When squeezed, what’s inside comes out….

Life; especially hardships, problems, disappointments, sickness, and pandemics, squeeze us mercilessly at times.

What has been pushing you way beyond your coping zone recently? The potential list is endless. Paul’s list in Romans 8 included trouble, suffering, hunger, nakedness, danger, and death!

But, if in it all, we’re rooted in Christ, when squeezed by bad things, somehow the fruit of ‘goodness’ (wholesomeness) comes out, despite our circumstances.

To be honest, we struggle to see or believe this when we’re going through the mill, yet how could God give us his most precious gift, Jesus, and at the same time want our ultimate harm? It’s absurd! God is constantly at work in those who love him, to bring about our ‘good’ as HE sees it. Can you trust him in that, when everything at times screams the opposite?

Of course, we prefer that ‘all things’ does not include ‘bad things’, but it seems suffering and pain are woven into the fabric of life in a broken world. There is no value in the pain itself, but rather what God produces through it. When I lost a job through great injustice, my world caved in, but years later I came to see it was the best thing to happen to me for what God had ahead. It turned out to be a happy release.

God desires and promises that he will bring goodness out of the most impossible-looking and painful circumstances we can imagine because he loves us; even failures we’re responsible for. Once we turn back to him, he will redeem and weave something of goodness into our lives.

Fruitfulness, goodness, and resurrection grow out of death. Jesus said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

What pain, difficulty, loss, mistake or suffering do you need to release to God today so that he can transform this ‘dying’ into something of goodness that will bless you and others?

Prayer:

Father, help me receive the tough, unwanted things that come my way, knowing that nothing will separate me from your love – that you are working something to bring honour to Jesus. Amen.