Maybe you’ve heard people say, “God’s put this trouble/trial/sickness on you to teach you something.” Or maybe someone’s well-meaning advice was: “God has allowed this trouble/trial/sickness to come upon you to help you grow.”Not true! It may sound spiritual to say something like that, but it is very, very wrong. If you think that, then you won’t know what to stand against. If you think God caused your trouble, how can you believe Him to deliver you from it? You can’t. We have to get this straight: God is good and the devil is bad. Don’t get confused about it, because it can undermine your faith. Know who your enemy is!
Say, for example, someone needs to overcome sickness. If they say that God put sickness on them to teach them something, then they’re saying that it is God’s will that they’re sick, right? But then they take medicine or go to the doctor to try and get the illness to go away.I want to say to them, “Wait a minute. If the sickness is God’s will for you, if this is how He’s going to train and teach you, then why are you taking meds and going to the doctor to try and get out of God’s will?” Of course we can see that’s ridiculous. Of course a person who is sick wants to get better. And God wants that person to get better too. It’s never His will for people to be sick; it’s always His will to heal us. He always has been and always will be a healing God. He said, “I am the Lord who heals you” (Exod. 15:26). Jesus Himself bore your sicknesses (Matt. 8:17) and by His stripes you were healed, more than 2,000 years ago (1 Pet. 2:24). Lets talk about this more tomorrow.