Accepting the Challenge

Isaiah 26:3-4: You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock.” (ESV).


There are going to be times in life where the road ahead is a dark one. There will be times in life where it’s time to accept the challenges and the trials. There will be times where we have to go through the fire. Maybe your fire looks like struggling family members, maybe it looks like financial stress, the death of a loved one, chronic illness, etc. Our first instinct in many of these seasons, I being the most guilty of all, will immediately be, “Why, Oh God, are You allowing this to happen?” or, “What did I do to deserve this?”


For the latter, the same question can be applied to the Lord’s blessings. What did we do to deserve those? The answer to that is - absolutely nothing. The answer to the same question when it comes to our trials and valleys? We truly deserved much worse. Romans 4:25 says, “He was handed over to die because of our sins, and he was raised to life to make us right with God.” Romans 5:8 says, “But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.” (NLT). Jesus Christ bore all that we truly deserved, and although His death on the cross did not free us from the troubles of this world, it did secure our victory over them. John 16:33 says, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (NIV).


The first question: “Why, Oh God, are you allowing this to happen?” is perhaps more commonly asked, and more painfully asked by us when our spirits are weary and broken, when God seems silent and life is spinning far outside of any illusion we ever had of control. Charles F Stanley said in his book “Every Day in His Presence”: “When God calls you to a task or allows a trial, He assumes full responsibility for removing the hindrances that would keep you from succeeding. Therefore, you must respond in faith.” God does not author the trouble in our lives, but when it happens, He is there for us. He hurts with us, and He works all things together for our good (Romans 8:28).


The next time you find yourself accepting a new challenge, the next time you find yourself in serious hardship, I encourage you to have faith all the more. It might not agree with what the world says, what logic says, what fear says, and those voices all seem so much louder than a still, small voice, but it will agree with what the Bible says. We can have faith in a God who has won the victory, who has overcome all the trouble we will ever experience in this world. “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock.”