One of my favorite songs begins with “There are times in my life when my heart is embittered, there are questions unanswered, yet You are drawing me to enter into Your blessed sanctuary…”, and ends with “let each experience constitute me, so Your life I’ll display in every way”.
We, as Christians (and especially as young people) go through a lot of experiences, many of them unpleasant to us, but we need to know that the Lord arranges every situation in our life so that we might be transformed.
In Romans 8:28a we read: “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God”. The “good” in this verse refers to our transformation, so – all things cooperate with God for our transformation. We are in a process in which we are being conformed to the image of the Son of God (Rom 8:29), and the only way to carry out that process is by putting us into experiences that help us to become mature.
All the experiences that we go through in our life are set to make us turn our heart towards the Lord. Our heart is the key! When we turn our hearts to Him, we let Him spread His divine life into our soul, sanctifying us.
Now, our human spirit is 100% saturated by the Lord, but we need to give Him our heart, which includes our conscience and the three parts of our soul: mind, emotion and will. That process makes us express His divine attributes in our human virtues.
God is love, so everything that happens to us is because He loves us. In Revelation 1:13 we see that the Lord, as the Heavenly High Priest, is presented “girded about at the breasts with a golden girdle.” This girdle represents that He has the churches on His heart, so we can see His tender care for us, His sons.
We also see a wonderful picture of the Lord’s care for us when Stephen was being stoned by the religious people. In that moment, the Lord was not sat at the right hand of God, but standing and looking at Stephen because He was concerned for this son of God, who was being prosecuted (Acts 7:55-56). It is really amazing how much the Lord cares for His sons.
The Lord knows what is the best for us, and we do not, although we may think so. He arranges every situation to make us turn our heart to Him. When we enjoy the Lord, we experience Him as grace, helping us to face all the situations, making us reign in life in the midst of them.
He cares for us and He will never make us go through any situation that we could not stand. When we give the ground to Him, He can work on us, constituting us with Himself, in order that we may express His life in every way. [guest post, Efrain]
Amen, Hallelujah! Truly the Lord knows how to make us turn from our flesh to our spirit by arranging situations for us. May our heart be preserved no matter what happens and remain in His love.
At times, it may really be hard to understand His will on us that we need to turn to Him from time to time even if things seem to be so bad for us. However we must know that situations, whether good or bad are arranged by the Lord for us to be mature and grow in life.