Principle 12: God allows us trials and uses our struggles to shape us as it is often only in difficult times that we understand how desperately we need him.
Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Matthew 9:12
We all have struggles. No one is perfect, and no one has a problem-free life. None of us wants to struggle with an appetite for drugs or alcohol. No one wants to go through painful life events and nobody desires depression or anxiety. We all though, experience destructive appetites, painful circumstances, and personal struggles.
Why does God allow such misery in our lives? If he wanted, God could remove all difficulty from the world. Why doesn’t he just make our lives problem-free?
That question is easily answered in looking back at my own life. It’s been in the toughest of times that I have sought God the most. The more desperate he struggle, the more desperately I’ve pursued him. It was only in the disastrous consequences of my addiction that I became willing to abandon me to follow God.
God created us to live in a very real, intense relationship with him. When everything goes well for us though, we embrace self-sufficiency, refusing to rely on him. Faith is keeping our eyes on God, but in success, we turn our gaze to ourselves.
In today’s passage, Christ taught that only those who are aware of their need will seek the answer for it. When Jesus healed the ten lepers (Luke 17:11-19), nine of them abandoned him. Once they got what they wanted, they had no further need for Christ.
God uses our continued struggles to keep us aware of our desperate need for him. Does this mean that I must always wallow in addiction? Absolutely not. God wants me to know the freedom that comes only in following him. In obeying God, he has radically transformed me, so that I don’t now struggle with pills. If, however, I became complacent in my success and returned to following all-things-me, my drug-appetite would soon return.
We all struggle with something. Some wrestle with drugs or food. Others struggle with anxiety or difficult life circumstances. We all have need and we all must allow that need to drive us to God daily. If God made our lives problem-free today, we would abandon him tomorrow. We need our need. It is up to us to continually turn to God in that need, allowing him to transform us into who we were created to be.