God's good plans for you

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God's plans for us are good.  He promises us this.

Christians love to quote this verse from Jeremiah.  We all want to know that our future is a good one.

But what does God deem "good?"  

I have had so many trials and tribulations in my life.  If I were to freeze-frame each one, they would hardly look like they were part of a "good" plan.

We have been mislead to think that the American Dream is God's good plan for our lives.  If that were all there was to it, then how would the world discern between those who belong to Christ from those who are in the world?  If God is there only to "make all our dreams come true," then we're under a false belief.  That is not what God means when He talks about His good plan for our lives.

Sometimes, the truly "good life" looks worse than what others have.  For example, did Paul believe in God's "good plan" for him when he was beaten, shipwrecked, going hungry, left for dead, beaten, thrown in jail, and worse?  Yet he was chosen of God and used by Him more than any other.

We need to get it through our minds that God's plan for our lives, if we are truly following Him and belong to Him, will entail more trials than not.  This is because the trials result in our spiritual growth.  God's good plan for us as His children is that we grow in His likeness.  And that does not happen when we get everything we want, or when everything is pleasant or easy, or when everything is going the way we like.

Job came to learn more deeply of God and Who He is during and after his numerous and devastating loses and sufferings.  

Paul exulted in his sufferings if they made him more like Christ.

Were Job and Paul some sort of masochists?  Never!  They simply counted everything else in life as rubbish compared to knowing Christ intimately.

Anyone who has suffered loss, been through excruciating trials and the like, and felt the nearness of Christ through it all knows what I am talking about.  

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted.  See Psalm 34:18.

His strength is made perfect in our weakness. See 2 Corinthians 12:9.

He tells us to delight in our trials because they are forming in us wonderful, lasting qualities that will serve us well not only in this life, but reward us in the next. See James 1:2-4.

So when God's "good plan" for you seems to turn sour, that is precisely when He is up to something really good!  

We all want a comfortable life.  No one likes to suffer.  Yet if suffering is the very thing that produces forever fruit - the very thing that grows Christ in us - then we need to accept it, learn from it, let Christ do what He will in and with us, and believe that He truly knows exactly what He is doing.

God's good plans for us involve trials and tribulations.  But we are to rejoice because He has overcome the world!  And all the trials we endure produce truly good things in us if we let them.

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