When Life Falls Apart!
I want to continue to share more with you today from Why Us? When Bad Things Happen to God’s People by Warren W. Wiersbe.
Today I am sharing from Chapter Eight: When Life Falls Apart, How Do You Pray?
He says, “ You see my friend,” I explained,”sometimes our faith delivers us from difficulties, and sometimes it delivers us in difficulties. Either way, God honors faith and He gets the glory. In fact, I’m inclined to believe God can get greater glory at times by giving grace to live with our suffering than power to escape it.”
Again He goes on to say: “If I pray to escape suffering, then I’m saying that suffering is my enemy and I must avoid it. But then I may be frustrating the plan of God. If I pray to endure suffering, I’m saying that suffering is my master. I’ll find myself in bondage when God has created me to be free. If suffering is not to be either my enemy or my master, what is my relationship to suffering? The answer God gave Paul is: Suffering must become your servant. In other words, if you pray to escape suffering, and God doesn’t answer, don’t pray simply to endure suffering, pray to enlist your suffering. Make it work for you, not against You.”
He goes on to share how we can enlist our suffering so that it works for us and not against us!
He shares that we must accept our suffering as God’s gift. A strange gift. But as he says acceptance is not resignation, giving up. Resignation is a passive attitude that borders on fatalism. Acceptance is active cooperation with God and it always includes gratitude.
He says we may not always be able to be thankful for what has happen, but we can be thankful in what has happen. It is an attitude of gratitude and acceptance that takes the poison out of suffering and keeps us from becoming bitter against God. This is an act of faith and it must come from the heart, asking Him to make us willing to be willing.
He goes on to say we must surrender what He has given us back to Him. That it is only when we see our experience as His gift to us that we can return it as our gift to Him. Putting it on the altar as an act of worship to the Glory of God. God can sanctify pain just as easy as He can sanctify service, if we will let Him.
Finally, we must listen for the message. The Apostle Paul prayed fervently three times but God did not answer him. Even when He is silent, He is suffering with us, and preparing us for His Special word. It finally came to the Apostle Paul, that God’s grace is sufficient, that His power is made perfect in our weakness. Paul learned how weak he was and how strong God is. He was able to enlist his suffering and make it work for him.
This has really been an awesome little book for which I am very grateful that the Lord had me to pick up and read at this point and time in my life because much of what has been shared confirms much of what the Lord has been revealing to me over the last couple of years and confirming by His Word.
It was the right word, at the right time in my life. The Lord chooses so many different ways to reveal himself if we will but let Him do so.
God has and is given me a whole new perspective on the issue of suffering and how we can turn it around for His glory and for us to be made stronger in our walk and relationship with the Lord.
I trust that what I have shared from this little book has been a blessing and an encouragement to you and helps you as you walk the path that you are on in life with the Lord.
I have to say that I look forward to the day that this present suffering will come to an end and that I can look up and say, “Thank you Father for being with me through all of this. Thank you for revealing yourself to me and may I reflect you to others so that they too will see that we are not a people without hope, but a people that are made strong in you!!
Till later,
Paul