21 May How Can You Believe God Loves You in Spite of All the Troubles in Your Life?
Let’s be honest. If you were a loving parent, and you had a child going through some of the hard things you are going through (or have gone through), wouldn’t you help them if you could?
So why doesn’t God help you?!?
You do your best to live the Christian life, but run into trial after trial that God seems conspicuously uninterested in helping you out of. Does He not care? Is He not able? Is He somewhere else in the universe doing something more important with someone more deserving?
What’s more, many Christians admit that, on the one hand, they get some bad things they prayed not to get, and on the other hand, they got some good things they didn’t even pray for. There often seems to be little correlation between prayers and answers.
It is not unusual for Christians to pray for guidance, but don’t seem to get it. They ask for help in living the Christian life, for help in overcoming addictions or other troubling personal problems and seem to get no help. They try to be a good spouse and get 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 the home.
Even more, God allows a missionary to be raped by the very people whose souls she came to save. Or killed by those whose lives they came to help. Or they get mired down in a forlorn third-world 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.
This is the third and final blog in a series on “How Can You Believe…” In the first one, we asked, “how can you believe in God in spite of the absence on scientific proof?” In the second one, we asked, “how can you believe God is good in spite of all the evil in the world?”
In this one, we ask, “how can you believe God loves you in spite of all the trouble in your life?”
- It is true, God’s children have troubles
- Job 5:7 says, “man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward.”
- 1 Peter 4:12 says, “don’t be surprised at the fiery trials you are going through, as if something strange were happening to you.”
- James 4:2 says, “consider it all joy when you encounter various trials…”
There’s no getting around it, God’s children suffer. Some suffer moderately (financial reversals, interpersonal conflicts, health challenges) and some suffer greatly (prison, torture, violent death), but we all suffer. And sometimes, we wonder where God is when we’re suffering.
C.S. Lewis wrote of his experience when His wife lay dying from cancer:
“When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.”
Sooner or later, a Christian is likely to experience suffering and trials in life so bad and/or so prolonged that they wonder if God loves them.
- It is true that God loves us
But it was also Lewis who said:
“The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word “love.”
Just because God’s children suffer does not mean He does not love them. Even when we feel isolated and cut off from God, He still makes it clear that He loves us.
- 1 John 4:8 says, “God is love.”
- John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal live.”
- Romans 5:7-8 says, “Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
We cannot escape the testimony of Scripture that God loves us even when we don’t feel loved.
- God uses trials in our lives for good.
If we take Scripture at face value and look at circumstances with an eternal perspective however, we conclude these four stupendous things:
- We can take joy in trials, knowing that if we respond properly, they will make us spiritually complete. (James 1:2-4)
- We can take joy in these trials knowing that we will receive disproportionate eternal reward for them. (Romans 8:18)
- We can take joy in these trials knowing that it will equip us for more effective ministry in others’ lives. (2 Corinthians 1:3- 4)
- We can take meaning in these trials knowing that it will deepen our relationship with God. (James 4:6- 8)
Whatever loss we feel we have incurred in this life can be counterbalanced by the realization that God will use it for good if we let Him (Romans 8:28), and we can be disproportionately compensated for it in the next (Romans 8:18). This life is brief. The next life is endless. There is no loss. There is only delay.
Conclusion
When we are in the middle of difficult trials that make us wonder if God loves us, we must – by faith – get a grip:
- Be on the alert, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. (1 Corinthians 16:13)
- Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might (Ephesians 6:10)
- Be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:1)
We must choose to trust the truth of Scripture rather than our notoriously unreliable emotions.
God does love us, even when we don’t feel loved. Even when we are going through such hard times that we believe that, if we were God we would help us. We must accept that God’s ways are higher than our ways (Isaiah 55:7-9). We must trust Him over our own imperfect perceptions of reality.
- God is morally perfect. We are not. (1 John 1:5)
- God has ultimate knowledge and wisdom. We do not. (1 John 3:20)
- God is sovereign and can accomplish whatever He desires. We cannot. (Job 42:2)
When we step down from the throne of our life and abdicate it to Him… when we take Scripture at face value, when we trust God above self, we conclude that God does, in fact, love us, even in spite of all the trouble in our lives.
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