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Life is Hardby Steve Cox,
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Talk about stating the obvious! Most of you are personally and intimately familiar with this truth, that life is hard. At least you can take some consolation in the fact that you are not alone. An internet search of “life is hard” produced a potential 427 million results. So there must be an awful lot of people that feel this way. Not too long ago, I was sharing with a close friend of mine, all the things that are making my life seem very hard. He told me that one of the key verses for his life is John 16:33: "I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world." He said this verse encourages him in a few different ways. First, he takes comfort in knowing that our Lord and Savior is very well aware that life on this earth is quite hard at times. For some of us, life can be hard almost all the time. God not only knows our lives are hard, and will be hard. But he clearly allows our lives to be hard, which leads to the second point. As fallen people, living in a fallen world, God has specific purposes for allowing and even bringing a wide variety of hard experiences into our lives. Much of it has to do with our nature as self-centered human beings. From very early in human history, as the Lord was calling a people to be his own, in Deuteronomy 8, he warns the people about the flaws in our human nature and how they are impacted by our circumstances. He tells the people that He is bringing them into a “land flowing with milk and honey”. They will live in houses they did not have to build and eat from fields they did not have to plant. Life will be easy. He warns them that after a somewhat refreshing period of time living the easy life, their hearts will become proud, and they will forget the Lord their God. They will credit themselves for their good fortune and have little need for God in their lives. The Lord tells them He will bring back the hard times, so they will remember the Lord, turn and seek Him again. Throughout the Old Testament, we see this pattern over and over. God seeks to convey His love for His people by blessing them, they then eventually focus on themselves and their blessings, and the Lord has to bring hard times on them again, so they will turn back to the Lord. I need to accept the fact, that even though the Holy Spirit is present in and at work in my life, by nature I am no different from the struggling people of Israel. There are certain lessons in life I can only learn the hard way. Paul expresses his experience of these truths, about his own human nature, and response to circumstances, in II Corinthians 12. He describes the “easy times” experience of being someone who was entitled to a special intimacy with the Lord, through direct revelations given him by the Lord. But he honestly confesses to us that the tendency of his human nature is to become conceited over this special treatment by the Lord. He then tells us God gave him a “thorn in the flesh” to keep him from becoming conceited. When he asks God, why hard times have been brought into his life, the Lord responds: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul realizes that the hard times of his life are from the Lord, and have the purpose of strongly directing Paul to turn wholeheartedly to Him in dependence. In other words, to draw him back into intimate and right relationship with our Heavenly Father. On this basis, he tells us the hard times of life are necessary and extremely beneficial to us. He states: “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (II Corinthians 12:9-10) I am growing in understanding these concepts. But I am still struggling
to apply them in my life, to be thankful, appreciative, and responsive
to life’s hardships. But as I seek the Lord in personal devotions,
and interact with other believers over these truths in small groups
and Adult Bible Fellowships, I do see the Lord moving me toward the
perspective Paul was able to grasp. I hope and pray we all may grow
in accepting what the Lord is doing in our lives, and turn more fully
to Him, so “Christ’s power may rest on us”.
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