Saturday, February 6, 2016

The State of Faith in our Difficulties

About the time I think I've got a good handle on this life and faith business, something comes along to remind me that I have a long way to go.  While we may feel our faith grow over the years and see how far we've come, there’s such a depth to our relationship with God that we can't "max out" on it, not ever.   There's always room for significant improvement in our faith in the Almighty.

No one likes to struggle with life's situations, especially the big ones.  One situation that frequently comes to my mind is when the apostle Paul took his request to God three times for deliverance from a debilitating malady.  And God told him "My grace is sufficient." [1] It is one thing to know it in your mind, but another to feel it in your heart when you can't see how God's grace can possibly be sufficient.  And given a choice, you'd be tempted to choose being healed over grace.  Ouch!  What a yardstick with which to measure our faith!  Our shortcomings are no surprise to God, but they can be to us.  

While it's not pleasant to see our spiritual deficiencies, it gives us the opportunity to work with God to deal with the situation and make appropriate changes.  Charles Stanley, in his “30 Life Principles,” states, “The dark moments in our life will last only so long as is necessary for God to accomplish His purpose in us.”[2]  I suspect the difficult times may not be so much about the specific thing we struggle with as much as the state of our faith in general.  And the thing we struggle with is only there to shine a light on the real problem.

Perhaps we tend to ask God for the wrong blessings.  In addition to prayers of healing, maybe the better prayer after a certain point is to ask for understanding and faith: understanding what God is saying to you in this struggle, and faith in God’s promise that His grace really is sufficient.  I feel confident of one thing: there is a reason and a purpose for every struggle.  And on the other side of that struggle is a blessing; a blessing bigger and more significant than the difficulty.



[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Corinthians%2012&version=NIV
[2] http://www.intouch.org/read/life-principle-7-the-dark-moments-in-our-life

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