Settle your accounts with God!
Do not be surprised by the suffering.
Most sufferings do not come as a surprise.
Most sufferings are due to our stubbornness.
Henry Nelson, of Wilmington, Delaware, was a veteran of World War II. He had served as an instructor in the Army Chemical Warfare Department. Yet he ignored a warning by the superintendent of the Riverside Housing Development that the apartment he lived in was being fumigated with hydrogen-cyanide gas, tore down the barricade at the door and went in after two blankets.
The neighbors saw him remove the sign and barricade and go in, and they called the Development office. But when employees arrived it was too late. Nelson lay sprawled on the living room floor with the two blankets in his arms. Despite both written and verbal warnings, and despite his training in the Army, he had gone to his death
Come to Him in humble confession.
Acknowledging His faithfulness.
Acknowledging your sin.
In Victor Hugo’s great Les Miserables Jean Valjean, the ex-convict, under a new name, had buried his past and became the prosperous mayor of a provincial town. But one day he learned that in a neighboring village an old man arrested for stealing apples had been identified as the notorious and long-sought ex-convict, Jean Valjean. That news precipitated a crisis in the soul of the real Jean Valjean. Should he keep silent, or should he reveal his identity and be sent back to the gallows? Should he remain in paradise and become a demon, or go to hell and become an angel?
His first impulse was to say nothing and do nothing. Out of a secret closet in the wall he drew a blue linen blouse, an old pair of trousers, an old knapsack, and a huge cudgel shod with iron at both ends. These were the last ties which attached him to the old Jean Valjean. He threw them into the fire, and then seized the candlesticks which the Bishop had given him and flung them into the flame. But a voice said, “Jean Valjean, there will be many voices around you which will bless you, and only one which will curse you in the dark. All those benedictions will fall back before they ascend to God.” This made him take the candlesticks out of the fire and replace them on the mantel. All through the night he fought his awful battle, until, in the morning, his servant told him that the carriage he had ordered to take him to the town where the old man was on trial waited at the door.
The next day as the president of the court was about to pronounce sentence, the true convict stood up before the court and said, “I am Jean Valjean.” Some thought that he was mad, and others pitied him for the sacrifice he had made. As he left the courtroom, he said: “All of you consider me worthy of pity, do you not? When I think what I was on the point of doing, I consider that I am to be envied. God, who is on high, looks down on what I am doing at this moment, and that suffices.”