Impact Week Nine

Review

Last week Thomas stood as a warning to us: faith means believing in the unseen. Without faith, you don’t have a chance of pleasing God. Common sense doesn’t always make it easy to exercise faith in a given situation. There’s certainly no reasonability to anyone coming back from the dead. Thomas was a realist and needed to see it before him or he flat out wouldn’t believe it. Funny, the man saw Christ do countless miracles right before his eyes, including, presumably, raising Lazarus from the dead. There’s no reason to assume Thomas wasn’t there to see that.

The point is, don’t discount or underestimate what God can do. To quote Ephesians 3:20 “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us…” God doesn’t belong in a box – heaven itself can’t contain Him. If you think you’re in a tough situation, don’t forget to broach the subject with God, sarcasm implied. Remember: the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead dwells in you. So don’t for a moment doubt His ability to, well, do anything.

Background

We’re in the New Testament again this week. If you’ve been a part of JBQ or TBQ for any amount of time, you probably know by now that Paul is responsible for about 2/3rds of New Testament writings. He also spent most of his life building and sustaining the earliest churches in history, hence the letters to Corinth, Thessalonica, Ephesus, and others. This letter, II Corinthians, was written somewhere around 55 A.D. It’s a couple of years before his first imprisonment, which explains why he doesn’t mention it in his list of physical trials. Let’s take a look.

Reading: II Corinthians 11:24-28

End

Wow. Paul went through it, no mistake. For the aspiring missionary, reading this passage doesn’t necessarily make you eager to run out to the Middle East and preach the name of Christ.

In those days, the church was under great persecution. Heck, even Paul, before Jesus met him on the road to Damascus, was a ringleader to those who hunted down the earliest followers of Christ. But who ignores a meeting with the God you think you’re serving? Paul was a follower of Jehovah God; he just didn’t know Jesus and Jehovah had met. But Paul wasn’t the only one chasing down Christians.

The possibility that you and I could face even a fraction of the problems Paul dealt with is pretty slim here in America. Being a missionary in a hostile land comes with occupational hazards, certainly. And there are many modern day martyrs for Christ. If you doubt that, take a glance at “Jesus Freaks” parts one and two, put together by Toby Mac and the rest of dC tAlk. But something tells me most of this group will be doing other things in the years to come.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, as we’ll discuss here in a moment), that doesn’t mean we’re free from problems or difficulties. Surrendering to Christ doesn’t guarantee smooth sailing through the rest of your life. If anything, it could mean more tight situations as the enemy intends to break you. And we are living in a fallen world, which means that we face the consequences that mankind has brought upon himself for his sin.

Believe it or not, the third source of our difficulties is God Himself. If you want to grow in your walk with God, it means going through tough times. Sometimes it seems like you can’t spend a day on this planet without being attacked personally in some way. And certainly, the situations you and I go through may not appear to be helpful in the least when we’re in the middle of it. Coming out of it, you may gain some perspective.

A bit earlier on in this letter, Paul writes “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.” We have the distinct pleasure of serving a God who has been through it all because he lived in human form here on earth two thousand (2,000) years ago. He knows what we experience and not only can He deliver us, but he can comfort us when it’s something we do need to go through.

Don’t ever forget that God can use your past experiences to minister that same comfort to the people around you. It’s all about perspective sometimes; you may see things differently than someone who is the middle of a battle, because you’re on the outskirts of the storm. That wonderful gift of perspective is why God can give you a specific interpretation (or understanding) of a message from Pastor Cervero or Pastor Holtzhauer, while at the same time, God is speaking something completely different to someone else on the other side of the room.

What are you going through that doesn’t make sense? There just may be someone out there who’s faced it before – scratch that – I’m absolutely certain there is. But He may send someone your way to minister to you. Just be sure to be open to be used by God when you’re out of it.

Memory Verse: II Corinthians 1:3-4

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”