Tag Archives: adversity

Charles Stanley – Seeing Adversity from God’s Viewpoint

July 16, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Isaiah 55:8-9

When adversity hits you like a ton of bricks, it could easily throw you into a pit of discouragement and despair. Although you may regard difficulties as setbacks, the Lord sees them as times for great advancement. His purpose in allowing them is not to destroy you but to stimulate your spiritual growth. In His great wisdom, the Lord knows how to take an awful situation and use it to transform you into the image of Christ and equip you to carry out His will.

Every adversity that comes into your life is sifted through God’s permissive will. That doesn’t mean the difficulty itself is His perfect will, but He’s allowed the trial to touch you so that He can use it to accomplish His wonderful purposes for your life. Although some of the suffering we see and experience seems senseless or blatantly evil, we must recognize that we have a very limited perspective and cannot always understand what the Lord is doing.

Our heavenly Father sees every aspect of life, but our view is restricted to what is right before us. His plans include not only you but also all of His creation, and they reach from the beginning of time to eternity. Though we’ll never grasp the infinite mind of God, we can know His faithfulness and love.

When you can’t understand God’s ways, focus on His perfect knowledge, wisdom, and power rather than the magnitude of your sorrow. Remember, He sees the entire picture and loves you more than you can imagine. This is a time to walk by faith, as perfect understanding comes only in heaven.

Bible in One Year: Proverbs 29-31

Charles Stanley – The Source of Our Adversity

July 15, 2015 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Isaiah 45:5-10

When experiencing hardship, we usually wonder why God allows painful situations to come our way. In our minds, this just doesn’t fit with His role as our loving heavenly Father. We also struggle to reconcile our suffering with the realization that an omnipotent God could have prevented it. To understand what’s going on, we must consider the possible sources of adversity.

A Fallen World. When sin entered the world, suffering came with it. God could have protected us from these harmful effects by making us like puppets who couldn’t choose sin, but that would mean we’d also be unable to choose to love Him, since love, by its very nature, is voluntary.
Our Own Doing. Sometimes we get ourselves into trouble with foolish or sinful choices. If the Lord stepped in and rescued us from every negative consequence, we’d never grow into mature believers.
Satanic Attack. The devil is our enemy. To hinder anything God wants to do in and through believers, Satan will never cease to harass us. His goal is to destroy our lives and our testimonies, thereby making us weak and useless for the Lord’s purposes.
God’s Sovereignty. Ultimately, the Lord is in charge of all adversity that comes our way. To deny His involvement contradicts His power and sovereignty over creation.

For us to accept that God allows—or even sends—affliction, we must see adversity from His perspective. Is your focus on the pain of your experience or on God and His faithfulness? As believers, we’re assured that no adversity comes our way unless He can use it for our benefit and His good purposes.

Bible in One Year: Proverbs 26-28

Greg Laurie

Greg Laurie – The Positive Side of Adversity

September 11, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

My troubles turned out all for the best–they forced me to learn from your textbook. Truth from your mouth means more to me than striking it rich in a gold mine. —Psalm 119:71–72

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: our definition of good is what benefits us in the here and now, not in our eternal life to come. In other words, we are interested in what will benefit us temporarily, but God is interested in what will benefit us eternally. We are interested in what will make us happy for a while, but God is far more interested in what will make us holy.

So here is the key. Jesus loves us, and He wants to be glorified through our lives. In view of that reality, He won’t always remove suffering because it can make us stronger and bring us closer to Him. Even though we would never choose it, suffering can give us a greater platform for glorifying God and pointing others toward Him.

Adversity levels us and keeps us humble. Success or prosperity has a tendency to make people proud and self-sufficient. We may not feel an overwhelming need for God when we have our salary, our investments, our career, our 401k, our homes, our health, and our family. But when the economy goes south or the stock market crashes or our home burns, we have the opportunity to turn back to God with all our hearts, being reminded of what really matters in life.

The truth is, you and I shouldn’t always be so afraid of pain. There’s something worse than pain: it is a prosperity that leads us to forget about God.

Adversity teaches us eternal truths we might not otherwise learn. For most of us, our basic objective in life is to avoid pain at all costs. Bottom line, we just want to dodge pain whenever we can. We want to get into better shape and look cool in our new gym outfit, but we don’t want to sweat and strain.

No pain, no gain? Alas, it’s true. And what is true of the gym or health club is also true of life. Our pain reminds us of a deeper need: the need for God in our lives. And God will teach us lessons in those valleys that we never would have learned on mountaintops.

Today’s devotional is an excerpt from Every Day with Jesus by Greg Laurie, 2013

Charles Stanley

Charles Stanley – God’s Purpose for Adversity

March 2, 2014 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Have you ever wondered why the Lord allows tragedy, sickness, and other suffering in our lives? Part of the answer lies in the fact that we inhabit a fallen world; the sin of Adam and Eve altered God’s original creation. However, the good news is that God uses adversity to show us our profound need for Him.

The Old Testament saint Jacob experienced something that forever changed how he related to God. The Lord weakened him physically to strengthen him spiritually. In a similar way, God wants to use adversity in our lives to draw us into a closer relationship with Him.

Jacob’s Journey

Read Genesis 32:1-32.

As Jacob traveled to the land of his parents, what troublesome news came to him (Gen 32:6-8)?

Why would Jacob expect the worst from his brother? (See Genesis 27:30-42 if necessary.)

On a practical level, how did Jacob prepare to meet his brother (Gen. 32:4-8, Gen. 32:13-20)?

Jacob also turned to the Lord in prayer. Summarize each section of his petition (vv. 9-12).

Example: v. 9—Jacob reminded God of His promise to prosper him.
v. 10
v. 11
v. 12

From Jacob’s prayer, what can you learn about how to approach God regarding your own problems?

After Jacob sent his family away (v. 23), he wrestled with a mysterious man. At first, he may have thought he was fighting one of Esau’s men, but later, he says he saw God (v. 30). In a similar way, we sometimes have a hard time recognizing how the Lord is at work in adversity. That can happen when we are busy blaming other people, ourselves, or the Devil.

What difficulty are you facing right now?

Who or what do you have a tendency to blame for your problems?

What purpose might God have for your hardship?

As the fight continued, the man touched Jacob’s hip and dislocated it. This may have alerted Jacob to the fact that he was wrestling with a supernatural being. He determined to hold on until he received a blessing (v. 26).
When we are facing adversity, we may need to wrestle with God—that is, stay at the throne of grace and mercy until we have what we need from Him (Heb. 4:14-16).

In your time alone with God, do you tend to wait until you hear from Him or sense His comforting presence? Why or why not?

Many scholars believe the man Jacob wrestled was the pre-incarnate Christ (Jesus before He was born as a baby). Others think Jacob fought an angel. Either way, this supernatural being changed the patriarch’s name. Jacob literally means “heel catcher,” an idiomatic expression that meant “trickster” or “supplanter.” Israel means “he struggles with God” or perhaps “a prince with God.”

Jacob became the father of the 12 tribes of Israel. Why do you think it was important for him to have a new name?

After this incident, Jacob walked with a limp (Gen. 32:31). With a dislocated hip, he would have found it almost impossible to defend himself against Esau. Jacob was forced to depend completely on God’s ability to protect him.

What does Esau’s greeting show about his feelings toward Jacob (Gen. 33:4)?

Jacob learned that he could rely on God more completely when he was weak. This is the same lesson Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” taught him (2 Cor. 12:7-10). The apostle wrote, “I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (v. 10).

Give an example of a time when your weakness provided an opportunity to rely successfully on The Lord’s power.

How could your present adversity help you lean more fully on God?

As we depend on the Lord, we learn more about who He is. After God spoke to Job, revealing His character and incredible power, Job said, “I have heard of You . . . but now my eye sees You” (Job 42:5).

What new insight has hardship given to you about God or the Christian life?

Adversity shows us how much we lack spiritually. Give an example of a time when difficulty revealed your weaknesses and need for God.

Apart from the Father’s help, we can never handle all our problems, consistently resist temptation, or avoid bitterness. In fact, when we attempt to wage spiritual battles on our own, not only do we wander away from God, but we ultimately fail.

Jude 1:24 says that God “is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy.” According to this study, what is a believer’s role in handling problems, temptations, and suffering?

Prayer: Father, thank You for being willing to carry me through the challenges of life. Teach me to rely more on Your power rather than on my own strategies and coping abilities. Show me how You want to use the difficulties I face to draw me into a more intimate relationship with You. Amen.

Related Resources

Charles Stanley – Advancing Through Adversity

October 11, 2013 broboinhawaii 1 Comment

Deuteronomy 4:7

There are many people who get stuck in life’s hard spots, too scared or too bitter to move through the difficulty. Instead, these folks wait for the Lord to remove the trial, and yet He doesn’t always work that way. But God wants His children to trust Him so they can advance through their adversity.

The way that a person responds to hardship reveals his or her true character. And tough situations are the times when God’s children most need to match actions to words. It’s easy to say, “I trust the Lord” or “My God is faithful” when life is good. But unless believers recognize that He is sovereign even in adversity, they may be tempted to complain and seek pity. Christians who trust in the Lord’s faithfulness and supremacy will steadfastly focus on Him and as a result will see their anxiety and doubt subside.

In order to conquer adversity, we must begin moving through it. Even though we may not know what God’s purpose is, it’s essential for a suffering believer to surrender to His will. We certainly won’t like the pain, and we’ll definitely want the situation to change—fast. But giving the Lord free rein allows Him to mature our faith, conform us to the likeness of His Son, and fulfill His unique plan for our lives.

Surrendering does not seem like a way to advance anywhere. But in reality, we’re just handing over the controls to God and saying, “You guide me where You want me to go.” Doing so requires a lot of trust, but we serve a Lord who is worthy of our faith and confidence.

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