The way to joy in gospel wakefulness is personal brokenness – it always has been. There is a perfect storm brewing for many of you, a perfect combination of personal emptiness and the fullness of Christ. This is necessary because we won’t know what it really means for the joy of the Lord to be our strength until we’ve had all the false strength of our intravenous idols yanked out of us.
God sends me trouble and trial because He knows that I will skip and whistle my way right off the cliff if he does not smack me with the shepherd’s staff.
Jared Wilson in the book Gospel Wakefulness