All tagged hard
Do you complain to God during the times of hardship in your life, or cry out in anguish to Him in the times of pain and suffering as if they were meant to punish you? Perhaps we need to take a lesson from the unattended fruit bearing trees and vines that grow gangly without pruning, and don’t produce fruit in either quality or quantity. We are very similar to those trees… The times when God prunes us, and that we find the hardest, are those that benefit us the most.
Hearing the gospel and having it fall on fertile ground within us creates a need for its peace and joy deep inside that is unquenchable. Is this how you are feeling inside? Are you one of those souls in which the gospel of Jesus Christ has found a slight furrow into which its seed has fallen and taken root? If so then despite the season of life you find yourself in, you will be irresistibly called to tend it... time and time again, day after day, you will water and admire it until it begins to bear the sweet fruit of Christ. For all the others of us there will be only darkness and a withering spirit.
Has Jesus ever asked something of us that we have resisted? Has he asked us to do something that shook us or that we convinced ourselves couldn't have possibly come from Him because it was just too hard or impossible for us to accomplish? Let’s think about this for a moment and then study on it this morning and as we go through our day in prayer.
We face the greatest lessons of Christ, and our Heavenly Father in the hard, and tempting moments of our lives. We learn the commandments and how to obey them when we come face to face with the temptation to disobey them. A man in the desert alone is not tempted to commit adultery, just as a child who is given his fill of candy isn’t prone to steal it. It is only when David stood on his roof and saw Bathsheba that he was made to face his desire to commit adultery, and it is when a child stands penniless before the candy counter that the thought of stealing crosses his mind. What were, or are, the circumstances that have led each one of us to learn such hard lessons regarding one of God’s commandments?