The Sweetness of the Word...

The Sweetness of the Word in the School of Affliction

God often brings his people into great depths before deliverance comes so that his glorious attributes may be the more displayed and magnified. We can never know God as we ought without temptations. … In the school of affliction and temptation, there it is the Lord generally showeth the soul its own impotency and insufficiency to bear trials honourably without divine grace and assistance… In this school of affliction it is that the soul is taught to suck sweetness out of the Word of God. Now they are taught to know the Word more practically and feel it more powerfully. Now it can say with David, thy law is my delight; and had it not been so, I had perished in my affliction (see Psalm 119:92).
… We may preach and hear many a good sermon, and in those sermons many a gracious promise be mentioned, yet we may not have had those tastes and relishes of the sweetness of the Word and promises as in a time of temptation. So that what the soul hath often read, now he can feel and experience that it was good for them they have been afflicted.
… The design of God by all your temptations is to take you off from living a life of sense, which we are very prone to do, and live a life of faith.
… In deep afflictions we come to see the profit of prayer.

(Hercules Collins)