09 Mar We Must Believe that God Loves Us In Spite of the Fact that He Does Not Make Our Lives Go Better
Blog Series: Renew Your Mind ~ Transform Your Life
The question of “why God doesn’t make our lives go better” is the problem of evil that we finished talking about last week, filtering down from the cosmic level to the personal level. It’s one thing for pain, evil and suffering to exist “out there.” It’s another thing for it to exist in my life.
At best, Christians pray not to have bad things happen to them, and bad things sometimes happen anyway. They pray for good things and often don’t get them. And they get good things that they didn’t even pray for. There often seems to be little correlation between prayers and answers.
They pray for guidance, and seem to get none. They ask for help in living the Christian life, for help in overcoming addictions or other troubling personal problems and are not delivered. They try to be a good spouse and end up divorced anyway. They pray for God to help their children grow up to follow Him, and the children defect from the faith as soon as they leave home.
God allows a missionary to be raped by the very people whose souls she came to save. Or killed by those whose souls they came to save. Or they get mired down in a hopeless situation in which people reject what they have to offer, and they waste their lives trying to help people who, in the end, simply didn’t want their help.
Why doesn’t God make our lives go better?
God’s eternal priority is not our earthly peace and prosperity.
It is one of the great frustrations of life that God does not seem to be that concerned about making our life easy, blessed, prosperous. However, God is not an efficiency expert, He is not a fairy god-mother out to grant our wishes, He is not Santa Claus, dedicated to our earthly happiness.
The world’s priorities are peace and prosperity. Those are not God’s priority.
God’s priority includes bringing the necessary influences into our lives to make us more like Him… and in doing so, lift us to the highest possible level of existence. God’s priority is to refine us so that we become like He is, experiencing peace, love and joy, a rich relationship with Him and His other children. God’s priority is to take us way beyond the American Dream. Anything less would be a failure of enlightened love.
As a result, we must come to grips with the fact that we will not always be able to make sense out of life according to this world’s priorities. That’s why we must have an eternal perspective.
If we don’t understand God’s priorities and His strategies for lifting us to our highest possible potential in life, we will be continuously frustrated, possibly discouraged and even defeated with God’s refusal to bless our lives as we thought He would, if He truly loved us.
An eternal perspective is essential to understand God’s work and ways in our lives
We reminded ourselves two weeks ago that one of the things we must do to prepare ourselves for major spiritual growth is to abandon ourselves to an eternal perspective.
We said that there are three “unbelievable” things we must believe to have an eternal perspective that will meet the demands of 21st century life (as we said, they are not truly unbelievable, they just seem unbelievable to the secular mind).
- We must believe that God exists, in spite of the lack of scientific proof.
- We must believe that God is good, in spite of the rampant evil in the world.
- We must believe that God loves us, in spite of the fact that He does not make our lives go better.
And that is one of the great challenges of the Christian life. We must believe that God loves us in spite of the fact that He doesn’t make our lives go better.
The Bible makes it clear that God loves us
There are many verses that tell us that God loves us:
- “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)
- “God demonstrates His love for us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)
- “This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sin.” (John 4:10)
So, clearly God loves us. “The question is, do we feel loved?”
Missionary Elizabeth Elliot said it well, “Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering. The love of God did not protect His own Son… He will not necessarily protect us – not from anything it takes to make us like His Son. A lot of hammering and chiseling and purifying by fire will have to go into the process.”
So, once we understand and embrace that God’s desire for us during our time on earth (to become more and more like Christ) is not the same as our natural desires (peace and prosperity, here and now), we are on our way to understanding that God loves us, in spite of the fact that He does not make our lives on earth go better.
Psalm 25: 8 says, “Good and upright is the Lord, therefore he instructs sinners in the way. He leads the humble in justice, and teaches the humble his way.”
So, the starting point for beginning to understand what God is doing, and how to cooperate with Him for the best possible result, is a spirit of humility – a readiness to admit that God is God and we are not, a willingness to submit to His will, trusting that His will is the avenue for our highest good
God loves us even when our life is not easy
Next week, we will unpack more specifically why He does not make our lives go better, along with the four gifts God gives us through trials. They are keys to enduring life’s hard moments. But for now, we want to simply make the point that God loves us, in spite of the fact that He does not make our lives go better, and that His love is the thing we must focus on. His love is what will really satisfy our longings, not pleasant earthly circumstances.
Conclusion
We wish we could become more like Christ by eating chocolate while playing with puppies and watching sunsets. But while that is not the case, the Bible makes it clear that sandwiched between a promise-laden past in Scripture, and an unimaginably bright future in which those promises will be fulfilled, the only thing God hasn’t done is make this life on earth easy for us.
But He intends to do so in the end in lavish, magnificent and deeply personal ways, giving us the best gift of all, which is a personal relationship with Him that is uncorrupted by sin. Like coming into the presence of someone we love deeply on earth… only much more so… we will come into the presence of God, which will be infinitely more precious to us than any gift He could give us.
Years ago, when I called my (now) wife in high school and asked her to go to the prom with me… and then when I cleaned and spit-polished my car and went to pick her up, and when she came out of the house in her dazzling white dress perfectly made up… at that moment, I didn’t want for another thing.
I didn’t wish I had made better grades. I didn’t wish I had scored more points in the last basketball game. I didn’t wish I had more money. I didn’t wish for another thing. I was completely happy in the moment with her… in her presence. And so it will be with God, infinitely over, that we will be filled up and completely happy and satisfied in His presence. The appearance, from a very limited understanding (remember the story of my 3 year old granddaughter last week) and temporal perspective, that He did not seem to take better care of us on earth will be a non-issue.
As Timothy Keller has written, “On the day of the Lord – the day that God makes everything right, the day that everything sad becomes untrue – on that day the same thing will happen to your own hurts and sadness. You will find that the worst thing that ever happened to you will in the end only enhance your eternal delight. On that day all of it will be turned inside out and you will know joy beyond the walls of the world. The joy of your glory will be that much better for every scar you bear.”
In case you’re new here
This blog post is part of a series titled “Renew Your Mind, Transform Your Life”, introduced on January 5, 2021. As the series continues, each succeeding post will be added to and available in the blog archives at www.maxanders.com.
If you know anyone who you think might enjoy joining us in this study, please forward this blog to them and encourage them to go to my web site (www.maxanders.com) and sign up for the free video, “Master the Bible So Well That the Bible Masters You”, available there on the home page. This will put them on my regular mailing list and they’ll receive my weekly blogs on this subject.
In addition, I am creating a new online membership site, The Change Zone, that will provide information, strategies and resources to help motivated Christians renew their mind and transform their lives. If you would like to learn more about this and get updates to know when The Change Zone will be available, click here.
I look forward to going through this life-changing journey with you.
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