One of the most difficult Scriptures to understand is I Peter 1:6, “In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.”
In what do we rejoice though? IN WHAT? Peter tells us we can rejoice in all this: that God’s power is working in us until the day of salvation. Paul writes of this bizarre kind of joy as well in 2 Corinthians 12:10: “That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
The way that God’s power is shown most effectively is when we are weak. Then all the world and all the church can see His strength … because no one can do what He can.
As crazy as it sounds, when tragedy came into the lives of Peter, Paul and the other apostles, they didn’t say no; they rejoiced. Joy is the mark of a master hope hunter. We can believe the Bible, and it says that we too can rejoice if we do not allow ourselves to give way to fear. The only way we can live without fear is to put our trust in the One who holds the world, our hearts, and every season in His loving hands.
And this doesn’t mean that hope hunters have to learn to like the situation we are in. It just means that we have to learn to look for God in the situation we are in. Believe me, He is in it with us.
The important thing to remember in order to have joy is that He is alive. There is no other god that is alive. We worship a God who is not dead and is not distant. He is alive and He is with us. When we can’t find joy in our situations, we can find joy in the fact that we serve the only Living God. What He offers us in I Peter 1:3 is something extraordinary: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead …”
Living hope! We have access to living hope!
We have somewhere to turn in our trouble, and that will bring us joy, if we let it sink in.
We may feel alone, but we are not.
We may not know what to do, but He does.
One of my favorite quotes about adversity is from Alan Redpath: “There is no circumstance, no trouble, no testing, that can ever touch me until, first of all, it has gone past God and past Christ, right through to me. And if it has come that far, it has come with a great purpose.”
I don’t know about you, but it brings me a deep comfort, almost to the level of joy, to focus on the fact that God would not even allow something to happen to me unless He knew there would be purpose in it. It may never be a purpose that I can see in this lifetime, but there will be a purpose.
God is not absent and unfeeling. He didn’t blink or look away, and that is why your challenge arrived when it did. He always has and always will have His eyes on you.
Rejoice that the Living God is also the Loving God, and the one He loves is you.
(Next week– How to Become a Hope Hunter #5: Dig Through the Darkness)
