Refined - Finding Joy in the Midst of the FireSample

The good that God is working from the painful and crushing events of your life is the good that He is working in you. God is placing His glory in your life and is leaving a deposit of all that He is inside of you. We have erroneously assumed that “good” is what replaces “bad” with circumstances, such as health, happiness, and pleasure. However, God defines “good” as what makes you and I more like Jesus. God uses suffering to make human beings more like Jesus! God is well able to take what is perceived as bitter by itself and turn it into a revolutionary force in one’s life that transforms anyone into possessing the character of Jesus. God delights in taking the things that have roared painfully through your life with the force of a hurricane and use those exact events to make you think and act and emote like Jesus. God’s plan trumps the devastation of the enemy every single time. The enemy wants to destroy you with problems, challenges, and storms, but God intends to turn you into the representation of His Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus is your elder Brother, and it is time for you to start acting like Him! It is time for you to model your life after the life of your Big Brother! He came to be the “show and tell” of how to live well, how to live powerfully, and how to live in the goodness of God, the Father. Oftentimes, God delivers His children out of suffering and tragedy, but He always protects us by shielding us with His goodness. Everything that comes into your life is filtered through the Father’s ultimate goodness. You can rest assured that nothing will touch your life that He does not allow and that He will not work for your good. Only a good, all-powerful God is able to take what is incredibly bad and miraculously turn it into something incredibly good. Every tragic event and disappointing experience that a believer goes through this side of Heaven should have one purpose and one purpose alone: to make each one of us more like Jesus. If a greater good can take place by God allowing you to walk through something rather than being detoured around it, God goes for the greater good—to make you more like Jesus.