The Enemy’s plan: Cause you pain to rob you of your future. God’s plan: Give you a future through your pain and rob the Enemy.
The way you fail the test of suffering is to claim yourself as a victim.
The reason you feel like a victim is because you do not feel like a son or daughter.
Stop interpreting your hardship as a series of mishaps. If you begin to embrace all hardship as an established fact of your son-ship, suddenly you’ll gain strength that you’ve never thought possible. Our God is no dead-beat dad; those whom he loves, he inflicts hardship, and his hardship for your life comes from a good place in his heart.
Once you’ve realized this, you will embrace and welcome hardship, greeting it each day as you are conformed into the image of Jesus Christ. He’s fathering you and he knows what he is doing.
Your suffering is actually making you into God’s masterpiece. The sooner you understand this the sooner your trust in God will foil the Devil’s plan of distorting your future.
One of the most effective and powerful things you can do is to praise God in the midst of your suffering. This will destroy any misgivings and doubt about who you are and who God is. This will also destroy the Devil’s plan and his scheme of using your suffering as his weapon – your praise disarms evil!
The Enemy’s plan: Cause you pain to rob you of your future. God’s plan: Give you a future through your pain and rob the Enemy.
This is because as a follower of Jesus, you are God’s son or daughter, and the Evil One, well he can’t take that away; he can mess with your mind and feelings, but the truth of who you are and to whom you belong is the source of your strength.
Revelation 12:11
“They defeated him [the Devil] by the blood of the Lamb and by their testimony; for they did not love their lives but laid them down for him [Christ].”
You are God’s beloved son our daughter and this truth is secured in the finished work of Jesus Christ!
So, look to the wisdom behind your suffering and hardship. I think you may discover your Father’s fingerprints and Jesus’ footsteps.
If you find yourself on “Easy Street” sinning and carrying on, peering upon the naked, peeking at the exploited and injecting your life with indulgences and have no hardship and no suffering; then quite possibly, you’re illegitimate and not a true son. But, I trust this is not your case.
“My son, do not despise the LORD’s discipline, and do not resent his rebuke, because the LORD disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in. Blessed are those who find wisdom, those who gain understanding…” Proverbs 3:11-13
If you pass this test you’ll move on. If you blame the devil and others, you’ll stay stuck in a perpetual groundhog day.
So, don’t waste your hardships and suffering on blaming the devil or others. Accept it and be fathered.
Maybe you’re not a victim after all. Maybe you are a true child of God.
Call To Courage 