When someone loses a family member or friend through death, when they become jobless or fail an examination; when they live through a separation or a divorce; or the fear of a war breaking out; or when a natural disaster hits and destroys or touches us, the question “Why?” spontaneously emerges.
“Why me?” “Why now?” “Why here?”
It is so difficult to live without an answer to this “Why?” that we are easily seduced into connecting the events over which we have no control with our perceptions of truth in our evaluation.
Worse yet, when we have cursed ourselves or allowed others to curse us, it is very tempting to explain all the brokenness we experience as an expression or confirmation of this curse.
Before we fully realize it, we have already said to ourselves, “You see, I can't do anything right, and I can't believe that God cares. The facts of life prove it.”
The great spiritual call for the lives of people living by faith in Jesus is to pull our difficulties, unknown realities, and brokenness away from the shadow of the curse and put it under the light of God's blessings. This is not as easy as it sounds. Read the lives of the great biblical persons: Abraham, Moses, David, Jeremiah, and even Jesus, and we'll see clearly that they suffered under great uncertainties and painful life situations that demonstrated the curse of Sin is still very real (except that Jesus never succumbed to the sinful urges of His flesh).
The power of the darkness that Satan seeks to surround us with is strong, and our world makes it easy to manipulate self-rejecting people - much more so than self-accepting people. To live in reaction to the circumstances that are painful is such an easy thing to do; but it blinds us to a greater reality of who we are as a Child of God.
The Bible calls us to keep listening attentively to the voice calling us the Beloved, the CHildren of the Father, and when we do, it becomes possible to live our brokenness, not as a confirmation of our fear that we are worthless, but as an opportunity to purify and deepen God's blessing that rests upon us.
Physical, mental, or emotional pain lived under God's blessing is experienced in ways radically different from physical, mental, or emotional pain lived under the curse.
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For Kids: There’s a lot of things we have to do each day. Get up from our sleep, Get dressed, Eat Breakfast, Get ready for School, Listen to the teacher, play with friends, eat our lunch, and after it’s all done, go back home. There’s time to play, Then we eat our supper… And eventually we have to get ready for bed and go to sleep! And then we do it all over again the next day. Sometimes there’s a vacation - like right now - and we get more time to play, to have fun and not have to do work at school. Our parents are good at helping us know what time it is and what we need to do next – even when we don’t want to move on to the next thing. God is also good at helping us know what time it is, and what is next. He doesn’t shout at us, or yell, or even scream…he does it peacefully, quietly. He wants us to understand that he does it, most of all, for us. Christmas can be quite busy and there’s lots of things going on at once…but l...
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