Horizon Church Christmas Advent Bible Reading Plan: The Joy of Every Longing HeartSample

While suffering can result from the poor quality of our choices, it’s also from living in a shadow world where evil is threatening its original goodness. Our collective rejection of God results in suffering and eventual death—for us and the world we were given to care for. Yet suffering and death are also what God uses to bring us back to wholeness.

The power of death has been broken! The Word came into the very world that He brought into existence! His life was so potent that death itself became a life-giving force in Him. The very thing which separated us from God—death—now brings us to the fullness of life in Him.

Now to live (in the fullest sense), we have to let that old self die—the one driven by fear and seeking comfort in all the wrong places—so we can receive a different kind of life. The Word became human to teach us how to be authentic humans.

When my fears and sins have led the day, I have felt less myself. Only in drawing near to Jesus do we feel most real and alive.

Bad things still happen. Yet in these challenging moments, God can work to bring us more of His life by using it to test and refine our faith. We can’t always see how He is going to provide, but God’s action isn’t contingent on our own imaginative or conceptual capacities. We are not in control. We can only rest in the God who is.

God, over and again, has shown Himself trustworthy. I can honestly say that goodness has followed me, and He has taken care of me kindly. It is not often in the ways I would have chosen, but Jesus in Gethsemane wouldn’t have chosen to die; I’m thankful He instead said, “Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:29)