Today’s devotional: Life-saving pain
When disaster strikes our lives, it’s natural for Christians to pray for relief from it—we want God to fix or take away the pain of illness, damaged relationships, spiritual malaise, and other troubles.
That is a perfectly reasonable reaction to life’s trials. But in this A Word With You devotional, Ron Hutchcraft observes that the challenges facing us are not always without helpful effects. Just as physical pain can be critical in bringing an urgent medical problem to our attention, sometimes life’s trials can help us by warning us of even more serious spiritual problems that need addressing:
Things going wrong can be your friend if they show you a problem that could really hurt you and if they get you to the help that you need. Now, that may be what’s happening in your life right now, and it may explain the real reason for what’s going wrong. In short, God wants you back before some really damaging things happen because you’re not where you’re supposed to be with Him….
If you’re away from Jesus, the one whose love you were made for, the one who died for you, things are only going to get worse because He loves you. Things are going wrong, not to hurt you, not to destroy you, but to help you wake up to something far more serious that’s going on in your soul. You’ve got a deadly heart condition, and you need to get to the doctor before it does serious damage. You need to get to Dr. Jesus. It stinks away from Him. The porch light is on, the door is open, and Jesus is coming down the road to welcome you home. And home is where you belong.
Looking back at some of the trials you’ve been through, do you see how God may have used some of them to point out problems in your spiritual life? If you feel dissatisfied and overwhelmed by life right now, could it be that God is nudging you to draw closer to Him?
Pain is something everybody sets attention. Jesus wants to purify us, so as a silversmith He sometimes put us “in the fire” for a time sufficient to burnout our impurities. He’ll certainly take us out of it before we are destroyed, but burning is always painful.
Good lesson.
Pain is made by man himself, there is a way that God has set for man to follow, that when followed, Man, will be with God, where no pain or suffering exists. Therefore we should ask God to teach us the Way that we may live with Him and suffer no pain. God desired man to become an heir to His Kingdom that He sent His only Son to save mankind and make us worthy to become an heir because we can’t do it by ourselves alone. God bless you all.