Trials: Thrive, Not Survive | Standing Strong

I was praying I was just thinking about the challenges that I faced in life, and I was thinking about the challenges that many of you have faced.

I was thinking, "oh God bring glory to yourself through these things. Oh God, magnify yourself through these things. Help me not to focus on the injustice, help me to focus on the glory that's being magnified in the heavenly realm that I can't fully see.

I don't need to see it all I know is that God uses suffering and challenges and trials. Most of the world just wants to get past. They want, if they survive it, they're happy. It's not enough for us to survive it as Christians, there's something greater at stake.

Your challenges and your trials become an expression of the power and majesty and divinity and beauty of your creator. Every time you go through a trial with a heart that rejoices in God, not because of the trial, but in the midst of it, because you can see that God is good and that your worship of him, and your love of him, isn't based on cause and effect, but it's based on cause.

It's just based on cause, and he is the cause, he is the reason we worship. He is the reason that we love him. His mercy to us is the reason that we respond back with this devotion, and this total surrender is a citizen of this new kingdom.

Every time you do this, every time you surrender in the midst of a trial your family, your wife, your husband your children, your workplace, those trials, those challenges become the very Avenue through which God receives glory and praise.

Because you are not people of cause and effect, you are people of cause. You don't need the effect; you don't have to have the reward every time in order to keep following God. There are lots of Christians like that. Don't be like that, that doesn't bring glory to God. Even pagans would worship a God like that if they could know that whatever they did would receive a blessing.

The Christian lives a different life so we can mature, we can rise up to be these people through our marriages, through the raising of our children, through the workplace, through our worship, and our church, in our community. Today we find out that we can actually bring honor and glory to God when we're under fire by the enemy and that this is not something to survive it's something to thrive through, something to glory in.

If you enjoyed this short video clip, be sure to listen to the entire Standing Strong Sermon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPCWwycTGMM

Blessings,

The Epic Life
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