience doth make cowards of us all” (Hamlet), and it is only when conscience is pacified by the application of the sprinkled blood that we are able to sustain our weaknesses. Haven’t you sometimes felt that if you had to spend the rest of your life in a dungeon and to lie there, as John Bunyan would have said, till the moss grew on your eyelids, yet, as long as you were sure that you were cleansed from sin by the precious blood of Christ, you could bear it all? Take sin away and give me a spirit washed in the fountain filled with blood, and I can patiently go through anything and everything, the Lord being my Helper.

Next, a [sound] spirit exercises itself daily to a growing confidence in God. The spirit that is to sustain weakness is not a spirit of doubt and fear and mistrust. There is no power about such a spirit as that; it is like a body without bone or sinew or muscle. Strength lies in believing. Someone who can trust can work; someone who can trust can suffer.

I must also add my belief that no spirit can so well endure sickness, loss, trial, sorrow, as a perfectly consecrated spirit. The person who lives only for God’s glory looks to see not how to comfort herself or himself but how to most successfully fight the Master’s battles. – C. H. Spurgeon

– Diana Wallis, Take Heart: Daily Devotions with the Church’s Great Preachers, (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2001), 107.