GOD'S ECONOMY

God's economy is all about turning our hardship into help for someone else… Paul puts it this way in 2 Corinthians 1:3-5… "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the Lord of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows."

There you have it. Overflowing comfort. When we're going through a hard time, God gives us more than enough to cope, so we'll have something leftover to share with someone else, thus giving us a purpose even in our hardship. This is so important because one of the tendencies when things go bad is to think that our life is suddenly pointless and wasted. We find it hard to wrestle anything good out of the bad things that happen to us. But the good is always there, and if we can't see it, it's because we aren't tuned into God's economy. We are just looking at the situation from one point of view, and it happens to be the most depressing one…

So are you going through it right now? Are you asking God, "Why?" and not getting any answers? Well, at its most basic level, the unique set of circumstances that set you up for this are such that they will qualify you to help someone else in a similar situation. So if that someone should say to you, "You can't possibly know what I'm going through," you will be able to say, "Oh yeah? Let me tell you my story and show you how God met me." It keeps circling around like that. That's part of God's economy.

-- John Fischer in The Purpose Driven Life Daily Devotional


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