Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Troubles - Do They Hinder or Help?

In Philippians 1:13, Paul says, “It has become evident to the whole palace guard, and to all the rest, that my chains are in Christ.”

But how can Paul think that way? Most of us would be busy sitting around crying, “Woe is me” We’d be asking the question, “Why me Lord? What did I do to deserve this awful treatment?” But not Paul.

Rather, Paul took the positive approach and asked, “How is God, who is sovereign and in control of all this, using this for His glory?” God showed him -the Gospel is still going forth. He came to the same conclusion that Joseph did back in Egypt after having been sold into slavery by his brothers and falsely accused by Potiphor’s wife causing him to spend two years in prison. It had all been God’s doing to get him where God wanted him. Joseph concluded and confessed to his brothers in Genesis 50:20, “But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive.”

Paul knew God was working out His plan to save people even through Paul’s imprisonment. He could trust God to work it out for that end. That’s like God. God can be trusted with our lives.

John Bunyan’s life is another example of this. His preaching was so popular and powerful that it was such an affront to the leadership of the Church of England in the 17th Century that they jailed him to silence him. Refusing to shut up, he preached in the jail’s courtyard. Not only did the prisoners hear, but hundreds of the citizens of Bedford. They would come every day to stand outside and listen as he expounded the Scriptures. The authorities threw him deep into the dungeons and forbade him to preach again so he worked on writing an allegory. That allegory was called, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” the most popular book in history after the Bible, which laid out the Gospel to literally tens of millions of people. Has God got a sense of humor, or what?

The apostate church wanted to silence him, and by their attempts, they only gave him a bigger audience. John Bunyan’s troubles actually were a furtherance to the spread of the Gospel just like Paul’s were.

That’s what Paul is saying here: God was working things out so the Gospel could go forth through his troubles. Now, he could preach to the palace guard, and every visitor who came to see him. And he wrote all these prison epistles that are still impacting us today - Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians – such precious books to us. Don’t think God wasn’t at work.

Likewise if we look close enough through our own troubles, we would see the same thing happening. God doesn’t waste our troubles either. He uses them for His glory and our benefit. We don’t need to be fretting when things seem to go wrong in our lives, worrying as though God has checked out. We trust that He is as good as His word, working everything out just the way He wants it. And so we look for opportunities to serve Him. We look for ways that we can become even more effective for God, even through our troubles.

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