Disease. Injury. Death. Material losses. Financial ruin. Unemployment. When God wants to turn our lives upside down, He has endless methods at His disposal. When some crisis strikes us out of the blue, it doesn’t take us long to ask “Why is this happening?! What did I do?” If we’re smart, we’ll recognize that God is at the center of our problems—He is the One intentionally making our world fall apart. The question then becomes WHY is He inflicting misery upon us? God is a multitasker who always has multiple reasons for what He does. Because God is so complex, some Christians argue that sometimes we suffer trials simply for the benefit of other people—God showcases our struggles to them and they learn something, but He has no personal lesson in mind for us at all. In such cases, we are like props that God uses for someone else’s benefit. This theory is total rubbish. Whenever God does something TO you, it is ABOUT you. It might also be about a hundred other people, but you can’t worry about the growth plan of any other soul. You need to stay focused on your own walk with God and look for the lesson He is currently trying to teach you. God is always teaching you. There is no such thing as a random, pointless trial. It’s easy to think, “Everyone’s going to get a certain ration of pain down here simply because it’s a fallen world,” but this explanation simply doesn’t work. God teaches us in His Word that He is intimately involved in every detail of our lives. We can’t execute a single plan without His help and approval. He is guiding every step of both the believer and unbeliever. He watches over every soul with equal attentiveness. No one is overlooked. No one is brushed aside or ignored. No one is less valued or less loved. So if you get diagnosed with cancer and someone tries to tell you it’s because of genetics or diet or a lack of exercise, you need to realize that such answers are attempts to explain the events of life without faith. God is the One who hands out the malignant tumors. God is the One who controls our health. Sometimes He follows genetic patterns, other times He does not. We must learn to acknowledge His intentional involvement in every detail of our lives—from the lost car keys which delay the moment we leave the house to the sudden death of a loved one. God is carefully introducing new events into our lives with precise timing. If we don’t acknowledge His involvement, we’ll miss the whole point of why we’re on this earth in the first place. We’re here to learn and grow in our knowledge of who God is and how we are to respond to Him. We don’t have long to learn—these lives are short, so we’re on a crash course to absorb as many principles as we can before we are transferred into an entirely different sort of existence. We mustn’t waste precious time by taking an atheistic view of things. We must see that God is the One bringing every bit of bad news into our lives. And then we need to ask what His purpose is. When it comes to painful problems in your life, God is either disciplining you or refining you. In either case, His motivation is the same: He wants to draw you closer to Him. But before you can figure out the best way to respond, you need to sort out whether you’re being disciplined or not. Discipline is about you going astray and God driving you back on course. Discipline is God’s negative reaction to your stubborn little heart defying Him and clinging to sin. Refinement is about taking you to the next level of maturity. Refinement is God’s joyful response to your obedient heart being so easy to work with. Discipline is a spanking. Refinement is a reward. Discipline is God drawing a firm line with you saying, “I am not going to keep letting you rebel against Me.” Refinement is God saying, “I’m so excited to take you to the next level. It’s going to be tough, but I know you’re ready.” Here’s a critical point that many Christians miss: God uses the SAME METHODS to discipline and refine us. This means it is impossible to stand on the outside of a soul and properly diagnose which event is happening to them. You are the only one who knows your own heart, therefore you are the only one who can properly discern what is going on with you. Of course you need the Holy Spirit’s insight, but it is critical that you go to Him directly—do not rely on some other human to interpret God’s actions in your life. The problem with asking another Christian why God is striking you down with some terrible disease or letting your marriage fall apart or blocking you from finding a job is that you’re liable to get the wrong answer. Other Christians are not always comfortable with acknowledging God at work in negative things. They want to think that He only does good things to the people He’s happy with and if He does bad things, it’s always because He’s mad. This is the crummy advice that Job’s friends gave him as they all sat on the ash heap together. “You’re being punished for your sins,” they concluded when they saw Job’s miserable state. So also today, “God is mad at you” is the explanation that is given to many miserable souls when this is not the case at all. It is extremely damaging to think God is mad at you when He isn’t. You’ll end up feeling depressed, despaired and rejected. You’ll become an easy victim for demons, who will waste no time in bringing up every sin you’ve ever committed just to help you stick to your wrong conclusion. NEVER accept the idea that God is upset with you without checking with Him directly. Would you want your spouse to believe gossip the neighbor is spreading about you without even asking you if it’s true? Of course not. In the same way, God doesn’t want you to rely on the gossip and ignorance of other Christians to determine what He thinks of you. His relationship with you is personal. There are secret whispers exchanged between your spirit and His that He doesn’t go around broadcasting to the busybodies at church. There is no human on this planet who is an expert on your personal relationship with God. He is the only One who can accurately tell you where you stand with Him today, and until you get a clear reading from Him, you can’t put your weight down on anyone else’s theory. Now then, God has a reputation for not talking when we really need Him to. So if your life is falling apart and He won’t say anything, how can you tell if you’re in trouble with Him or not? It’s very easy to discern whether you’re being refined or disciplined, even when God isn’t talking. What you need to look for is the presence of conviction. Is the Holy Spirit showing you a specific area of your life where you are not in alignment with Him? When you’re feeling stressed, it’s easy to get a head full of false conviction from demons, especially if there are Christians in your life who insist that God must be punishing you. Here’s how you sort through the mess: if the Holy Spirit is actually the source of any complaint, He will not just complain, but He will also present you with a CLEAR, SPECIFIC, DOABLE SOLUTION. Those four words are critical. Let’s look at them each in turn. SOLUTION. God doesn’t just rag on you. He loves you and He values your relationship with Him. Speaking only about what’s wrong with you is what Satan does. If God were to only harp on your failings without giving you any hope of correcting them, it would be the same as eternally rejecting you. Being faced with unforgivable problems is something the residents of Hell will have to deal with. As a Christian, God is never going to cut you off or present you with a list of hopeless flaws. If you’ve got a headful of criticisms with no solutions in the mix, you’re not receiving any conviction from God. CLEAR. God doesn’t play vague “read My mind” games when He’s upset with you. Vague, garbled messages are the trademark of demons. Do not act on vague convictions, because you’ll only end up running in circles. If God is in fact disciplining you because He is upset with something you’re doing and He expects certain behaviors from you before He will end your trial, you will not have to rack your brain to try and figure out what He wants. The sin He wants corrected will be clanging in your head like a loud bell. If you’ve done some sincere praying and listening and you’re still hearing nothing but silence or vague static, then you can safely rule out discipline. God is not upset with you, nor is there something specific He wants you to do in this moment. You are on the refinement track and the hard circumstances you’re in is about maturing you to the next level. Roll up your sleeves and get ready to persevere, but REJECT all notions that God is upset with you. SPECIFIC. Not only will God make sure that His complaint comes through loud and clear on your mental channel, His solution to the problem will be very specific. It won’t be something like: “You need to be a better Christian.” Such a general statement doesn’t point you in any clear direction. When God sees that we’re out of alignment with Him, He always makes a way for us to get right with Him immediately. If there’s something He wants you to do, He will pinpoint it for you. “Apologize to your wife. Admit you cheated on that test.” Did you try and bargain with God and now you’re shirking on your end of the deal? If so, He may be pressuring you to do what you promised to do. “I gave you the confirmation you asked for. Now do what I wanted.” It is possible that God will bring consequences on you for a sin you have committed in the past. Perhaps you slept out of wedlock and now you’re pregnant. Or perhaps you’ve just been diagnosed with an STD and you feel like God’s punishing you for all the years you slept around. When we can see a clear case of cause-and-effect, it’s easy for Satan to convince us that God is holding some kind of grudge towards us because of past rebellion. Yet harping on the past isn’t something God does with souls who are aligned with Him today. God may very well use your past sins as reasons to bring present trials into your life, but you mustn’t read into them a tone of anger. Unless there is a specific conviction present in your mind TODAY, you should not assume that God is upset with you or rejecting you because of the past. The past has been atoned for by the cross. You are God’s kid, and He wants to you to mature in the faith. He’s going to use trials to make that happen, and He might choose to use trials that are related to your past actions. But if you are aligned with God today and eager to please Him with your life, then He is not going to be upset with you. In the absence of any specific conviction, you can safely assume that you are being refined, not disciplined. DOABLE. This is a critical marker of God’s conviction. We cannot change the past, and God doesn’t harp on it. If you come down with some terrible disease and your mind is filled with thoughts like “This is because you divorced your wife” or “God is punishing you for being such a lousy parent,” you must realize it is demons talking, not God. Demons love to focus on the past and review all the ways you’ve messed up because they know there’s nothing you can do but feel rotten about it. You can’t take back what you said to someone or undo the damage you did. God focuses on the present and will give us instructions that we can actually do. Depending on what kind of mess we’ve made in our rebellion, He might ask us to do something very hard, but His instructions will still be doable. God doesn’t ask us to morph into Christ overnight. He doesn’t tell us to come up with perfection He knows we don’t have. If He is guiding us through the process of unraveling a complicated mess involving many people that we’ve hurt, He’s going to give us step-by-step instructions on how we need to make amends, and as we align with Him in doing them, He will be pleased with us. God wants us to be in unity with Him at all times and He makes this very easy for us to accomplish. All we need is willing hearts that sincerely desire to please Him. Such an attitude will motivate us to quickly respond to His clear convictions and we’ll never get to the point where God is truly irritated with us. In the Bible, God says He disciplines all of His children. In this post, I’ve been using discipline as a negative term to describe situations when God is frustrated with our stubborn rebellion. But discipline can also be a positive thing, like the helpful instructions of a teacher who is showing us some new skill: “Do this, not that. This way is better.” When our hearts are aligned with God, we will receive constant convictions from Him which are like gentle taps on our shoulder that help us stay focused on the right path. God enjoys interacting with us, and we mustn’t read irritation into every little corrective prompt He gives us. It takes a lot of intentional effort and defiance on our part to truly aggravate God. Make no mistake—God does get extremely angry at His own kids, but this is not a situation which we can stumble into by accident. As long as you sincerely desire to please God in your heart, you’re never going to experience His temper lashing out at you, nor will you ever have your life plagued with problems that are only about humbling you into repentance. As long as you know you desire to please God and you want Him to have His way in your life, you need to view every hardship that comes your way as an opportunity to grow closer to Him. God gets very excited when He sees that a soul is reaching out for more of Him. He is not going to waste such an exciting opportunity. If you really want to please God, it is guaranteed that He’s going to bring all sorts of trials into your life and some of them might feel like too much to handle. The more mature we become, the stronger our faith becomes, and the more drastic our trials need to be in order to push us to the next level. Remember that God knows you inside and out and He will never cause irreparable damage to your bond with Him. Trusting His judgment and remembering that He is madly in love with you are vital parts of surviving intense trials. Once you have ruled out the presence of God’s conviction, do NOT accept the theory that He is upset with you. Do not waste your time confessing sins that have already been atoned for by the cross and forgiven. When there is no clear conviction, God is NOT disciplining you in anger. He is not punishing you for your sins or trying to make you grovel at His feet. It is vital that you rely on the Holy Spirit alone to properly discern God’s reason for bringing a trial into your life. Don’t let other people convince you there are problems between you and God if that is not the message you are getting from Him. Remember that God wants you to be in alignment with Him and He makes it very easy for you to stay there by giving you clear convictions whenever you step out of His will for your life.
Posted on: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 02:30:50 +0000
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