Making Choices Under Pressure: Part 5 — A ‘Time With God’ Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning and welcome to the end of the work week. I hope you’re looking forward to the weekend, but first, let’s stop and take some time with God. We’ve been having a great time this week looking at this theme of making choices under pressure and looking at the life of Job, who faced enormous pressure, the loss of everything in his business, followed by the death of all of his children.

And then this horrible disease that brought painful boils all over his body, even on the soles of his feet and all the way up to the crown of his head, his wife looked at him and said, “Just curse God and die”. His friends came to him and said,” There’s got to be sin in your life that God would be bringing blessing if you were walking with Him. And if you’re experiencing all of this, it has to be the result of”.

Sin or lack of faith or something in your life and all of these things that would tend to discourage so many of us. Job says, “I’m trusting God. I’m trusting God. What else can I do? I know he’s in control. I can’t see what’s happening”.

It’s like one of these tapestries, you know, where the weaving on the front is this beautiful picture, but on the back, if you turn it over, it’s just this mess of strings and different colours hanging out.

And we’re on that bottom side we can’t see the beautiful picture God is weaving. We just see the mess of strings that we’re experiencing on the bottom.

And we have to trust just like Job. We have to trust God. And I want to go back today to the beginning when these things first started happening in Job’s life, and Satan was sure that Job would turn around and curse God if God took his blessings away, that it wasn’t God that Job loved, rather, it was just the blessings that God was bringing to Job’s life.

And here’s Job’s response. When all those things are destroyed in his business and his children are all killed in that accident in their house.

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It says then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell to the ground, and worshipped.

And he said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb. And it looks like naked I’m going to return there. The Lord gave all these things God gave to me, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Through all this, Job did not sin, nor did he blame God.

You see, you can see God’s hand of sovereignty in your life without blaming God.

And you look here again at Job’s statement of complete trust and submission to God’s will in his life.

You know, it’s easy to talk that way and accept the good things that come our way as coming from God and to say God is blessing me. God is so good.

Our real challenge in life is to have a right view of the tough times in our life, to have the courage to choose the road of faith and trust, even when things look so black to us.

You know, chance is not a part of a Christian’s vocabulary.

Either God is in control or He isn’t.

And if he is, then we must choose to trust him, knowing that nothing comes into our life without his permission.

Elizabeth Elliot said, “God is God. Because he is God. He is worthy of my trust and obedience. Listen, I will find rest nowhere but in His holy will. A will that is unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what he is up to”.

I’m John North.

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