We must believe God loves us in spite of the fact that He does not make our lives go better – Part 1

27 Jun We must believe God loves us in spite of the fact that He does not make our lives go better – Part 1

Blog Series

Moving from Checkers to Chess

Five Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective

Let’s be honest. If you were a loving parent, and you had a child going through some of the hard things you’re going through (or have gone through), wouldn’t you help them if you could?

So why doesn’t God, your Heavenly Father, 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.

It is not uncommon for a Christian, at one point or another in their life, to ask, “How can I believe in God when He does not make my life go better?”

At times like that, we can reassure ourselves with several key truths.

1. 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.

2. It is also true, nevertheless, 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.”
• “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)

We cannot escape the testimony of Scripture that God loves us even when we don’t feel loved.

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: 8-9 says, “Good and upright is the Lord; therefore He instructs sinners in the way. He leads the humble in justice, and He 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, and a willingness to submit to His will, trusting that He loves us and that His will is the avenue for our highest good.

Next week we’ll look further at this truth that we must come to grips with in Part 2 of Believing God loves us in spite of the fact that He does not make our lives go better. I’ll see you then.

Get a Moving from Checkers to Chess At-a-Glance-Overview: Click Here

We have been studying these concepts for quite some time (including in some prior blog series), and I am excited to now be connecting all the “moving parts” from those posts and combining them into a “spiritual game plan” in this “Moving from Checkers to Chess ~ 5 Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective” series.

For an overview of the game plan, so you can see at a glance where we begin and where we’re headed, I’ve created an overview/outline you can download for free: Click Here

For the full discussion of each of the steps, begin with the first post in this series, Moving from Checkers to Chess, and then continue with the following posts thereafter.

In case you’re new here, below are two resources I’ve created for additional help in your Christian discipleship journey:

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