If you keep up on my blog you are well aware that God has chosen to place some great trials in the life of my family over that last few years. I will not go into detail about them here, but rather, I'd like to share what God has been teaching us through the gift of tribulation! I cannot claim that we never feel great sadness or loss. We do. We have even hit the point of despair at times when we have taken our focus off of God and have thought for a moment that we deserve better. I think we all struggle in this way. We see trials as bad things, but we need to see them as gifts. They are God's way of stretching and growing us. I really don't think it's possible to learn and to grow when everything is just fine all the time. I don't know if that is even something that anyone experiences. Trials are just part of life. We have no control over them, but boy, if we let them, they can sure gain control over us.
Recently our Pastor reminded us that God has us right where He wants us right now! That is an all important truth to understand and believe wholeheartedly. God is training us for glory, to bear the weight of glory and the only way we will be able to bear that weight is if we now learn to bear the weight of tribulation by trusting that God has us EXACTLY where He wants us to be right now. We do not need to try to understand why, we just need to trust that truth!!
Romans 5:1 - 5 says "Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produced perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope. Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us."
You can see very simply that tribulation has a big place in our lives for teaching us perseverance, hope, character and the ability to experience the love of God.
It gets even more interesting than this though. As Christians, our hope is to live in glory eternally. Well I never knew this before, but glory is weighty and we will not be able to bear the weight of glory without first learning to bear the weight of tribulation.
II Corinthians 4:16 - 18 "Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal."
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