 pain and affliction is actually good. There's a passage in the Bible in Psalm 119 where David says, it is good for me that I was afflicted that you may, that I may learn your statutes. The law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces. Your hands made me infashion me. Give me understanding that I may learn of your commandments. And the Holy says, may those who fear you see me and be glad because I wait for your word. I know, the Holy says, oh Lord, that your judgments are righteous and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me. Well, that seems like an awfully strange thing to say, but notice what he says, in your God's faithfulness, you have afflicted me. I am thoroughly familiar with being afflicted because of things that I've done or because of God's guiding hand. God is not some sort of sailor, a masochist person where he's just getting joy out of punishing us and hurting us. No, what he does, how he corrects is for a particular reason to grow us, to get us somewhere. Again, the passage that he says in the 71, he says, it is good for me that I was afflicted. And the reason why is that I may learn your statutes or learn your teaching. Sometimes we just don't get it. Let's just be honest. Sometimes we just don't get it. And correcting, especially by God, is a good way to do so. He would obviously rather us not go through that, but unfortunately that's who we are. We are people who just won't do right, won't get it right and we need to learn. Oftentimes if the correction, like he says in Ecclesiastes six, I mean eight, like he says in Ecclesiastes eight, if the correction, the punishment came swiftly, immediately we would learn. But oftentimes it doesn't come. God gives us opportunities to get things right and we just don't. And so after a while, what do we do? We build up this punishment. And when it comes from God, if he's faithful towards us, which the Bible says he is, then it's a good thing because he's going to guide us, he's gonna grow us. And then what happens is other people can look at us the end result, the polishing of it. After all we've gone through can look at us and be glad and see what we've gone through. They may be going through the same thing. They'll be encouraged to see that we can make it because being built up. And the only way this works is if we are actually learning his statutes. There are some people that are gonna be punished and won't learn. And how sad is that? How sad is that to go through all of this in life to struggle, to suffer, to be beat down, to be torn down, to be whatever it is you go through in many cases abused. And then only after that still finds yourself in hell. What a waste. Wouldn't it be better to learn of these afflictions to grow as a matter of fact, Paul calls them light and momentary afflictions. Why? Because in the grand scheme of things, the time that we're gonna have in eternity either with him or in hell, doesn't compare to the little bit of time that we have here on earth and we're going through. But this suffering, this punishment, this development can be for our good. Let's do that. Let's make sure that we are while we're going through, while God is correcting us because we deserve it. Let's just be honest. While we're going through it, we're making it our aim to learn and to grow from it because like a father, a loving father, he's only doing it to build us up to bring us closer to him. And that's why he can say that it was good that I was afflicted. Amen.