Extraordinary Ordinary!预览

Many of us grew up with a warped view of God and mistakenly were taught that He was stern, judgmental, and wielded a big stick that would bop us over our heads when we got out of line. We falsely believed God was uninterested in our pain or our daily lives. The words of Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, blast that highly false opinion of the character of God into smithereens. Our God ... the God we worship ... the Father who lovingly sent Jesus to give us life ... is actually the Father of mercy and of all comfort. He knows of no other way to be than to be comforting and soothing. It is in His intrinsic nature to reach out to His children with encouragement and love.

Any encouragement you need is from the throne room of God’s heart; when you are experiencing traumatic emotional or circumstantial pain, do not make the mistake of attempting to comfort yourself through eating, spending, sleeping, withdrawing, or other temporary panaceas. The God who loves you with every beat of your heart is the Author and Source of all comfort. Nothing and no one else has the power to make any long-term or significant difference in your life. One of the most powerful truths of the abundant life Jesus came to give us is that we serve a God who is concerned ... He simply cares about you.

God not only cares deeply about the things which cause us pain, but He then takes the ugly pain that has penetrated our souls and uses that same wretched pain to turn us into something more beautiful than we were before the pain. He engineers the discomfort into a springboard for our destiny and we are then able to comfort others. Nothing is wasted in the economy of the Kingdom of God as He takes that which was meant to diminish our lives and turns it into profit. God uses broken, pain-riddled lives to bring His healing and miraculous touch to a broken and pain-riddled world.