In the midst of our suffering, it can often be difficult to glimpse the glory to come. Suffering is so immediate and can seem so permanent that we can easily lose sight of the big picture. The pain can be so crushing and our hearts can be so broken that we just don’t understand why! Why me? Whenever that question tends to fill my mind, I hear Him whisper to my heart, “Anne, why not you? Just trust Me! Trust Me to be with you. Trust Me to bring you through. Trust Me to be enough for you. Trust Me – because I love you!”
When I don’t understand why, I trust Him because . . . God loves even me!
Are you hurt because you’ve thought that if God truly loved you, you would be exempt from pain and problems and pressure? Lay your hurts at His nail-pierced feet – and just trust Him because He loves even you!
Believers of every generation have triumphed over their suffering as they placed their faith in God, trusting Him even when they didn’t understand why. And every generation has suffered to a greater or lesser degree.
My generation has not been exempt. There has been unfathomable hopelessness and helplessness in the killing fields of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, in the massacres under the vicious anarchy of the Red Guard in China, in the senseless slaughter between tribes in Rwanda, in the torture chambers supervised by the butcher of Baghdad. . . . Sometimes it’s just so hard to understand!
Yet God is bigger than our suffering. We can have hope as we place our trust in Him – in His faithfulness and in His ability to work out in our lives His purposes that will be for our ultimate good and His eternal glory. So . . . when you suffer, just trust Him!
Sometimes, when faced with great problems, our tendency is to focus on the hands of God – what He has not done for us and what we want Him to do for us – instead of focusing on the face of God – simply Who He is. Our depression can deepen through this kind of self-preoccupation. Often, in the midst of great problems, we stop short of the real blessing God has for us, which is a fresh vision of Who He is. When we stop focusing on our problems and on ourselves and focus instead on our almighty and omnipresent God, our problems, as the old hymn promises, “grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.”
Have you grown so impatient, wanting your problems solved now, that you are missing the vision of His glory God has for you? Get your eyes off yourself, your problems, your circumstances, and look to the face of Christ!
The apostle John, suffering in exile on Patmos near the end of his life, must have prayed earnestly to be restored to his church and to his ministry. He must have begged God to get him off of the remote island so he could continue preaching and serving as a pastor and evangelist. Yet God didn’t answer his prayers. Instead, John related that it was on Patmos that God drew near to him and gave him a vision of the glory of Jesus Christ – a vision he recorded for the encouragement of every generation of believers since that time in the Book of Revelation. Jesus was with him in exile on Patmos!
What is your Patmos? A place where you are seemingly cut off and exiled from ministry and family? Is it a hospital bed? Or a small home with small children? Is it a workplace where you are surrounded by politically correct hostility to Christ?
Then look up! God is with you!
Bad things do happen to those Jesus loves. But remember this spiritual principle: Glory follows suffering, and life follows death.
Miss Audrey Wetherell Johnson was a woman greatly beloved of God. Born in England, educated in Europe, delivered from agnosticism, and transformed by God’s grace into a gifted Bible teacher and preacher, she answered God’s call to the mission field in China during the 1930s. After years of teaching pastors and church leaders in a theological seminary in Beijing, Miss Johnson was scooped up with other missionaries and placed in a Japanese concentration camp for three years of intolerable and unmentionable suffering. Yet once again we glimpse God’s glory when we learn that Miss Johnson was finally released, came to America, and began Bible Study Fellowship, an international ministry that now has approximately one million men and women who use her material and format to study God’s Word each week.
If something bad has happened to you, would you look forward to the glory that IS coming?!
