Hope and Faith in Trouble

You do your best as a mother or father, but your child goes wrong.

If you lose your job, if you get sick, if life stabs you in the back, you have problems.

What does the Bible say about problems in life?

My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy,
because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; Jas 1:2–3 NRSV

When you park in a shopping centre and come back to your car, you find a big, ugly dent. How do you react?

Do you celebrate? I don't.

Maybe we need to change our perspective. We can learn to trust God in all our problems. God always wants to help. Gratitude for God's help changes everything.

It is important to be grateful for God's help after He has helped.

If you are familiar with God's love, you can be grateful in advance that God has a solution to your problems where you have not yet found a way out.

In this earthly life, we will always encounter problems, setbacks and disappointments. We must learn to accept this reality as normal. Not so easy.

What did Jesus say about this?

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” Jn 16:33 NIV

If we don't expect difficult problems, we will always be stressed because the problems will always come anyway.

When we read in the Bible that we can overcome with God's help, we should expect that we will always experience something we need to overcome.

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?

As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. Rom 8:35–37 NIV

In the Bible we see how God has saved his children time and again with miracles. If we study these miracles, we will realise that in many cases the people who experienced a miracle had no other way out.

You don't need a healing until you are sick. You don't need a miracle until you need a miracle.