Trials and Transformation.
But consider the joy of those corrected by God!
Do not despise the discipline of the Almighty when you sin.
For though he wounds, he also bandages.
He strikes, but his hands also heal.
(Job 5:17-18)
We receive (sometimes very painful) correction from God for our sins. God exiled the Israelites to Babylon for seventy years. He wanted them to turn their heart back to Him, to obey His voice, and love Him with all their heart. Afterwards, He changed their circumstances by freeing them to go back to Israel and be blessed again.
Or a man may be chastened on a bed of pain
with constant distress in his bones,
so that his very being finds food repulsive
and his soul loathes the choicest meal.
(Job 33:19-20)
If God doesn’t answer our pleading prayers it’s because He has a greater plan in mind, one that will transform us with the refining fire of the Holy Spirit. For many years I rejected the church, and hardened my heart toward Christians, but still prayed and pleaded to God. God would not answer because there was still farther hardship and destruction that had to take place in my life before I would finally surrender and open my heart to Christ and His church. It wasn’t a plan of punishment or one to give me greater patience and endurance—it was a plan of complete transformation. If by some superhuman feat I had just patiently (or more-like painfully) endured I would never have made the change He was calling me to make. Fortunately, instead I was broken, and in that brokenness He saved and transformed me.
“Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” (Job 2:10)
Job is an example that suffering isn’t always a result of sin. God wants to know whether your faith contingent on the well-being of your family, physical health, and financial status. Suffering is God’s way of calling us into a closer relationship with Him through deeper levels of surrender, obedience, faith, and inner healing.
Many fear looking at their inner self because of what they might find, and what God might ask them to change. Inner work is usually more painful than just enduring and developing patience with our current circumstances. God is the one who does the searching and exposing of the areas (both inward than outward) that He wants us to look at, pray about, and release to His Lordship. He wants to set us free from bondage—through faith in His healing grace (i.e. supernatural power). This usually starts with us dying to and/or surrendering parts of ourselves. We must willingly choose to take an inner journey: to look inward at the past rejection and hurt (from society and family), generational sin, inequities, inner vows, inner bondage, lack of balance, and repressed parts of ourselves.
For God speaks again and again,
though people do not recognize it.
He speaks in dreams, in visions of the night,
when deep sleep falls on people
as they lie in their beds.
He whispers in their ears
and terrifies them with warnings.
He makes them turn from doing wrong;
he keeps them from pride.
He protects them from the grave,
from crossing over the river of death.
(Job 33:14-18)
A lot of inner work is unconscious work. Dreams are the place where God speaks to our waking self about the parts of ourselves we aren’t aware of. Of course, He can still get the message to us through a million other miraculous means, but He does like to use dreams (in the Bible and in my life). Whether you decide to listen to your dreams or not, God wants to do some inner refining work in you. Inner transformation is a much more difficult road but also more spiritually rewarding. Gifts of the Holy Spirit; blessings and joy in our lives; and the fruit of the Holy Spirit are all spiritual rewards of a victorious life in Christ.
