The In Touch Daily Devotional. Now available in easy to read large print. Order yours today. male announcer: “In Touch,” the teaching ministry of Dr. Charles Stanley. Next on “In Touch,” “Grace for Times of Trouble.” Dr. Charles Stanley: There are all different kinds of ways to respond to affliction and suffering and hurt and trials and tribulations in our life.
Sometimes the simplest thing to do is just to rebel against it. Sometimes we choose to very stoically reserve ourselves and decide we’re just going to bear up under it. Sometimes we whine and groan and we moan and we complain about it. Once in a while, we may understand what Paul meant, and we may respond the way Paul responded, that is, with joyful understanding of God’s purpose in allowing that affliction or that pain.
I wonder which of those best describes the way you respond to suffering and heartache in your life. You know, one of the errors that’s going around today is that if you pray long enough and hard enough and if you believe enough, then God will change any and every circumstance of life. And that change depends, really, on whether we have enough faith or we pray long enough, hard enough, intensely enough.
Well, if that’s true, then there’s one passage of scripture that we have to look at again. It’s the passage that I want to look at today because I believe this is the pinnacle passage in all the Bible, the mountainpeak passage when it comes to dealing with the grace of God in the light of how it relates to our pain and our suffering and our heartache and our hardship that we endeavor–that we endure in life.
All of us are going to experience those things. It may be physical pain as a result of some disease or some accident. It could be something even worse than that, and that’s emotional pain because of a broken home, because of the loss of a loved one, because of loss of finances, because of circumstances and situations, because it could take a thousand different avenues.
There’s all kind of causes of pain. But how does this grace of God, this goodness and graciousness of God, which He pours out toward us without any regard to our merit or our worth in spite of everything we deserve, what about this grace of God in our life, in the times of pain and suffering and heartache, and also what about those things that don’t seem to change? Where is the grace of God when things don’t change? Where is the grace of God when you’ve prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed and nothing happens?
