By Trust, God Is For You

There Are Times when, completely powerless or at our wits end, we wonder about the certitude of life, as we grapple with a disaster that has unfolded before our eyes. We wonder how God could possibly love us and still allow such calamities to invade the spaces of our consciousness.

Then we read the following:

“Yet those [people and things] that be against us, so far are they from thwarting us at all, that even without their will they become to us the causes of crowns, and procurers of countless blessings, so that God’s wisdom turns [those] plots unto our salvation and glory. See how really [nothing] is against us!”

— John Chrysostom (347–407), Early Church Father.

God is not against us by the circumstances of our lives, but only for us; but we must respond in a way that sees, by faith, that this is true, by rejecting negativity and seeing the blessing in the persecution. This seems absurd. But we can only see that God is for us when we choose to allow the disaster to occur without comprehensive resistance. Even in the affliction we can do nothing about, rather than becoming forlorn, we become accepting regarding the best we can give in response to that situation.

When the people and things that seem to be against us cannot defeat us, nothing can defeat us, and we have what is an indefatigable hope.

There are many forces in this life would that would have us defeated, but we, by our faith in God, propose a superior set of circumstances – the circumstances of our attitudinal competence, by ways of refusing their power over us, as we skip happily along in life. We do not deny the negativity, but we take it in its stride, and when we do, we find God has already provided the strength to get through.

So great is God that nothing is beyond the brush of his healing touch.

To gain a grasp of this astounding wisdom of God’s, we see the gospel with utter clarity. It is the solution to all of life’s problems: when we get out of the way of God’s Spirit we are granted power to cede the difficult attitude. The attitude is addressed with deft poise. We simply make a bold decision to run with the flow of the river of life.

Because God is for us and not against us – by our willingness to obey the will of God; that we should never resent, for we know not its purposes – we will be granted power to get through hopelessness and hope for our despair.

***

Because God is for us we can have the hope for a solution to every circumstance, and the worse our circumstances are the more we are blessed by accepting them. It’s a blessing to get through the circumstance, and added later is the blessing of the crown for having endured. So, really, the worse, the better.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.