Walk of faith

“If God’s goal was to make you happy then suffering wouldn’t have any real purpose in your life. In fact, it would be completely counter-productive.

“Real joy is about meeting God’s expectations, not yours, and having done God’s will. That’s how somebody like Paul could be beaten and shipwrecked over and over and over again, locked away in prison, and still talk about joy and fulfilling his course and his ministry with joy.

"The Bible teaches you there’s a big difference between human happiness and godly joy. Human happiness is about meeting personal expectations and having circumstances match desires.

“It means I’m happy when others respond the way I want them to, or expect them to respond. God’s purpose in your life has nothing to do with making you happy.

"People say, ‘Well, certainly God wants me to be happy.’ I’ll agree with you that the Lord is real happy to have you be happy. But that isn’t really God’s purpose in your life.

"God’s purpose is to use me to bring glory to His name, and in every circumstance of my life that’s my purpose, my privilege. I don’t need to look at circumstances and evaluate whether this is a place I can rejoice or not . . .

*****

“I can imagine Paul’s life maybe didn’t turn out the way he expected it to when he started out. It’s a sobering thing to know brothers and sisters are suffering.

"There's real, intense persecution in our day. And yet by God’s standards, they’re living the good life. They’re living life to the maximum.

"People don’t always live to their own profession of expectations and when their decisions affect me, I might not always be thrilled about it, but I can rejoice because that’s a walk of faith; faith in who God’s made us . . .

“Glory is an outward expression. Rejoicing is an inner attitude. So the inner attitude of joy results in me being able to express that outward demonstration of that joy in times of trouble, difficulty and pressure, or persecution.

*****

“It isn’t enough just to say ‘tribulation works patience’; it’s KNOWING that it does that causes us to be able to have the glory—the outward expression of this joy in the midst of trouble.

“All of your joy is eventually going to have to be based in who God has made you and what He’s going to do with you in Christ. Every time in Paul’s epistles when you see the issue of hope, it’s always looking to the future. It’s a Rapture-resurrection kind of a look.

"Always talking to God about what His word says about the circumstances I’m in gives me the ability to continually endure through the trouble because I’ve got a hope out there in the end that fills my heart with rejoicing.

“Now the trouble is a circumstance in which I’ve been equipped by God to grow. What gave Paul the ability to live in whatever the circumstances were and to have joy was not to evaluate life the way human viewpoint evaluates it, on the basis of simple happiness.

“My strength, my power is made perfect, made complete in weakness. You see, grace requires you to do nothing. My joy is going to come from the sufficiency of His grace."

(new article tomorrow)