God is not satisfied simply with giving us salvation. He desires to safeguard us. Though we should endeavor to preach the Gospel until Christ returns, the Devil struggles day and night to make us stumble. If we want to be safeguarded to the end in these difficult circumstances, we must maintain an attitude of repentance before anything. God sometimes allows us to go through trials to achieve this.
When people face trials, many blame others or assign the cause to something in their environment. But if we keep in mind that we are sinners who received the grace of God and remember that we are Christians, something needs to change. Before we point an angry finger on our surroundings, we should think carefully if God is trying to turn us back with this incident, or if He is trying to restore a sincere faith after we unknowingly forgot about His grace and became self-centered.
Many prophets previously urged Jerusalem to repent and warned about God’s discipline, but the inhabitants in Jerusalem constantly refused to listen. Even though God’s Son later came and warned them, they did not repent and eventually saw Jerusalem’s destruction at around AD 70. Only the people who remembered the Lord’s warning at the time quickly escaped Jerusalem as the Lord said and could escape horrible destruction.
Things like these will come again on everyone in the upcoming last days of the world. In those days, ‘the abomination that causes desolation’ will stand where it does not belong, and afterwards, great distress unlike anything since creation will come on the whole world, and severe trials will come on Jews and Christians in particular. The reason God allows such things is so a few people among them might perhaps accept God’s warnings and repent through it.
Of course, we may not see these final days while we live in this present age. But God allows us to be disciplined even today. Just as parents use the rod so it may go well with their children, God momentarily allows the enemy to trouble us. There is a good reason why God allows our bodies to suffer trials. It is so that we do not lose a repentant faith and face eternal punishment after we leave this earth.
When we talk about repentant faith, this does not mean we become unable to sin. We are full of every kind of filthiness inside. The important thing is to acknowledge that we are sinners who cannot live one moment without the Lord’s grace. Additionally, it is about coming to God in humility and gratefulness, since He saved us through the church. Let’s look at the trials before us with new perspective. As God truly wants us to return to Him, let’s accept His sincere love.
(Lord’s Day Service on December 26, 2021)
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