God has already given you the good life through Christ’s redemption. Even suffering fits into God’s pattern for your good. Your confidence in Jesus through your trials glorifies and honors him before a watching world, so live a life of faith and trust.
Hi, I’m Joni, and I cannot believe what some preachers are saying.
It was a message that somehow landed in my inbox. Before I sent it to my junk email, I took a look. It was about a famous preacher who was taking South America and Africa by storm. His popularity was even surging here in the U.S. I only read through the first paragraph or so but was dismayed to see this man make sweeping promises of wealth and health, prosperity and good fortune for all those who would come to hear him preach the Gospel of Christ. I could hardly believe what I was reading, but I did copy this quote. He said, “Well-being, success, abundance, overflow – these are all definitions of the good life. Prosperity is God’s will for you. God wants to give [you] life more abundantly and empower us to bless others. The idea that God wants his people sick, [or] sad, or living in poverty is completely against his word and his very nature.”
I could not help but think of the thousands of people with disabilities that we serve in Africa and in South America. I wonder what this famous preacher would say about them. Would he still define the good life as well-being and success? Would he look at these people with disabilities and their families living in dire poverty and say that they are out of the will of God or that they don’t have enough faith? After I sent the email into junk, I thought about this man’s enormous popularity with so many people. His message is popular among those who have no theology of suffering; those who don’t know what to do with suffering. They don’t know how to handle it because they don’t know what God says about it, and so they try to escape their suffering, or ignore it, or drug it, or divorce it, or go to this man’s crusade to be healed from it, anything but actually learn to live with it.
My friend Peter Rosenberger and his wife, Gracie, know what it means to live with suffering. Gracie lost her legs and crushed her hips in an automobile accident and just recently underwent her 84th surgery. Gracie lives a life of pain, but she and her husband Peter have cultivated an abiding trust in the God of the Bible, and for good reason. They are Romans 8:28 people who believe that God fits everything – yes, even tragic accidents – into a pattern for their good. They may not be able to understand that pattern, but as the Rosenbergers trust God in the toughest of times, oh my, does it give their Savior incredible glory, unbelievable glory!
So, yes, people will go to that man’s crusades down in South America and in Africa, and they will go hoping to find some of that abundance and prosperity. Like Peter Rosenberger says, he said, “It’s why you hear words like victory, breakthrough, and blessings instead of words like perseverance, endurance, and resolve. People want to be bailed out of their misery… that plays for a while, but eventually one has to stop praying for a bailout and start living a life of faith and trust – that’s when our prayers change.” Thank you, Peter, because that’s so true. The sovereign God that Peter and Gracie and I trust is the God who has changed our prayers. We don’t pray for abundance and prosperity, no. He’s already given us the good life through Christ’s redemption. We thank God for his gifts of perseverance and endurance. And most of all, we pray that Jesus Christ will end up looking great through our confidence in him, no matter how hard the affliction. So take a look at your own prayers and the way you’ve been asking God to deal with your suffering, and just go to the Lord and thank him for the good life through Jesus Christ. That’s your good word today from Joni Eareckson Tada sharing hope.
© Joni and Friends