Sometimes you ARE the lesson …
Over the last few decades I’ve listened to thousands of very frustrated people as they have told their stories. Very similar stories in one regard, and that is, they can’t figure out their stories.
As they go through some rough times, they look for some lesson God has for them, and something specific seems to be missing.
As we’ve dug around the facts of their lives, we discovered that God wasn’t pointing them toward a lesson chiefly for them, but instead was positioning their lives as a lesson for others! We discovered an interesting reality that many who are truly Christian will experience. It’s this: Sometimes the tough things you go through are to teach OTHERS something, and God uses YOU as the lesson!
“Certainly God wouldn’t do that to someone!” you suggest.
Have you ever read the book of Hosea? Talk about a guy whose life God used as a lesson! This is just verse two of Hosea 1:
“When the Lord first began speaking to Israel through Hosea, he said to him, ‘Go and marry a prostitute, so that some of her children will be conceived in prostitution. This will illustrate how Israel has acted like a prostitute by turning against the Lord and worshiping other gods.”
Hosea’s life was used as part of a living lesson!
At times, yours may be as well.
Life was never all about you. Never is that more true than when God uses your life to teach others. The Apostle Paul presents an example of this in 1 Corinthians 10:1-11:
“I don’t want you to forget, dear brothers and sisters, about our ancestors in the wilderness long ago. All of them were guided by a cloud that moved ahead of them, and all of them walked through the sea on dry ground. In the cloud and in the sea, all of them were baptized as followers of Moses. All of them ate the same spiritual food, and all of them drank the same spiritual water. For they drank from the spiritual rock that traveled with them, and that rock was Christ. Yet God was not pleased with most of them, and their bodies were scattered in the wilderness. These things happened as a warning to us, so that we would not crave evil things as they did, or worship idols as some of them did. As the Scriptures say, ‘The people celebrated with feasting and drinking, and they indulged in pagan revelry.’ And we must not engage in sexual immorality as some of them did, causing 23,000 of them to die in one day. Nor should we put Christ to the test, as some of them did and then died from snakebites. And don’t grumble as some of them did, and then were destroyed by the angel of death. These things happened to them as examples for us. They were written down to warn us who live at the end of the age.”
Just as we have the examples of others as recorded in scripture, sometimes God allows us to face challenges in life as a living lesson for others. Instead of getting frustrated in trying to find something for yourself in every situation, sometimes we need to relax in the knowledge that some things are for the benefit of others.
Because it’s not all about you or me.
It’s all about Jesus Christ.
And sometimes, we are the lesson!
Scotty
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