He does not want to see us suffer. We must be clear about this. God is reserving all the good things for His children. We can enjoy all of His provisions which He has given to us.
Suffering is a matter of choice, not a matter of imposition. We choose the way of suffering. We suffer willingly for the sake of serving Him. According to God's plan, we can avoid many sufferings. However, for the sake of serving God, we would rather gladly choose a way that is different from that of ordinary people. This is what it means to have a mind to suffer. Having a mind to suffer is a fundamental necessity in the character of a servant of God. Without such a mind, we will produce little results in our work, and the work we do will be very superficial in quality. If a worker of the Lord does not have a mind to suffer, he cannot work at all in the eyes of God. Let us speak of a few things related to this subject.
For instance, the Lord may put you in circumstances where you are provided with food and clothing and a nicely furnished home. It does not mean that you cannot continue to enjoy all the provisions He has given you. If the Lord has made such provisions, you can accept them from the Lord. But within, you still have a mind to suffer for Him. Although you are not suffering physically, you must have a mind to suffer. It is not a question of whether you have encountered something outwardly, but whether you have a mind to suffer inwardly. Do you have a mind to suffer even when circumstances are smooth and easy? The Lord may not arrange for you to suffer every day, but every worker of the Lord must not be short of a mind to suffer, not even for a single day. Suffering may not come to us daily, but a mind to suffer must be with us daily.
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Many brothers and sisters have become useless in God's service because they are afraid to take on any responsibility. They are irked by everything. They constantly hope for less work. They would rather choose less responsibility than more responsibility, and they would be happy to settle for no responsibility at all. They do not have a diligent character. If we are lazy, we are disqualified not only from God's service, but from man's service as well. Many brothers and sisters cannot be servants of the Lord because they are lazy.
What is diligence? It is the opposite of slothfulness. It is not shirking from responsibility. A diligent person does not try to reduce his work to nothing. On the contrary, he tries to create work out of nothing. In the Lord's service, it is quite possible for us to take a day or two of rest if we do not look for work. We should not be those who stand around idly waiting for something to turn up. If we work only when work turns up, we are not diligent persons. A diligent person is never idle; he is always looking for things to do. He is always pondering, praying, contemplating, and considering before God as to what he should do.
Unless he exercises himself this way, he can find himself with nothing to do. If we only act "according to the book," we may soon find that there is not much of a book left. We should expect to find much work in our service to God. We should discover many needs. We have to pray much to the Lord and look to Him all the time. We should open our eyes, and as soon as we find something that needs to be done, we should do it. After we finish a job, we should wait on the Lord and look to Him again. And as soon as we find more to do, we should tackle it. Following this, we should seek God's will again, and take on yet another task. This is what it means to serve God. The Lord said, "My Father is working until now, and I also am working" (John 5:17). We must never change this verse to read, "My Father is resting until now, and I also am resting." Laziness is not our way; our way should be, "My Father is working until now, and I also am working."
Today many people are hiding at home instead of journeying in God's way. Their eyes are not on what God is doing today. In John 5:17 the Lord said that He was always doing what His Father had sent Him to do. In John 4:35 He told us to lift up our eyes and look. If we do not lift up our eyes, we will not see anything. The matter of work is altogether related to the matter of diligence. It involves our conscientiousness. It is not a matter of taking care of what is in our hands, but a matter of lifting up our eyes to look for things to do. God is moving and acting behind many things, and we have to lift up our eyes to look for them in order to find them. We have to lift up our eyes to see the harvest and to see if it has ripened. Once we look, we will find work to do. How strange it is that so many people seem so idle; they seem to have nothing to do!
A diligent person always waits on God. As soon as he is free, he goes to the Lord and looks for things to do. He is always seeking an opportunity to work. A brother once said, "Brother So-and-so is not doing his job. So many brothers from out of town are here, and he will not spend any time to fellowship with them." Another brother asked, "Why do you not tell him?" The first brother answered, "Does something like that have to be said?" This is right. A servant of the Lord should always be waiting on God for things to do. Of course, this does not mean that he should move around and make a fuss ostentatiously. But it does mean that the Lord's servant should always be seeking God and looking to Him. He should build up the habit of lifting up his eyes and looking. If he is truly busy, God will not burden him with further work. But as soon as his time becomes available, he should ask, "Lord, what do You want me to do?" As long as we will lift up our eyes, we will find that many people need our service.
They pray day and night for their responsibilities to be reduced or eliminated altogether, and they yearn for the day when they will have no responsibilities at all. This is not the way our Lord works. He came to the world to seek out men, to take on responsibilities. He said that He came "to seek and to save that which is lost." He did not come just to make contacts with men; He came to seek them out. We must have this kind of character before we can go on with the Lord.
Let us, as dying men with fleeting breath and fading opportunity, give ourselves fully to preach the gospel to those who are dying around us. If we drag our feet and fail to see the needs around us, the responsibility that we bear, and the little time that we have, we will not get much of the Lord's work done. Today every servant of God has to serve with a dying urgency. Who can be slothful under such pressure? Brothers and sisters, we must arise and discipline our body in order to be diligent. As Paul said, we have to buffet our body and make it our slave. Just saying that we are eager to serve the Lord is not enough. If we are lazy, we will not be able to tackle any problem before us. Do not think that slothfulness is a small thing. Second Peter 1:8 says that slothfulness is laziness and idleness. We cannot be lazy, and we cannot be idle. We have to buffet our body again and again until we realize that a total, genuine, and daily sacrifice of our life is the only way to work and become useful. We cannot deceive ourselves. Some people say that they will gladly give up their lives for the Lord. Yet they live a lazy life. They try to spare themselves in everything. If they try to bring their character, habits, and disposition into the Lord's work, they will find that they are holding back the Lord's work! If Paul had waited every time for a Macedonian call before he worked, the book of Acts might have recorded only one mission of Paul to Macedonia. The Macedonian call was only one among many in Paul's work. As for the rest of his work, Paul carried it out with a burden which he bore before the Lord. If we have to wait for the brothers to come to us before we will work, we may wait a lifetime for nothing. We work because we have a burden, because we know that the time is short, the need is great, and Satan's attack is fierce. We are forced to be diligent. Slothfulness can make an otherwise useful man useless. It can turn a man of riches into a man who works only to a third, a fifth, or merely a tenth of what he is capable of! Everyone who knows God and who is useful in His hand is diligent.
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