In April of 1831, Charles Simeon was 71 years old, he had been the pastor of Trinity Church in Cambridge for 49 years, and he was asked by his friend Joseph Gurney how he had

endured and surmounted the great opposition that had been his portion for so many years, and this was his response.

My dear brother, we must not mind a little suffering for Christ's sake.

When I am getting through a hedge, if my head and shoulders are safely through,

I can bear the pricking of my legs. Let us rejoice in the remembrance

that our holy head has surmounted all his suffering and triumphed over death. Let us follow him patiently. We shall

soon be partakers of his victory. And so I entitled the message,

Brothers, we must not mind a little suffering.

And I have a very definite aim, biblically, and what I want to achieve in the next hour and that is to be

used of God to strengthen you to obey Romans 12, which simply says, be patient in tribulation. That's my goal. You can write it out.

I want you to go out of here stronger than you were when you came in to be

patient in tribulation. I want you to see that persecution and opposition and

opposition and slander and danger and weakness and self-recrimination

and disappointment are the normal portion of a faithful pastoral ministry.

And I want you to see it in the life of a man who was a sinner,

I was a pastor, and who did not allow himself to become embittered by years and years of entrenched opposition to his ministry in his own church and in the university where he served.

Because what I have found in my own experience is that my own personal disappointments and discouragements

find resources for endurance when I have before me a model of one who endured.

I just find tremendous strength flowing to me.

If I can put before me in my mind's eyes, somebody who incurred or experienced what I'm experiencing

and more and held on or even thrived in the midst of it.

Another thing that makes me so drawn to this issue and this man is that I think we live in a very emotionally fragile time.

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