When
we understand the scope and breath of God’s sovereignty, we will know beyond
any doubt it is impossible for saints to be a victim of their circumstances.
Our Father, has placed a protective hedge... think Job, about each of His
children preventing all attacks of the enemy except those, which in His great
wisdom, He allows for our conformation. “Shall we indeed accept good from God,
and shall we not accept adversity”? The Hebrew indicates these actions, “good”
and “adversity”, are a unity and cannot be disconnected. Longfellow had it
right, “Into every life a little rain must fall.”
All
of God’s children are predestined to be conformed into the image, the very
nature, of Jesus. The biblical phrases new creation, new man, new nature,
inward man, renewed mind, etc., speak to this transformation process. This
lifelong molding and shaping of our heart takes, at times, great motivating
pressures. In a very real sense we are clay on the potting wheel of life being
molded and shaped by our Heavenly Potter’s hands: The pressures of His fingers
are the adverse circumstances of our life.
God,
the great architect, engineers our circumstances so that we can partake of His
divine nature through obedience. Our Savior learned obedience through the
things He suffered. Likewise our obedience must be tempered in the fire of
perseverance. Our Lord never said our life would be easy, but he did say He
would never leave us alone. “Yet in all these things (i.e.,
adversity and affliction) we are more than conquerors through Him who loved
us.” What the enemy means for evil God turns into His purposeful good, as He
brings forth the nature of Christ in us... birthed in our adversity. Obedience,
even in the smallest detail of our life, has all the omnipotent power of the
grace of God behind it. Far from making us victims, life’s hurdles are
Grace-Builders in disguise, enabling us to shuck-off all the false loves and
allure of life in this world… enabling us to become truly Christlike...
GRACE-BUILDERS IN DISGUISE
(Job
1:10-12, 2:10; Is. 64:8; Rom. 8:29; Heb.
5:8; 1 Peter 4:1, 12-13;James 1:2-4; Rom. 5:3-5; Rom. 8:37)
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