Suffering is a required course in the university of life, one that should lead to you a closer walk with God.
In this life, you are being prepared for home. God is using adversity to shape you. God is allowing those things which He is redeeming for your good and His glory. In the present tense, then, you are to practice living in His presence.
God is drawing you through suffering from an egocentric to a Christocentric world. He is preventing you from the wealth or success, perhaps, that you thought you wanted, because He knows that such things will drive you away from Him. His greatest desire is for you to know Him, and this is your greatest good. As you come to recognize this truth, you will have a closer walk with God.
Growth in the Spirit
Growth in the Spirit has to do with revisiting truth and seeing them on new levels. The more we grow in the Spirit, the more we will recognize the holiness of God and the sinfulness of sin. God’s standards of perfection are so high, we can never achieve them apart from the grace of Christ. Some people may live better lives than others, but we all fall short. We all need Christ’s righteousness to save us.
The deeper our relationship with God, the more we will see the magnitude of God’s grace. The more we will appreciate Christ’s sacrifice and come to have a closer walk with God through that knowledge. The closer we walk with God, the more we will choose gratitude and contentment.
Skill in the Art of Living
Your thought life affects your relationship more than you might realize. Sloppy thought lives invite the definition of the world, which defines us by default. But Christlikeness requires training.
Wisdom is always uneven, which is why we need a constant learning modality. The more we grow, the more we realize we still have further to grow in our sanctification. In His mercy, God does not reveal all of our sins at once to us. Instead, He works with us over time. He convicts us in specifics, not in generalities, to bring us closer to Him.
It takes training and failure to become spring loaded to the Spirit in the daily arena of life. But we can slowly become skilled in the art of living, which is wisdom.
Let’s just take one example to demonstrate the truth of this. Consider how you drive. This is an area in which many of us are spring loaded to instant anger and the gratification of revenge. Someone cuts you off, you speed up to cut them off. Someone blocks you, you block them. But such is the way of the flesh. It takes training to become spring loaded to grace in such scenarios.
No matter what stage of life we are in, we can always develop more skill in the art of living as we develop a closer walk with God.
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