The very bewilderment of your cry reveals the trial's design, to teach you that faith must rest where understanding fails. He educates our faith, testing it by trials which increase little by little in proportion as our faith has increased. You say, "I do not know where the pain comes from," and it is well that you do not, for if you knew the source you might trust the physician instead of the Physician. The greatest faith often grows in the soil of ignorance, where all human sight is baffled. "Ah," said one the other night, "I thought I had great faith, but now that I am racked with pain, I find I have scarcely any." Yet even that confession, when it drives you to Christ, is faith at work. Weak faith may bring us a blessing, but weakness in faith is an evil, and to indulge weakness in faith and not to struggle out of it would only be a willful increase of guilt.
Stick to your faith in Christ. The just shall live by faith, not by living free from pain, nor by tracing every ache to its earthly cause. Faith in Jesus begets life and this life will flourish or decay very much in proportion to our faith. You are confirmed in the present faith, and well you may be, for our doctrine is worthy of your confidence. Let this trial be the place where you make a carpet of needle-work for your Lord, woven in the dark hours with the threads of trust and the gold of patience. He had in His right hand seven stars, not ordinary lamps, but stars shining with a greater brilliance, and that same right hand upholds you now, though you feel yourself to be no star but a dim, flickering wick. Do not ask first for the pain to go; ask that the faith which brings life to the soul would not go. The sun, when it shines in its strength, not when it is rising in the morning, nor yet when it is setting in the evening, nor yet when a cloud passes over it, the sun in its strength, no man can look at. So it is with the purposes of God in your body; you cannot gaze directly into this blazing mystery, but you may trust the One who holds the sun and the stars and your right upper leg in His pierced hand.
Genuine faith in God knows of no difficulties whatever, not because the difficulties vanish, but because the Object of faith eclipses them. You are not occupying a logical position in being a weak believer in a strong Christ. Why wavering faith in an unwavering promise? The persuasion that Christ died for me comes after the exercise of faith and is an outgrowth of that faith. It is faith in full bloom, but it is not necessarily the essence of faith in Christ. Even now, with your leg throbbing and your mind dark, the essence remains: "I believe; help my unbelief." He only expects us to do man's work and to endure man's afflictions when we have arrived at the stature of men in Christ Jesus; so this very endurance is His expectation, and He supplies the strength for it. Forsake me not in the day of my strongest faith, lest my faith degenerate into presumption, and so I perish by mine own hand. Let that be your prayer, and then hear the answer: The Lord will perfect that which concerneth me, unworthy me. Lost and ruined me. Yes, even this leg, this mysterious pain, this hour of confusion, it all concerns you, and therefore it concerns Him. Little-Faith goes to Heaven, but his feet are sore on the road. Your leg may be sore, but the road leads home, and the Chariot of the covenant, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, carries you along even when you feel every jolt.