Thoughts on Smashing the Idol of Greed

Centering Our Lives on God Not Stuff

“Therefore, consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, AND GREED WHICH AMOUNTS TO IDOLATRY.”

The phrase greed which amounts to idolatry stands out for two reasons:

1. Paul sets this phrase apart from the others.
2. Because of the charge of idolatry.

Idolatry is an important word in the Scriptures.

* One of the central themes in Scripture is a refutation of
idolatry.
* One cannot understand massive amounts of Scripture
without understanding what Bible teaches about idolatry.

Idolatry is a serious sin in the Scripture.

* The very first commandment is against idolatry.
* The punishment for idolatry is very serious in the
Scripture.
* Idolatry is a defining mark of pagans.

That is why we need slow down to make sure we understand what Paul is getting at by defining idolatry, by looking at means Paul gives us here for discerning idolatry in our lives and how we can turn from this kind of idolatry.

What is idolatry?

1. A basic definition: Idolatry is investing something that is created with the properties of God.

2. A clarifying explanation: Idolatry is worshiping a god other than one true God either through acts of reverence we should give to God alone or through an attitude of reverence that should be reserved for Him alone.

3. Two helpful illustrations: Marriage and politics – giving the love your wife deserves to someone else; giving the loyalty and trust your king deserves to someone else.

How do we identify idolatry in our lives?

1. One simple question: We can evaluate whether or not we are in fact worshiping a god other than the one true God by examining ourselves as to whether or not we are covetous?

2. Several important tests:

- What you value.
- What you think about.
- What you dream about.
- What you are most committed to.
- Where you are putting your confidence.

How do we fight this kind of idolatry?

1. Question greed.
2. Speak the truth about greed.
3. Refuse to compromise with greed.
4. Replace greed with faith.
5. Fight greed with work.

Stupid Human Tricks…

We as humans have many amazing abilities.

One of the most amazing has to be the ability to turn things we should be giving thanks for into reasons to complain.

7 encouragements for people in difficult relationships

Six.

God has not left you on your own to figure out how to respond in the difficult situation your are facing.

You haven’t been dropped in the middle of a jungle with just a pat on the back and no map how to get out.

It may feel like that.

But you’ve got some tremendous resources straight from God Himself.

Like 1 Peter.

He’s given you instruction obviously in a book like 1 Peter how to respond, but you know he’s done more than that.

He’s also given you a person.

To say it another way, He doesn’t only tell you how he wants you to respond, He came down from heaven to earth to show you how.

That’s what Peter is getting at in verse 21ff.

“For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example so that you might follow in his steps.”

It’s easy sometimes sitting and listening to someone talk from the Bible about how to respond to unjust suffering to think that person doesn’t have any idea what you are going through, and it may be true, he doesn’t but God does and God provided clear instruction and help in the person of Jesus Christ to show you how He wants you to respond.

7 encouragements for people in difficult relationships

Four.

Whatever is happening is not just about you and the person that you are struggling with, it is about you and your relationship to the Lord.

It’s interesting to watch how often the writers of Scripture connect our relationship with others to our relationship with God.

For example this is something Peter brings out in verse 13 of chapter 1 Peter 2, where he writes, “Be subject.”

Reason.

“For the Lord’s sake.”

Then in verse 15, as he continues his exhortation, he writes

“For this is the will of God, that by doing good…”

It is not just about the government.

It is about God’s will.

In verse 19 he explains why a slave would be respectful even to an unjust master like this.

“For this is a gracious thing, when mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly.”

Mindful of God.

And again in chapter 3, verse 5 he explains exactly what motivated the holy women we read about in Scriptures to submit to their husbands when he says, “For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves.”

Their submission to their husbands had to do with their hope in God.

Speaking to husbands later, he warns them to be careful how they treat their wives because if they are not, it is going to have a very negative impact on their relationship with God.

Peter says in verse 7.

“showing honor . . . so that your prayers may not be hindered.”

Which all goes to show us that our relationships with other people are about so much more than our relationships with other people, ultimately the way you and I relate to other people has to do with our own attitude towards God.

He is the ultimate reference point for all your relationships.

Not your comfort.

Not even the other person.

God.

What does he want.

How can I please Him.

I think this is so helpful because other people, they change. If you make them your reference point. Some days they are going to do the right thing, other days they are not and if they are my reference point, the way I respond to them is going to be constantly going up and down.

But with God.

He doesn’t.

Change.

Plus, the fact is when you just focus on the other person, if that is the only person you are looking at, there are going to be times when you just can’t see doing the right thing because they might be actually evil.

If it is only them and you in the relationship, there’s not much hope because they are just not a good person.

Peter’s aware of that possibility.

That is why he talks in verse 18 about servants whose masters are morally bankrupt.

That is what the word unreasonable means there.

Which means if you are only thinking about the other person, then you are going to easily be able to find reasons to give up and to stop doing the right thing but Peter won’t let us just think about the other person, we have to see that our response to that person is connected to our attitude towards God.

It is almost like you have to learn to see Jesus smiling standing behind the person who is screaming in your face.

I remember I had a friend a number of years back who came under attack and he was describing how painful it was, he just wanted to attack back. He actually was invited to a sit down across the table kind of conference with the people who were attacking him and they were just unleashing on him and I asked him how was he able to continue to respond with grace and kindness in the middle of that.

He said that he just imagined tape recording the conversation and sitting down afterwards with Jesus and listening, and so he made it his primary goal to speak in a way that would make Jesus happy.

That’s what I am talking about.

Focusing on Christ even more than the other person. Ultimately we think it is about the other person, that is why we are freaking out, that is why we are getting angry, but it is really about faith.

Mindful of God.

Hoped in God.

And Jesus, verse 23.

“When he was reviled, he did not revile in return, when he suffered he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.”

Which means,

Five.

Whatever happens God has given you a unique opportunity to please Him and He will remember your obedience.

Peter actually brings this out in two of the specific situations he addresses.

First look at what he says to servants in verse 19.

He says, “For this is a gracious thing, when mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly.”

And then he emphasizes that again in verse 20.

“For what credit is it if when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure this is a gracious thing in the sight of God.”

Doing good, suffering for it and enduring is a gracious thing in the sight of God.

The Greek word is literally grace.

The parallel term he uses though if you look at verse 20 is credit.

“For what credit is it…”

If you put verse 19 and 20 back to back, these are parallel terms.

And the word credit means renown or fame or glory.

When you are suffering in a relationship and yet you remember that God’s there, and so you keep on doing the right thing, that is something God remembers. That’s something that finds renown or fame in the sight of God.

The heros they are celebrating in heaven’s newspaper look a little different than the worlds.

Which is why while some people would look at someone suffering and say that is the worst situation the person can be in and yes it is a difficult bad situation, no doubt but it is not only that and you can’t think of it as only that, because Peter here makes it clear it does provide you an opportunity to please God.

That’s an idea Peter comes back to in verse 4 of chapter 3 as he speaks to wives as well.

He says “let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious in the sight of God.”

Being gentle which here has to do with being willing to yield and being quiet which here means being steady, tranquil you might say in the face of attacks is something that God Himself finds precious and beautiful.

Which is huge.

When God thinks you are beautiful.

And again it is why if you are in a difficult situation and you are thinking and talking about that situation as if it were only difficult, you are not really seeing the situation correctly. In that situation you have an opportunity you would not otherwise have and you have a responsibility to think a little about the unique opportunity that is in front of you.

I know that sounds like a lot, but if you look at the way Jesus spoke this is the kind of encouragement he often gave.

For example, check out Luke 6:27ff.

“But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back. And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.”

Now by itself, some of the things Jesus says there sound pretty bad.

Being hated, being cursed, being abused.

Being hit in the face, having your clothes taken away, someone stealing your stuff.

But Jesus doesn’t just see it as a bad situation. He sees it as an opportunity. Why?

Verse 32.

“If you love those who love you what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those who from you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners to get back the same amount. But love your enemies and do good, and lend expecting nothing in return and your reward will be great! And you will be sons of the Most High.”

In other words, everyone is able to respond graciously to people who treat them graciously, even unbelievers but when you are being mistreated and taken advantage of, that’s when you as a believer have a unique opportunity to prove your faith and you have to think of it like that, and when you do act in faith you can be sure that God notices and that He will remember and bless you for it.

Peter he says that very thing straight up.

If you look back at 1 Peter 3:9.

“Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless for to this you were called, that you might obtain a blessing.”

Watch Out!

One of the things I like about reading the sermons of old-school preachers, like Jonathan Edwards and Thomas Watson and Stephen Charnock is that it’s obvious they really meditated on the text.

They don’t always go about expositing the text the way that we might and there are times when I wish they might have looked a little more carefully at the context in which the particular passage was placed, (though you know with guys like Edwards I haven’t really found that to be as true) but man, they did think long and hard about the text that they were preaching and how it applies to our everyday lives.

Take a sermon I was reading by Jonathan Edwards the other day on the parable of the four soils.

He talks about the fact that it is strange that people can hear the Word of God repeatedly and sit under a gospel ministry and experience no saving effect. Knowing what we know about the power of the gospel. that’s just strange.

And so he starts thinking about why. Why is that?

One reason has to do with the fact that there is a Satan. There is a supernatural being who wants to keep us from benefiting from the Word of God.

Another has to do with the fact that doing what the Scripture says isn’t always easy. So sometimes people will seem to get all excited about the Word but when they find out that it is going to be really hard to put the Word into action, they give up.

And yet another reason has to do with the cares of this world. Check out Mark 4.

This is actually what Edwards focuses on.

He writes, “The cares of this life often hinder the saving effect of the Word of God.”

Now here’s what I love. He doesn’t stop there. He meditates on exactly how the cares of this world go about hindering the saving effect of the Word of God.

First, he says the cares of this world keep the Word of God from making the impression on their minds as it naturally would.

Our hearts are kind of like a cup.

If they are filled with one thing, they can’t be filled with something else.
Or to put it another way, the cares of this world and the Word of God are like opposite ends of magnets. If your heart is centered on the cares of this world when the Word comes, it is going to repel it.

It makes your heart like cement. The Word of God is like a basketball and if you are focused on the here and now, no matter how hard it is thrown on the cement, it just rebounds right off.

The preacher can get up there, he can give all kinds of great illustrations, he can be real logical, he can show you what he’s getting from the text, he can speak with great authority and power and yet, it makes no impression because your mind is somewhere else.

The way the soul is, Edwards explains, two concerns of an opposite nature cannot possess it at once. So if your soul is all wrapped up in the cares of this world, then the Word of God is not going to make much of an impact on you. You just aren’t going to be able to really focus.

Second, he says that the cares of this world tend to erase impressions by made the Word.

You are sitting there in church and you are convicted by the Word of God. You just know that it’s right and that you’ve got to change.
You get up and leave, go back to work and start hanging out with your friends, watching television, whatever and slowly but surely that concern about your soul just doesn’t seem as important anymore.

Third, he says that the cares of this world indispose men to the duties of religion directed by the Word.

We only have so much time and energy and if we use all our time and energy on pursuing the things of this world, we aren’t going to have much if any left for doing what God has called us to do.

I don’t know if you have ever seen a huge, musclebound weightlifter try to run a race. It can be kind of funny. He is so focused so much on one particular aspect of physical fitness, that it makes it difficult for him to exercise in any other way. When we exercise ourselves so much regarding the cares of this world, it makes it very difficult for us to get fit spiritually.

Fourth, he explains that the cares of this world expose men to many temptations that keep them from really pursuing the Word.

If I were in China and I were talking to people who were being persecuted, I would have certain cautions to give them. They are obviously in a dangerous situation. But what I am not sure we always realize, sitting here in America, is that we too are in a really dangerous situation spiritually.

Affluence, prosperity, the cares of this world may in fact have done greater harm to Christians throughout the ages than all the persecutors and tormentors combined.

Edwards gives several helping directions in light of this great danger.

First, he says don’t aim at great things in this world.

Try preaching that at a graduation service.

But he’s got a point. Why would you pursue great things in the world?
Honor?

Well, whose respect do you really want at the end of the day? God’s or man’s?

Providing for your family?

Who do you think can provide for your family best, you or God?

Even from a human perspective, you talk to most dying men and you ask them about what was most important in their life and I doubt many of them are going to say the fact that they lived in a nice house. Or that some people they didn’t even really know respected them.

I guarantee you if you go to heaven or hell and talk to the people there, there’s not a single one of them who is going to counsel you to make it your life’s goal to be great in the eyes of the world.

It’s just not worth the energy.

Especially when you have the kinds of promises God makes to his people in Matthew 6, like how he is going to provide for their needs if they will just seek first the kingdom.

Second, he says watch over your heart.

Anytime you feel a stirring of the Holy Spirit as you listen to the Word of God, jump on it. Imagine that conviction like a precious jewel and guard it lest anyone take it from you. As you leave church, you might imagine that there are any number of armed robbers who want desperately to steal that diamond from you, and those armed robbers are the cares of this world.

Think of how you are when you are really focused on something and seek to be that way with the Word of God.

Third, he says never trust your heart about the future.

In other words, don’t rest in resolutions you make when you hear the Word of God. Obey immediately. You don’t want to give the devil time to mess with your convictions.

Fourth, he says watch out for concerns that might entangle you.

Fifth, he says to give yourself many reasons your soul is important.

If you are in a burning building, you are going to run even if you don’t like running.

You may not like listening to preaching and you may not like reading, but listen, if you know how important your soul is and if you know the dangers of sin, you are going to be pretty passionate about doing those things despite your natural inclinations.

Think long and hard about the threatenings of God’s Word.

Think about the uncertainty of this life.

Think about the length of eternity.

Finally, Edwards says, whatever you do, pray, pray, pray that God’s Word would transform you and don’t stop praying until your heart is affected and changed by it.

7 encouragements for people in difficult relationships

#3

Your situation is one God can use to accomplish a whole lot of good.

For example, if you look at 1 Peter 2 I think you can see at least two ways God can use your difficult circumstances to accomplish good.

To start with in verse 12 of chapter 2, there’s the transformation of unbelievers.

There were people who were speaking against Christians as evildoers being transformed to the point where they end up glorifying God on the day of visitation, which is you know a big change.

That is something that Peter comes back to again in chapter 3.

In this case he is speaking about the specific situation of a believing wife with an unbelieving husband. He writes, “Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives.”

The word won there is used in other places in Scripture as a missionary term, basically equivalent to save. Be subject so that even if they are out and pagans they might be saved as a result of observing the godly behavior of their wives.

When you are starting to become discouraged by the difficult relationship you are in, you need to remember that it might just be that God uses your persistently good behavior to completely transform someone else’s life and even change their eternal future, which is pretty exciting.

You might think of it like a missionary opportunity.

We read missionary biographies and we are all impressed about someone leaving the comforts of their home to live in the middle of the desert somewhere to bring others to Christ; it may be that in your difficult relationship God is giving you a tremendous opportunity to do something like that through the difficult relationship you are facing. God may be keeping you in that messy, difficult relationship to accomplish His great redemptive purpose.

There’s more.

To keep going, Peter shows us something else God might be accomplishing in verse 15 of chapter 2.

Where he says, “For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people.”

It may be, another option, it may be that through your consistent obedience to God’s Word, doing good in other words, you end shutting the mouths, silencing, those who are attacking you and the gospel. You make their talk about you look foolish.

I am sure you can think of all sorts of different ways that might happen.

Like someone calling you a liar at work and yet your employer, he has seen you telling the truth for years, and the person attacking you brings his case before the employer and it’s clear he doesn’t have any ground to stand on.

The way Peter imagines here is found in verse 14 where he talks about the governing officials recognizing those who are persistently doing good and punishing those who aren’t. In those days it was common apparently for Roman officials to commend those who were doing good in the community, which obviously would have made those attacking believers look pretty silly.

The problem I guess over the years is that Christians have responded to the difficulties of life just like the unbelievers around them, they do the right thing when it is easy and then have stopped doing the right thing when it became difficult, and as a result, when unbelievers have gone to attack the church, they have been able to open their mouths very wide because the good works aren’t there to shut them up.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of supernatural effort to be in a difficult relationship and do the wrong thing; that doesn’t make anyone take notice but to be in a difficult relationship, suffer and do the right thing, that’s something else.

True…

Little Update

Thank you so much for your concern and your help over the past year.

WE ARE GRATEFUL!

I have never been very good at writing updates. With so much to do, it can be a little difficult to take the time to look back. It’s a good process though because when we finally do take the time to think back we can see how much God has done in our lives and that causes us to be thankful and even more excited about how good He’s going to be to us in the future!

FAMILY LIFE

First of all, I am just amazed by my wife. I am sure God knew I needed a lot of help so he gave me the best one! If you followed Marda around as she takes care of the home, homeschools the children, feeds all the visitors that are coming through our house, and helps develop the mercy ministry I am confident you would be pretty sure I needed a lot of help and that God was very gracious to me in giving me Marda as well!

Our daughter McKenna is a joy. She just turned ten, so she’s proud to say she’s a tweenager. If you hadn’t heard of that, don’t worry, I hadn’t either. She’s busy learning the guitar and has such a sweet voice. We love listening to her sing with her sister Cambria.

Cambria is a pretty wonderful little eight year old if I do say so myself. She’s not so little anymore however. Pretty soon she’s going to be as tall as her mommy. She’s really a servant as well. Marda always tells me Cambria could run the house if she were gone!

Caitlyn could brighten your day in an instant with her smile and her ability to talk. She bubbles over with happiness and joy. Whenever I go on walks with Caitlyn I come back happy and my ears come back tired because she’s non-stop, let me tell you that. We’ve also been happy to watch her to develop a great friendship with her Grandma. She’s often asking us, can I go over to Grandma’s house and when she does, we have to go over there and drag her back!

Our little man Muzi has grown quite a bit. It took a while however. The first few months he didn’t even gain a single gram. But with time, things are changing. He’s even starting to talk! He began school a couple of months ago and his teachers were amazed. They looked his brain-scan, looked at Muzi and told Marda that he was basically a miracle. He shouldn’t be able to do the things he is doing, but with God’s help, he’s really moving forward.

Zanelle is a sweetie-pie. She’s best buddies with Caitlyn. They are constantly playing games. She’s also Mommy’s helper. Whenever something needs to be done around the house, Zanelle is there to help out with a smile.

I’ll tell you what, Bayley is becoming a chatterbox. With all these daughters, pretty soon Sundays will be my only time to talk. While she’s the youngest daughter, don’t tell her because she doesn’t seem to know it. Right now, she’s pretty sure she’s the boss of the home and she expects her sisters to recognize it.

We are pretty amazed by Lincoln. We call him our always content baby. He does cry, but not often. He’s just happy to be loved.

MERCY MINISTRY

As many of you know, we’ve recently been involved in beginning 1Hope4Africa. We are really thankful that God is bringing together a team of people who are excited about making sacrifices to serve others who are in need. We were even able to add our first staff member this year, Emmanuel who is from the D.R.C.!

While 1Hope is involved in many different things, at the end of the day 1Hope is about helping the church come alongside and develop a relationship with those who are in very vulnerable and difficult situations in order to help them achieve God’s best for their lives.

For example, we are currently assisting orphans in a variety of ways. We have brought orphans into our home and are praying that other families in the area would do the same. We are looking to find other homes where “houseparents” can come and care for 6-8 orphans. We also have spent time reaching out to a group of orphans in a nearby township over the past year. We have run a Bible Club with these children and quite often we bring food, provide school supplies, clothing, warm blankets and other gifts for the orphans we see there. Please pray because most while these children need food, clothing and shelter they more urgently need a godly family, Christian parents, and to know Jesus Christ as their personal Savior.

A major part of 1Hope’s ministry is to refugees. We have come in contact with many, many refugees that reside here in the city of Pretoria. We are seeking to provide food packs for many of them on a monthly basis and also to meet other needs as they arise such as clothing, job opportunities, accommodation etc. Many are in our home over the weekend for Bible Study, and for a wonderful time of fellowship and food after Sunday Church. If you are interested in finding out more information about this, please check out our web-site www.1hope4africa.com! You’ll read some stories there about some of our friends that I think will encourage you and give you more information with which you can go to God in prayer.

CHURCH PLANTING

We have recently been sent out by our church to help begin another church in the heart of the city. This is my bread and butter. I LOVE THIS. I’ll never understand how those who are interested in truth are not interested in showing mercy because the truth of the gospel leads us to mercy, but you know what, at the same time I’ll never understand how those are interested are not interested in truth because man, TRUTH IS THE ULTIMATE MERCY.

We are happy to have begun meeting with the core team in September and we have been amazed once again by God’s goodness and by what He’s accomplished already. I keep saying to people, the one thing I know how to do is fail, if anything else happens, it is God and we are seeing God work right in front of us. We have core team of eager God-centered servants, several other godly leaders who are involved, a great team of musicians, and two African interns from Angola and the D.R.C. who are currently staying with us and studying at Christ’s Seminary.

I thought it might help you get a picture of what we are after if I just gave you a quick summary of what we are praying God will do through Living Hope.

Vision

To glorify God by growing a biblical inner city church where believers know, proclaim and live in a manner worthy of the gospel, where the gospel brings people together not only in position but also in practice, where leaders are trained and sent out to strengthen churches throughout Africa and where believers are sacrificially reaching out to the lost with the love of Christ and the message of truth.

Purpose

To grow a church that will function as a model of what a vibrant biblical African church looks like and to ignite a church planting/strengthening movement that fills the city of Pretoria with the gospel of Christ in such a way that people of the city are changed in every dimension, spiritually, socially, and culturally. Our object is to turn the city upside down, that where sin once abounded grace might abound still more.

Mission

To establish a multi-cultural city church with both a church planting center and mercy ministry outreach.

Specific Focus

3rd world in focus, 1st and 3rd world in scope. Focusing on the vulnerable accomplishes several objectives at once:

- It demonstrates one of the ways the gospel transforms a person’s entire worldview.

- It reaches out to those who often are not reached to and it is a way of discipling and evangelizing those who are.

For one, it effectively exposes a number of the idols that those in comfortable positions often unknowingly worship.

Second, it provides a tangible demonstration of the difference the gospel makes in people’s lives.

- It also provides a unique opportunity to reach the rest of South Africa and Africa as a whole. Many of those who come to stay in downtown Pretoria are from other places in South Africa and even Africa. (We already have people from Angola, D.R.C., Zimbabwe and even Burundi who fellowship with us. Not to mention South Africa, Germany and America as well!) If we can reach out to them, support them, train them and give them a biblical model of what the Christian life is and what the church is, that will not only affect them – it will also affect hundreds of other people in their communities in their villages and home countries.

TRAINING

I have the privilege of being involved in Grace School of Ministry which trains men from all over Africa in biblical counseling. This has been a real joy for us as we’ve seen God take what these men are learning and using it to help them impact people in deep and profound ways. I also have had the opportunity to teach at various conferences and family camps and orphanages over the past year.

But I do have to say that what I have enjoyed the most is having three interns stay with our family over the past year for discipleship. Steve is from the United States, Django is from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Oliviera is from Angola. God has used these men to draw me closer to Himself and we as a family have seen such tremendous growth in them. We are excited to see how God is going to use them in the future as all three are looking to serve Him with their lives in the years to come!

If you have made it this far in the newsletter, THANKS! CONGRATULATIONS! That was a lot of words, I know but it’s just a beginning when it comes to what we have to be thankful about. WE SERVE A GREAT GOD AND WE LONG TO SEE HIM GLORIFIED! Will you pray with us about that?

We’d love to hear from you – just send us an e-mail and don’t forget to check out our various web-sites for more regular updates.

www.joshnmarda.wordpress.com
www.1hope4africa.com
www.livinghopechurch.co.za

Luck?

I don’t think so…

7 encouragements for people in difficult relationships

Encouragement #2

Your situation is one God can and will use to bring Himself glory.

There are many different ways God can bring Himself glory through difficult relationships.

We see one of those ways in 1 Peter 2:12 where Peter writes,

“Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.”

While Peter is not promising that this will happen, he certainly views it as something that can happen. One of the ways God might glorify Himself through your particular circumstances is by using your response to change the person who is attacking you from hating God and wanting to make Him look great when Jesus returns and I bring that up because sometimes when we are in difficult situations we begin to think and talk like the only possible outcome of those situations is tragedy, and you know what, sometimes we talk like that because it really feels like that but look, while a lot of those bad things may actually happen, there’s always something good that is going to come out of whatever difficulty you are experiencing and that is that God is going to find a way to bring Himself glory.

God’s the world’s best glory hunter. He always gets his game.

One way may be the way that Peter talks about here. He may use the situation you are experiencing to change the people around you. Another way, honestly, God might not change the people around you but He might use the situation to change you.

There are all kinds of ways that God can use a difficult situation to bring Himself glory. Those are two but there are more. This is something the Bible talks about a lot.

He can use a difficult situation to cause you to stop relying on yourself and start relying on Him.

If you turn look at 2 Corinthians 1:8 and 9 you see Paul puts it like this.

He says, “For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed we felt that we had received the sentence of death.” That sounds like a pretty bad situation. But Paul continues. “But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises us from the dead.” That’s one way God was using that situation to glorify Himself, by making it very clear to Paul and others that He was their only hope.

If you look at that text, you can actually see another. He can use a difficult situation to cause others to pray for you, which will then result in them giving praise to God for the way He has answered your prayers. 2 Corinthians 1:11. “You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.” He can use a difficult situation to produce courage and a desire to spread the gospel in the people around you.

That’s what Paul brings up in Philippians 1. He’s imprisoned, which is a pretty bad place to be, no matter what the particular imprisonment is like. And yet Paul sees that God is doing something significant in the middle of this. He writes in v. 12 and following, “I want you to know brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ. And most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment are much more bold to speak the word without fear.”

It might be that God uses your response to the afflictions you are experiencing to demonstrate that his grace really is sufficient, not just when things are going well but also when they are not.

This is something we see Paul saying was happening in the Macedonian church in 2 Corinthians 8. He writes, “We want you to know brothers about the grace of God that has been given among the churches in Macedonia for in a sever test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part.” Paul’s doing what? Using the way God worked in the Macedonian churches to encourage the Corinthian church to obedience. And that’s something God may be doing with you.

We can be pretty creative when we are thinking about different ways our situations can turn out for the worst and make our life more difficult. When you are suffering though you should take some of that creativity and use it to think about how God can take that situation your in and bring Himself glory; which if you are a believer, is the thing you want most.

I am definitely reading into the text but I wonder if this is something that Abraham did when he was thinking through taking Isaac up to the altar; Hebrews tells us that he thought God was going to raise him from the dead; now Abraham had never seen anyone raised from the dead, that wasn’t in the history books, but he was so sure that God was going to keep His promises, that he came up with this creative solution, I just picture him waking up in the middle of the night saying to himself, oh that’s how God is going to do it and you know, we can attempt to follow in Abraham’s footsteps when we find ourselves in difficult relationships, taking some time to think about biblical ways God might use the situation to bring Himself glory.