Lessons from Adversity (Part Eight)
He leads me …
We have been looking what Charles Stanley has to say about the benefits of adversity based on Paul’s experiences throughout the New Testament. Now consider another way that we are better off.
12 LESSONS FROM ADVERSITY - Growing Closer to God Through Trials and Troubles[1]
Through tribulation and difficulty, Paul learned:
8. The Father valued his service more than his desires. Although Scripture promises that the Lord delights in giving us the desires of our hearts (Ps. 37:4), He will prioritize our character development over our comfort. Instead of satisfying Paul’s inclination toward comfort and ease, God sent adversity to prepare him for greater service (2 Cor. 12:7).
In 2 Corinthians 12:7 we read the account of Paul explaining that God gave him a 'thorn in the flesh' because of the incredible revelations that he received, and also to stop him from becoming proud.
In doing this the Lord stopped Paul from thinking how admired and special he was. After all who else had experienced what he had? We are no different. We all want to feel that we are admired and special.
Let us deal with admired first. This comes from the sense of being part of a community that we all have. We are not meant to be on our own. We are meant to function with others – family – church – the work place – to be part of a team contributing to overall good of others. We all have different gifts and abilities and when they are used in conjunction with others, great things can happen.
The problem comes when we focus more on ourselves at the exclusion of others. Paul’s ‘thorn in the flesh’ was a reminder that it was not all about him, but rather about what the Lord was doing through him. God may well give us a ‘thorn’ for the same reason too.
Feeling special is really the desire to be loved and appreciated. We all have it. However, as we go through life we find that people often will not, or cannot fulfil this desire in us, and it is common to be let down. We learn to live with this, and make the most of the few people in our life who are genuinely supportive and loving. Hopefully we are doing the same for them. But even then it is not perfect.
As we Christians our view of God slowly changes as we mature. From seeing a two sided God of love on one hand, and justice and discipline on the other, we see Him as simply the God of perfect love. God is Love. That is who He is, and everything that He does will be an expression of that.
We all know that when a child does something wrong that they need some sort of discipline to reinforce that doing wrong has consequences. A small child may not immediately understand why they are being disciplined for running out on the road, because nothing happened. But they will remember that if they run out on the road there will be correction given which they will not like.
Later on they will see for themselves that if they run out on to the road, they could easily run directly into the path of an oncoming vehicle. Were their parents doing the wrong thing disciplining them? No. In fact they were acting out of love, because they did not want to see their child seriously hurt or killed.
God does the same with us. He does not punish us because we have been naughty. He disciplines and corrects us out of His pure love. He does not want us getting caught up in our own ego. Then we think that we have the answers and do not need God so much. This leads to us doing what we want to do, which leads to sin. He loves us too much to let us do that, so He stops us before it is too late. If it takes a ‘thorn in the flesh’ to keep us in the right place, then that is what He does.
[1] https://www.intouch.org/Read/Blog/12-lessons-from-adveristy
