HOW DOES GOD USE PAIN

“I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things” (Isa 45:7).

God will use pain in order to create a love relationship with His creation.

This statement may challenge your theology. However, consider that God allowed Jesus to experience incredible pain in order to create an opportunity to have a relationship with His creation.

Consider how Jesus created a relationship with Paul. He blinded him and used a crisis in his life in order to bring him into a relationship with him and use him for God’s purposes.

Consider how God recruited Jonah for the mission He had for him.
This is not God’s first choice for His creation. Romans 2:4 reveals that God’s preference is to show mercy and kindness: “Or do you show contempt for the riches of His kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance?”

-God loves people more than He loves their comfort.
-He invests a great deal into mankind.
-He desires relationship with us and will go to great lengths to create such a relationship in order for us to receive the rewards and inheritance He has for us.  A relationship that is motivated now by love and devotion instead of pain.
This is where God desires us to be. Another way of saying this is we are no longer seeking His hand. We are seeking Him. We want to know God personally.
Obedience will not last when the motivation is only the removal of our pain.

God often causes delays in our lives that we cannot understand. Sometimes it seems our obedience is not getting rewarded. Jesus said He learned obedience through the things He suffered (see Heb. 5:8). Imagine that – Jesus having to learn obedience. What does that say for you and me?

Sometimes God’s delays are simply because He wants more glory in the situation, more recognition, more Christ-likeness in you and me through greater patience and obedience.

Faint not, for the promise may yet come.  Amen