2 Cor 12 8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.
Why Chronic? Why do some hardships never go away? [The molding process] won't end until we become completely holy...my diving accident was the beginning of a long, arduous process of becoming like Christ. The grace of God mentioned is enough to sustain us through hardships that hang around.
As I said in my last blog....the kindest people who shine the most with God's love....are the elderly, or, actually, often children with untreatable cancers...those who are closest to completing holiness by joining God, to me, often seem to have it the closest to making it "right" on earth of being like Christ.
Why doesn't God just stop it all? Timothy Keller states that He could...but that would destroy all of us who had not accepted Him, and He is waiting for the number and people who will until that destruction.
Until then, we are asked to boast of our weakness and accept the grace and power to live from Him. He has not left us to battle alone, unless we choose to battle alone. We can tell ourselves we can do it (or adversely, tell ourselves we can't) and go along in that thought process. We will not last. Not until we accept His grace and power....we were not created to take in the stress, the evil, the horridly ugly of this world; it destroys us, body and mind, and unless we anchor ourselves to God, we will be in the most adverse agony. By our own choice.
Much like our forerunners did, we make a choice. We can stay away from the "apple" of destruction, being our own mini-god, or we can pick that "apple", and take a huge bite. With that bite, we will feel less and less of God's presence, and more and more of our mini-godness, and become more and more miserable as our plans fall apart left and right----everyone dies, everyone gets sick, jobs are lost, homes are lost. We can't handle it, and we know our mini-godness did not work, so then we move on to other mini-gods. Drugs, alcohol, sex.....whatever will numb us to the fact that that bite of "apple" did not work.
All we have to do is have faith. Abraham's faith was considered righteousness, after all. Faith will bring you back, almost putting that "apple" bite back on the "apple" and the "apple" back on the tree. His great strength, loving arms, abounding grace will help with whatever sorrow there may be, as He trains our hearts to be what they should have been if way back when no one had taken the first bite of forbidden fruit. Our Father loves us so incredibly much that, like any good half-broken earthly parent, He lets us see how much we really need Him. We need Him so much that to live without Him is no life at all.
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