November 28

How Christian soldiers are made

“Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ” (2 Tim. 2:3).
“This charge I commit unto thee . . . that thou by them mightest war a good warfare” (1 Tim. 1:18).

The Lord trains His soldiers, not by allowing them to lie on feather beds, but by turning them out, and using them to forced marches and hard service. He makes them ford through streams, and swim through rivers, and climb mountains, and walk many a long march with heavy knapsacks of sorrow on their backs.
This is the way in which He makes them soldiers, not by dressing them up in fine uniforms, to swagger at the barrack gates, and to be fine gentlemen in the eyes of the loungers in the park. God knows that soldiers are only to be made in battle; they are not to be grown in peaceful times.


We may grow the stuff of which soldiers are made, but warriors are really educated by the smell of powder, in the midst of whizzing bullets and roaring cannonades, not in soft and peaceful times.
Well, Christian, may not this account for it all? Is not thy Lord bringing out thy graces and making them grow? Is He not developing in you the qualities of the soldier by throwing you into the heat of the battle, and should you not use every appliance to come off conqueror?
—C. H. Spurgeon.

From silken self, O Captain free
Thy soldier, who would follow Thee:
From subtle love of softening things,
From easy choices, weakenings,
From all that dims Thy Calvary,
O Lamb of God, deliver me.
—Amy Carmichael.

Each heart must pass through the furnace for itself. To hear of the refining of others has no lasting effect on the heart’s own alloy.
—Florence Barclay.

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