Welcome to [music] the InTouch podcast with Charles Stanley for Monday, February 9th. [music] Have you ever felt like everything just keeps going from bad to worse? Even when you’re overwhelmed, [music] God’s grace can help you rise above. Listen to today’s podcast, Out of This Wreck, I Rise. If you’ll turn to Romans chapter 8 and beginning in verse 31 and verse 39 are probably some of the most comforting and reassuring verses to be found in the Bible anywhere.

And Paul deals with a problem here that all of us face. And that is how we’re to respond to circumstances and difficulties in our own life. And when a person understands what that means, sometimes they come out of it shouting, “Out of this wreck, I rise as conqueror, not as victim.” And so he says in verse 31, “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own son, but delivered him up for us all, how will he not also with him freely give us all things? Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God

is the one who justifies. Who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is the one who died. Yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God who also intercedes for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? Just as it is written, for thy sake we are being put to death all day long.

We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered. But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

God did not make us to be immune from trouble, but rather he promised to be with us through the trouble. He didn’t promise to always remove the trouble, but he promised to be with us through it. He knows that real character is formed best by not evading problems and heartaches and burdens, but by learning to endure them until God has finished what he set out to do in our life.

God knows that spiritual maturity is not the overflow or the fruits of a life of ease, comfort, and pleasure, but what? Tribulation, trial, temptation, and testing. And if that be true, the goal of a believer should never be to avoid all problems, all heartaches, all difficulties, all disaster, all calamity, but rather to learn how to respond when these things come into our life.

Now, when you and I think about the things that we go through, the difficulties, the hardships that you faced in life, and the things that people face every day, what is our response to be? Is it to be defeat or is it to be won a victory? Even though you and I strike out, that doesn’t mean we’re down. We don’t have to give up. We don’t have to throw in the towel.

We don’t have to surrender to our circumstances. We don’t have to settle for a settle for life. Regardless of where you are today in your circumstances, you still have the privilege and the power to become the person that God Almighty wants you to be. But it’s a matter of seeing things from God’s perspective and not as the world’s perspective.