Good Morning Everyone,
Our theme for this month: “Trust”
Our Bible verse for today: “Then Job stood up, tore his robe, and shaved his head. He fell to the ground and worshiped, saying: ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will leave this life. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Praise the name of Yahweh.’ Throughout all this Job did not sin or blame God for anything.” Job 1:20-22 (HCSB)
Our thought for today: “It’s in the worst times of suffering that we learn to trust God the most.”
For more than 3000 years Bible readers have been fascinated by the story of Job. A good and godly man who had great success and who honored God with his life, Job suffered a series of horrible and seemingly inexplicable tragedies in his life. It was like a cascading row of dominos falling, with one awful event leading right into the next.
In order to really understand the lesson of Job you have to have endured terrible loss and pain in your own life – or you have to have been close to someone who did and you walked through it with them.
But in reality, Job’s story is all of our stories because sooner or later life brings tragedy and great suffering to all of us. And the questions are always the same: “Why is this happening to me?”, “What am I supposed to do about it?”, “How long is this going to last?” and “What’s going to happen next?”
The story of Job reinforces the truth that we live in a broken and bleeding world that is filled with sin and suffering. Worse, we have an adversary (Satan) who actively seeks to bring pain and suffering into our lives to further his own evil purposes. The challenge for us is that we must trust God to help us face those situations and in the middle of it all we have to remember that God is supremely good and absolutely sovereign, and therefore He has a purpose for allowing these things into our lives.
As we follow Job’s story we discover that he suffered greatly. We also see that he did not pretend to like it or to be happy about it – and he also did not attempt to minimize the severity of what he was suffering. But through it all he remained focused on the proven goodness of God. The lesson is that in the good times and in the bad times God is still God. He is still good, He is Creator, Redeemer, Savior, Sovereign, and Lord; and we can trust Him.
If that’s our confession in the middle of suffering, then Satan’s best efforts in our lives have been rendered harmless and he is shown to be a defeated foe.
Yes life can be hard, and we will be faced with situations we don’t like and would rather not be going through. But in such times we are to stay focused on the great truth that God is there with us in the middle of the trial, He has a purpose and a plan for it, and when it’s all said and done it will be shown to be true that God is good and we can trust Him.
God Bless,
Pastor Jim
Oak Hill Baptist Church 