“Whereas thou hast been forsaken and hated, I will make thee a joy” (Isa.
lx. 15).
God loves to take the most lost of men, and make them the most magnificent
memorials of His redeeming love and power. He loves to take the victims of
Satan’s hate, and the lives that have been the most fearful examples of
his power to destroy, and to use them to illustrate and illuminate the
possibilities of Divine mercy and the new creations of the Holy Spirit.
He loves to take the things in our own lives that have been the worst, the
hardest and the most hostile to God, and to transform them so that we
shall be the opposites of our former selves.
The sweetest spirits are made out of the most stormy and self-willed, the
mightiest faith is created out of a wilderness of doubts and fears, and
the Divinest love is transformed out of stony hearts of hate and
selfishness.
The grace of God is equal to the most uncongenial temperaments, to the
most unfavorable circumstances; and its glory is to transform a curse into
blessing, and show to men and angels of ages yet to come, that “where sin
abounded, there grace did much more abound.”