To Grow Bitter Is to Be Beaten

He who is able to endure has learned one secret of the overcoming life. 

To endure is to bear patiently whatever the revolving years may bring us.

It is to accept quietly and cheerfully the intractable elements of life.

It is to pass through difficult or tragic hours free from any embittering of spirit, for to grow bitter is always to be beaten. 

We say "what can't be cured must be endured"; but that is scarcely the endurance of the Scriptures.

Such endurance is a joyless thing. It is forced submission to necessity.

The endurance of which the Bible speaks is of a happier character than that; it is a glad and even grateful acquiescence. 

Paul and Silas, in the prison at Philippi, did not accept things in a joyless way.

They were happy; there was a lilt within their hearts; they sang so loudly that the prisoners heard them.

And that is the endurance of the Scripture the bearing of things in a happy kind of fashion; an acceptance with the note of triumph in it.

Of that gracious and beautiful endurance the New Testament indicates three sources.

~George H. Morrison~