In Christ, we have an ironclad, unfailing, all-encompassing God-given guarantee that every single circumstance in life will sooner or later turn out well for those committed to Him.
— Robert J. Morgan, The Promise:Â How God Works All Things Together for Good, p. xviii
Satan wants to destroy our dreams. God wants to surpass them. He gives us dreams so we’ll long for his reality.
— Beth Moore, Praying God’s Word Day by Day, p. 196
The Lord took no pleasure in my broken neck. Like any father who has compassion on his children, it pained his heart to see me hurt. Yet at the same time, it pleased the Lord to permit my accident. My spinal cord injury was something he sovereignly designed in and for his good pleasure.
God’s ways are so much higher than ours, he has the capacity to look at the world through two lenses — through a narrow lens and a wide-angle one. When God looks at a painful event through a narrow lens, he sees the tragedy for what it is. He is deeply grieved. . . . When God looks at that same event through his wide-angle lens, however, he sees the tragedy in relation to everything leading up to it, as well as flowing out from it. He sees a mosaic stretching into eternity. It is this mosaic with all its parts, both good and evil, that brings him delight.
— Joni Eareckson Tada, Pearls of Great Price, July 6 entry
Everything that happens to you is for your own good. If the waves roll against you, it only speeds your ship toward the port. If lightning and thunder comes, it clears the atmosphere and promotes your soul’s health. You gain by loss, you grow healthy in sickness, you live by dying, and you are made rich in losses.
Could you ask for a better promise? It is better that all things should work for my good than all things should be as I would wish to have them. All things might work for my pleasure and yet might all work my ruin. If all things do not always please me, they will always benefit me.
This is the best promise of this life.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, quoted in The Promise, by Robert J. Morgan
If we think of hell as the state in which God allows the painful reality of sin to hit home, then we can understand both the terrible imagery used in Scripture to portray such a fate and the urgent warning to avoid the wide road that leads in that direction. It also removes the objection that God is being presented as a cosmic torturer hurting people until they agree to follow him. God does not torture anybody — he simply withdraws his protection that allows people to live under the illusions that sin is not necessarily harmful to a truly human life. The natural (though none the less God-ordained) consequences of sin take their course, and it becomes harder and harder to fool oneself into believing the seductive lies of sin anymore. In this way hell is educative and points us towards our need for divine mercy.
— Gregory MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist, p. 136
And so God must, from time to time, and sometimes very insistently, disrupt our lives so that we release our grasping of life here and now. Usually through pain. God is asking us to let go of the things we love and have given our hearts to, so that we can give our hearts even more fully to him. He thwarts us in our attempts to make life work so that our efforts fail, and we must face the fact that we don’t really look to God for life. Our first reaction is usually to get angry with him, which only serves to make the point. Don’t you hear people say, “Why did God let this happen?” far more than you hear them say, “Why aren’t I more fully given over to God?”
We see God as a means to an end rather than the end itself. God as the assistant to our life versus God as our life. We don’t see the process of our life as coming to the place where we are fully his and he is our all. And so we are surprised by the course of events.
It’s not that God doesn’t want us to be happy. He does. It’s just that he knows that until we are holy, we cannot really be happy. . . .
We are so committed to arranging for a happy little life that God has to thwart us to bring us back to himself. . . .
Now, I am not suggesting that God causes all the pain in our lives. . . . But pain does come, and what will we do with it? What does it reveal? What might God be up to? How might he redeem our pain? those are questions worth asking.
Don’t waste your pain.
— John Eldredge, Walking with God, p. 87-88
We can be assured of this: God, who knows all and sees all, will set all things straight in the end. Even better, he will dry every tear. In the meantime he mysteriously takes our sorrows and uses them to heal the world.
— Richard J. Foster, Prayer, p. 223
I don’t know how it matters; I only know that it does, that when we suffer, God suffers, and he will never abandon the smallest fragment of his creation. . . . He will not give up on me, not now, not after my mortal death. He will not give up on any of us, until we have become what he meant us to be.
— Madeleine L’Engle, A Severed Wasp, quoted by Carole F. Chase in Glimpses of Grace, p. 158
Indeed, if we will listen, a Sacred Romance calls to us through our heart every moment of our lives. It whispers to us on the wind, invites us through the laughter of good friends, reaches out to us through the touch of someone we love. We’ve heard it in our favorite music, sensed it at the birth of our first child, been drawn to it while watching the shimmer of a sunset on the ocean. The Romance is even present in times of great personal suffering: the illness of a child, the loss of a marriage, the death of a friend. Something calls to us through experiences like these and rouses an inconsolable longing deep within our heart, wakening in us a yearning for intimacy, beauty, and adventure.
— John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance, p. 6-7
Did you realize that time could possibly be the stander’s greatest obstacle? Charlyne could report, “Bob delivered hurricane supplies across the state today,” and be correct. What she did not tell you was that it was a six-hour trip. I encountered heavy traffic, post-hurricane congestion, rude drivers, and so much more. The Bible is exactly like that. We are told of an event, and assume it happened all at once, when in truth decades passed. May we each learn that God’s timetable is far different from our timetable.
— Robert E. Steinkamp, The Prodigal’s Pen, p. 170