| September 20, 2007 |
| Consent to Suffer |
"I expect and hope that I will not fail Christ in anything, but that I will have the courage now and always to show the greatness of Christ in my life here on earth, whether I live or die." Phillippians 1:20 (NCV)
I just wanted to share with you some of what God has been working on me about. After consenting to hear all of this from Him, I feel refreshed and more myself than I have in a very long time. I shared this with my chronic illness group tonight and now I would like to share it with you.
No one wants to suffer. We don’t ask to be sick. We don’t ask to battle fatigue that keeps us from the things that we enjoy. We don’t ask to endure pain that seems at times to be more than we can possibly endure.
Yet somehow we do endure. We make it through another day. Some days we sense this accomplishment. Other days we just crash into our beds grateful that another day of suffering is behind us.
God wants so much more for us than just mere existence and endurance. He wants us to experience His joy and peace, which only comes from submission to His will. I Peter 1:3-8 tells us that our trials make us strong and our faith will ultimately produce joy. We only find this joy though in loving Jesus and surrendering to Him in our trials.
Even Jesus faced a test of choosing His own will or His Heavenly Father’s will. In Luke 22:42 He begs of God to let this cup pass from him. In Isaiah, it says that He took on our pain and our suffering and now He has found blessings from God (Isaiah 53:1-5 and 11, 12). Jesus, God our Messiah, chose to take on extreme pain and suffering that lead to his death and separation from God the Father. He knows what it means to lay down His own will and endure to the end.
Jesus found his true fulfillment by enduring his suffering in submission to God’s will and now he sits at God’s right hand able to intercede on our behalf. Our blessing comes as joy despite our trials and when we remember that our true home in heaven is a place where there is no more pain and all trials will cease.
As we make the choice to allow God’s will in our lives, especially in our suffering, we will inevitably draw closer to Him. We will find that we are more able to fully experience His presence, His strength, and His love in our lives.
As we continue to turn ourselves over to Him, we become more like Him. Ephesians 5:1, 2 (NCV) says “You are God’s children whom he loves, so try to be like him. Live a life of love just as Christ loved us and gave himself for us as a sweet-smelling offering and sacrifice to God.” Your life, struggling day to day in pain and illness, can be a sweet-smelling sacrifice to God if you choose to accept His will for you today.
Not one of us chose the illnesses that now plague us. If we had the chance we would gladly erase it from our lives and there is nothing wrong in feeling that way. But if we are truly to become Holy as He is Holy (I Peter 1: 15 & 16) then we must give up our will for His.
The only way that we can do this is to ask God to do it in us. In Exodus 31:13 it says that the Lord is the one who makes us holy. Choosing to accept His will even through our pain is completely foreign to our nature and our way of thinking. It is a work that only God can do in us.
Look at what Jesus endured and what he has become. We can also look to others whose faith has carried them through their adversities. Hebrews 12:1-3.
If we can ever truly realize the nature of God and what He can offer to us as His children we will find that He is indeed able to do exceedingly abundantly more than we could ask or imagine (Eph. 3:20).
Getting to know Him more deeply and fully is the only way that we can begin to consent to suffer. We must not give up. We may be getting older and weaker, but God can renew us from the inside and give us something so much greater than what we can see now. (2 Corinthians 4:16-18).
The best way to get to a place where we know and trust Him well enough to humbly submit to His will even in our worst times is to get to know Him through His word and through our times of prayer with Him. Ephesians 6:18 reminds us to pray at all times with all kinds of prayers. These prayers and our reliance on the validity of His word give us strength to consent to suffer.
In a book that I recently read, there is a young mother and wife who is suffering from chronic illness. After many years of suffering and coming to the point where she is not sure if she will live to see her children grow up, this is the conclusion that she reaches....
"But I wish, oh, how earnestly, that whether I go or stay, I could inspire some lives with the joy that is now mine. For many years I have been rich in faith, rich in unfaltering confidence that I was beloved of my God and Savior. But something was wanting, I was ever groping for a mysterious grace, the want of which made me often sorrowful in the very midst of my most sacred joy, imperfect when I longed for perfection. It was the personal love of Christ...But not till I was shut up to prayer and to study of God's Word by the loss of earthly joys, sickness destroying the flavor of them all, did I begin to penetrate the mystery that is learned under the cross. And wondrous as it is, how simple this mystery! To love Christ and to know that I love Him--this is all!" (quote taken from Stepping Heavenward by Elizabeth Prentiss) |
posted by Dare @ 7:31 PM  |
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Name: Dare
Home: Mabelvale, Arkansas, United States
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