J.C. Ryle spent a significant portion of his adult life paying off his bankrupt father’s debts. He would later write, “I felt most acutely my father’s ruin, my exile from Cheshire with the destruction of all my worldly prospects, and I have never ceased to feel them from that day to this.” That statement was 32 years after the fact. The excellent instruction in holiness Ryle learned in Christ can be seen in the following quotation.

“I believe that God never expects us to feel no suffering or pain when it pleases Him to visit us with affliction. There are great mistakes upon this point. Submission to God’s will is perfectly compatible with intense and keen suffering under the chastisements of that will.”

(Iain Murray, J.C. Ryle: Prepared to Stand Alone, 56)