Promises, Promises
Simply Radiant Magazine
By Aurora Gregory
Who doesn’t love it when life is easy, problem and stress-free? Everyone does! No one asks for challenges or problems to deal with but the truth is, challenges are a fact of life. There’s no avoiding them, no way to live a problem-free life.
But you know what? A lot of good—a lot of eternal good—comes from life’s low times.
Good times have a way of distracting us. When life is easy and breezy, we don’t look for God much. We feel like we don’t need to. Because everything’s good.
But when crazy hits our lives, Jesus isn’t always our first choice to run to. We might avoid the situation or pretend that whatever’s going on is not really happening. We do everything we can to get back to the good times as quickly as possible. Because hard times don’t feel good and most of the time, we want to do anything we can to get back to feeling good.
But when we do that, we miss out on seeing God’s promises become real in our lives. And it’s the joy of His heart to show that He is real and true in our lives at all times, but especially when life hurts.
He wants us to be confident that His promises to love, protect and provide for us are real and true. It is impossible for the Lord to lie. Numbers 23:19 asks “God is not a man that He should lie nor a son of man that He should repent. Has He said and will He not do? Or has He spoken and will He not make it good?”
His promises are absolutely and perfectly trustworthy. And they are eternal. They are for today in our here and now and they are for the eternity we’ll spend with Him when we see Him face to face in Heaven. We can be confident in His eternal nature and the promises He makes to us.
Hard times are never fun, never enjoyable, never a walk in the park on a sunny day. But they are so valuable, so important because they let us see the Lord a little more clearly. And they challenge us to trust Him more and to rely on our thinking, our own wisdom less.
Challenging life seasons give us the chance to see God’s promises perfectly worked out in our lives.
So enjoy the no-stress, no-problem seasons of life. But when the bumpy times arrive – and they will – don’t avoid them, don’t deny them. Work through them with an eye to what promises the Lord wants you to experience personally. He has something for you that you don’t want to miss.