The temptations in your life are no different from what others experience. And God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand. When you are tempted, he will show you a way out so that you can endure. (1 Corinthians 10:13)Things do not always happen for a reason. Something happened and someone says, Well, it all happens for a reason. Sounds good, except that it is not true.
The engine on my van goes out. Why? It is because it is old, not to test me in the grace of God. Somebody dies and we tell the kids, God wanted him. Except that it is not true. We die because of sin. Someone who is a godly person gets a severe illness that is long and protracted and painful. A baby is born with a birth defect that will affect him and his parents the rest of their lives. You lose a fifty dollar bill.
Don’t blame God. If you blame anybody, you blame satan. You blame the devil. He is the one who brings sadness, not God.
James 1:17 says: Whatever is good and perfect comes down to us from God our Father. Death, illness, pain – none of these are good and perfect and cannot come from God.
So what is it when these things happen? Do we realize we are adrift in the sea of life, cast about, and will die any moment. No, not necessarily. God is there with us if we are there with him, even though bad things are happening.
And even though those bad things are not necessarily for a good reason, at the same time, we can use them to make something good. The old lemonade from lemons thing. Romans 8:28 says that we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.
In other words, bad things happen, but God can use them to make good things happen.
There are always three ways you can approach a problem. One is that you can curse the problem, be angry, stomp around, kick the cat. Another is that you can ignore it and pretend it didn’t happen, in which case you are going to look rather foolish. The third is that you can allow God to work through your life and use that problem for something good.
When we were first married, we met a couple who had a daughter who was a Down’s Syndrome
child. The father was talking about it to me one day and told me that before she was born, he was very impatient and somewhat intolerant of other people’s difficulties. Since they had raised her for several years, he had learned patience and compassion.
Did God send her to them? No, because bad things do not come from God. But could God use it to make that couple stronger? Yes. And he did.
Somebody up there doesn’t love me, why did God send this problem, I guess it was just his time to die – all these are messages of the devil, not the Father. So let God use what happens to you but don’t blame him.
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