It Starts Small

We learn more in our valley experiences than on our mountaintops.

Our school of experience is through adversity, anguish, trails, tribulations, and headaches. They operate as lessons that bring us to a place of new insight and understanding. They can alter our perceptions of the world, our views on God, and lead us to changed behaviors. Our Heavenly Father is our ultimate teacher. His Word is our textbook and He’s the One to whom we look to for meaning in any lesson related to the adversity we find ourselves in.

I have come to believe from my experience that there are three reasons God allows adversity:

To Get Our Attention

There are many ways God uses to get our attention. Adversity is one of them. He got Paul’s attention by blinding him with a great light. It was through experiencing this blindness Paul looked within himself and saw the depths of his persecution was and how wrong his life had been.

When adversity comes, make it a habit to first seek the Lord. Is He trying to get your attention? Have you strayed from the path? Are you walking in your own way, strength, and means? Sometimes God just wants us to member who He is and who we are to Him. He is a jealous God and will not settle for any place but first in our lives. Has God become an after thought?

For Examination

Sometimes God will use adversity to motivate us to look inwardly. The winds of a storm can blow away the surface circumstances and reveal something deeper in us. Adversity can be used to remove our cloak of denial about who we truly are, what we believe about God, and His faithfulness.

Paul encourages us:

“Let a person examine himself; in this way let him eat the bread and drink from the cup.”
‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭11‬:‭28‬ ‭CSB‬‬

He encourages each of us to examine ourselves and look inwardly to discover what is driving, enticing, and motivating us. If it is anything other than God, then it’s not right. God must be our motivating factor in everything we do.

To Change Behavior

Psychology loves to tell people, you are who you are, you can not change your behavior. God begs to differ! It’s not enough that God desires to get our attention or encourages us to take a truthful introspection of ourselves. We must give His Spirit free access to every aspect of who we are. When we allow His Spirit to have free access, He changes our response and behavior. If we do not allow the Spirit access, we will never benefit from adversity or grow as a result of it.

God provides us with a challenge and we are given the opportunity to obey or disobey Him. The choice is up to us and the consequences of obedience belong to us as well.

If we are willing to allow God to surface the hidden things of our heart, and we are willing to change, we will emerge from adversity closer to Christ with a far greater potential to reflect the love of God to the world around us.

“Brothers and sisters, take the prophets who spoke in the Lord’s name as an example of suffering and patience. See, we count as blessed those who have endured. You have heard of Job’s endurance and have seen the outcome that the Lord brought about — the Lord is compassionate and merciful.”
‭‭James‬ ‭5‬:‭10‬-‭11‬ ‭CSB‬‬