What do you expect life to be like? Do you expect an ordered, predictable calm where your plans are unobstructed? Do you assume that people will agree with you and affirm your choices? Do you think you will be able to avoid sickness, accident, and injury? Do you believe you can plan your way out of stress and avoid situations where you feel overwhelmed? Yah!...If you live like a hermet monk!
Our experiences become more difficult when we carry unbiblical, and therefore unrealistic, expectations into them. We are shocked when we find ourselves in stessful situations. We question God's goodness and wonder what has gone wrong with our faith. We think that God has changed the rules on us.
That's why....lets say for example...a man named "Fred" was so disappointed. He was one of the good guys. He played by God's rules. He worked hard, made wise choices, and exercised a lot of discipline. He was serious about his relationship with God and active n his church. He was a faithful husband to "Judy" and an involved father. Given all this, "Fred" assumed that God would continue to give him the "good life."
He didn't want something extravagant. he just wanted his life of work, Christian friends, and family to go on without a hitch. But now "Fred" stood at what once had been the doorway of his dream home. A hurricane had blown it all away. Except for a few photo albums, everthing was gone. "Fred" could not calculate the loss.
Where was God? Why would he let this happen? Whey had "Fred" bothered to work hard, only to lose it all? "Fred" knew he should pray, he didn't want to. He was shocked, angry, and disappointed. It wasn't supposed to be this way.
What words would you use to discribe the world in which we live? In Romans 8 Paul describes it like this...
For the creation was subjected to fustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its BONDAGE TO DECAY and brought into the glorious feedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creations has been GROANING as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
These are the phrases that Paul uses to describe earthly life between the fall of man until Christ comes once agian as King of Kings. Creation is subject to frustration, in bondage to decay, and groaning as in pains of childbrith and we live in the midst of it all.
What pours and overflows out of your own heart when the boat is rocked a little and the heat is on? Life on earth is a wilderness. Each day we face unexpected difficulties. In it all, God works to expose, chage, and mature us. he has not forgotten you or the promises he made to you. He has not left you to the limits of your power and wisdom. In ways that are glorious, yet often hard to understand, God is in your Heat. He calls you to turn from questioning him to examining yourself! Where do you question his goodness, grace, and love? Where do you toy with the idea of going back to your old lifestyle...because this dosen't seem to be "working." God is not absent from your heat. When you are in the middle of the heat, you haven't somehow gotten yourself outside the circle of God's love and care.
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