Jesus Revolution By Greg Laurie And Ellen VaughnПримерок

Day Six

How Deep Is Your Trust?

Scripture: Romans 5:3-5

In 2008 Greg Laurie and his wife Cathe lost their youngest son, Christopher, in a tragic car accident. Greg had no choice, of course, regarding his son’s death. But in the aftermath, he did have a choice. He could sort of paint by numbers with a fake, superficial religiosity, and give up and drift for the rest of his life. Or he could go back to the bedrock, to the absolutes of his faith, and vigorously trust God for whatever new thing He was now doing. 

The Jesus Revolution that had turned Greg’s life upside down back in 1970 had to be real and powerful almost forty years later. 

It was.

The reality of faith didn’t anesthetize the pain. Trusting Jesus wasn’t an emotional Xanax. Greg and Cathe hurt all the time, their chests pressed with a constant, crushing weight. But faith did make it bearable, second by second by second. 

And because they had studied the Bible, day in and day out, for years, they knew a few things. Not just intellectually, but deep in their souls, things they could hold on to in the midst of the storm. 

First, they knew that life is full of trouble, just as Jesus had promised. Greg realized that he had unconsciously assumed that because his childhood was so full of pain, he might get a break as an adult. Not so. But the pain of this world made Heaven itself much more real, and now they found they were thinking of Heaven all the time, with great expectation. 

Second, they knew God loved them.

Third, they knew that Jesus wept with them. 

Fourth, they knew that God can be glorified, in some mysterious way, by human suffering.

Storms will come. Fires will burn. Terrorists and rogue governments will attack. Stock markets will crash. Cancer and other disease, accidents, murder, suicide, betrayal, and death—they will come in this world. For Greg, in the fulcrum

days after the loss of his son, life came down, oddly enough, to the same essential question that Lonnie Frisbee had posed to him when he was seventeen years old.

“Are you for Christ, or against Him?” Except now the question was, “Do you trust Christ, really, or don’t you?”

Suffering has been defined as having what you don’t want, or wanting what you don’t have. What are you struggling with right now? How can this suffering strengthen your faith?