Why Is This Happening To Me?
by Pastor Ray Dare (copyrighted)
Once you become a believer, God uses everything that happens in your life. God doesn't cause everything, but God will use everything that happens to you to help grow you. "For those who love God everything that happens fits into a pattern for good. For God...chose us to bear the family likeness of his Son...." Romans 8:28-29 (Ph). One of the most common ways God grows you is through problems.
How do you know if you are growing spiritually? You learn to trust God through a problem. You trust God in spite of the circumstances. You don't demand explanations because there are some things that we will never understand on this side of eternity. In the Bible, there's a book called Job. It's all about one thing: Will a person continue to trust God if he loses everything; If everything goes wrong in his life? Job's answer was a resounding, "Yes!". But allow me to make this personal - would you? Would you continue to trust God if everything went wrong in your life?
There's a story in the Bible about the disciples of Christ going through a terrible storm. After Jesus calmed the stormed He turned to His disciples and asked, "Don't you have faith in me yet?" The fact is, you will go through some storms in life. You're going to lose loved ones. You may lose a job, your marriage, your health. But will you continue to trust God in spite of the circumstances?
That's what spiritual maturity and faith really are: Facing the facts without getting discouraged by them. Faith is not the absence of problems or pretending that everything's great, when it's not. Faith is facing the facts without losing your confidence in God. This is the ultimate test of spiritual maturity. It is the point of surrender - you give up control. Part of that trust is realizing the fact that God doesn't always deliver you from the problems of life, but He always has a greater plan beyond them.
God has a purpose behind every problem. "For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all." 2 Corinthians 4:17 He uses circumstances to develop our character. In fact, God depends on circumstances to mold us into Christ-likeness even more than the Bible, because we experience them 24 hours a day. Even if you read your Bible an hour a day, it would still leave 23 hours of circumstances for God to use.
Life is a school and problems are the curriculum. Every time you solve one problem, another one is waiting to take its place. Not all of them are big, but all are significant in God's growth process for you. If you are facing trouble right now don't ask, "Why?" ask "What?" Not "Why me?" Instead ask, "What do you want me to learn?" Then trust God and keep on doing what's right. Never give up - but allow God to grow you up!
Pastor Ray
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