Like any decision to trust, the commitment of ourselves to the truth about God is likely to be tested as the years go by. But mere testing doesn’t mean our faith was foolish. To the contrary, it may well demonstrate just how wise our choice was.
When sorrow makes an appearance in our lives, we can make it our aim to shine all the more radiantly against the dark background that has developed. We can seek God in such a way as to brighten our character with the brilliance of tested faith.
To gain wisdom from our suffering in this life, our focus must not be on ourselves. The main object in life is neither to defend ourselves against suffering nor to exploit it self-righteously, but to seek a greater Truth outside of ourselves.
We are called to partake of God’s own nature. If sin’s damage is to be undone, we must not only be forgiven of our sins; we must be remade in God’s image. He has arranged for us to be crucified and recreated. To seek Him is to seek this very thing.
The human spirit was created to thrive on God’s beauty. When we long for God and reach for Him, when we devote ourselves with a whole heart to showing forth His goodness, we come closer to a beauty that was meant to surround us and delight us.
Many good things come to the obedient, and it would be naive to say we shouldn’t be drawn to these. But those can’t be our primary concern. Jesus taught that we get the good things of this life only by forgetting them and keeping our focus on God.
Diligent study only becomes the diligent seeking of God when the intellect is driven by a pure heart. And whether we’ve actually sought God or not is evidenced more by the tokens of devoted discipleship than by those of academic scholarship.
The question of God is the most basic of life’s issues. Whatever we do when confronted with this question influences our character at its deepest level. One can’t be a quality person and not deal in a quality way with this issue. Our choices matter.
Even when we acknowledge the primary role God must play in our progress, we sometimes still don’t move ahead. We fail to see the need on our part to take the spiritual steps we could take and to make the progress that is available to us each day.
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” Applying that to our spiritual lives, we can learn to grasp the simple things that lie right before us and squeeze the maximum good out of each moment. We grow toward God by just such steps.
