Wait and Hope: Puritan wisdom for joyful suffering

How can we suffer well? Is joyful suffering really possible? Tanner says it is; the Puritans agreed, and clearly the apostle Paul agreed.                                                                                                                                

A lengthy introduction includes Tanner’s own experiences of suffering and finding encouragement and ‘balm to his troubled soul’ in Sibbes’s and Watson’s writings. 

In further chapters, quotations from Athanasius, the Reformers, the Puritans, and more recent writers (Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones, Beeke, etc.) are applied to sufferings which we experience. There are brief biographies and lessons drawn from their (often short) lives. We see all that the grace of God brought about despite their afflictions. There is poetry from John Donne and Anne Bradstreet. Two chapters remind us that weeping at night is replaced by joy (Psalm 30:5).