God has never guaranteed Christians immunity from trouble. Although Jesus said we could come to Him to have life more abundantly, He wasn’t inferring that life would be a rose garden or that we would be borne to heaven on flowery beds of ease. The person was right who said life wasn’t meant to be easy.
But just why is this so? Jesus says that in this world we shall have trouble didn’t He? We are, as the writers of the New Testament said, in the world, but are not of the world. This world is not our home. We are just sojourners, pilgrims, seeking a city whose build and maker is God. Paul envisioned us a colonisers in the Phillipian letter. And as ambassadors and living love letters from heaven in his Corinthian letters.
As the old saying goes, we are cannot hold on to God with one hand and the world with the other. We cannot be neutral. Jesus said. “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” (Matt. 6:24)
God is asking us to take a stand for Him in this world. You see Jesus called it like it was. The tug of the world and the pull of the Holy Spirit and the Word of God in\ opposite directions guarantees inevitable trouble for a Christian.
Experimentally we can all confirm the veracity of Job’s statement that man is born for trouble. He’s often caught up in the geography of circumstance and finds himself surrounded by the meteorology of trouble. He frequently feels the heat in the crucible of crisis.
He’s dropped into the test tube of trial. He’s called upon to navigate the shoals of loss and sorrow. Often he finds there is no easy way to build a detour around\sorrow or tragedy. He must go through it in order to come out safely on the other side. The three Hebrew children were not saved out of the fiery furnace, but in and through it. The lives of Daniel, David and all the patriarchs of the Old and New Testaments confirm the universality of this dilemma and the purifying experiences that often result form it.
In his Roman letter Paul gives a liturgy of the sort of tragic occurrences the Christian may expect in life. (See Ro. 8:35-39) In this list, He gives no indication any will escape trouble. Rather, he says we will suffer through them. He warned that Christian martyrdom was already becoming an everyday occurrence. He even mentioned two kinds of demonic angels. He indicated there are special kinds of demons whose primary mission is to bring us trouble. But he reassures us that by suffering we become more than conquerors in Christ Jesus.
No comments:
Post a Comment