Growth Hope

Everybody Hurts

“Life’s not fair.” This is a refrain with which we all familiar. It is likely that a parent or a teacher or a coach or somebody said these words to us at some point in our childhood. Depending on how old we are, we may have uttered them to somebody else. We have an innate desire for things to work out in a way that benefit us. Yet despite the fact that God is gracious and gives us more good things that we could ever deserve, in our moment of pain, we often neglect to recall His generosity and focus on the hurt that we are currently experiencing.

While there is some pain that we may never quite make sense of, Scripture tells us that there are at least two reasons that we suffer. Sometime we suffer because we are His and as God’s children, the forces of this world are diametrically opposed to us (John 15:18). Another reason that we suffer is because God is disciplining us. We’ve sinned and there are consequences for those rebellious actions (Hebrews 12:6). Sometimes, perhaps often times, the correction of our Father involves pain as He guides us back to a right relationship with Him.

However, I Peter 3:17 reminds us that while R.E.M was right and everybody does hurt sometimes, it is far better to suffer for the glory of God then as a result of His discipline. Jesus reminded us of this when, before healing the blind man, He stated that the reason for the man’s blindness was so that God could be glorified (John 9:1-3). Could you imagine the change of perspective that man had at the moment? Instead of seeing his blindness as a curse, it was an unique opportunity for God to use this man to draw others to Himself. In a way that few others could, this man could put God’s glory on display.

There is going to be pain in this life; we can be sure of that. However, may increasingly our pain not be as a result of God bringing us back to living a life that pleases Him, but may it used to bring others into a relationship with Him. May our aches and our cries be for the glory of the eternal King.

Everybody hurts, but not everyone suffers for Jesus’ sake. May we see our suffering for His sake as the privilege that it is.

Now it’s your turn…..how can we suffer well for Jesus?
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Growth

Place Yourself in God’s Hands

This concludes a three-part series. You can read the other parts here and here.)

We talk a lot about things “happening” to us in life. We say things like “It was the luck of the draw” or “That’s just how it goes sometimes.” And there are a great many things in life that are outside of our control. We can’t determine when they will happen, if they will happen, and how bad they’ll be when they do happen. We just know that they do happen, and we have to respond to them.

For Christians, when the unexpected occurs, we are bound to say that “it’s all in God’s hands.” The statement is correct. After all, a sparrow doesn’t fall to the ground without our great God being aware of it. He controls the moon and the stars, causes the sun to rise each day, and is the only reason that we take another breath. So the inconveniences and the tragedies of our lives are definitely within His control. But we need to make sure we place ourselves in His hands too. We can’t just assign Him control for the events of the day, we must give Him control of our response and our lives.

This isn’t a passive thing. As I wrote about previously (here and here), recently I was standing in a hospital room as a friend was diagnosed with brain cancer and given only a short time to live.  Her response was to turn to her God in prayer – first to thank Him for all she had been given, and then to lift up others who needed His strength. The last thing that she did was to place herself in God’s hands. She immediately recognized that she needed to be firmly in His loving grasp – not trying to respond to this tragedy in her own strength, but to respond as a child wrapped in her Father’s embrace. She needed to be where He was, not in a passive sense, but to get her heart and her mind aligned with His.

It’s a discipline with which I think we often struggle. We are a society of independent, go-getters, and what we fail to recognize is that we’re dependent beings. We can’t handle the bad times or the good times on our own. We are nothing apart from God. Therefore, what we need to do is to put ourselves in His care – recognizing that not only are the things of this life safe in His hands – but so are we.


How would our response to things change if we were intent on placing ourselves in God’s hands?

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