Selwyn Hughes Founder and Writer of Every Day With Jesus 1928-2006

Lift Your Hearts To Heavenly Places featuring Lucy Jane Rutherford from the album “Lift Your Hearts To Heavenly Places” recorded and produced by Ross Gill

As I said last week one question that understandably is so often asked is – “If there is a God and He is good – why does He allow so much suffering in the world? There are, in fact no easy answers but in the following weeks I will copy extracts from the “Every Day With Jesus” devotion “A Higher Love” written by Selwyn Hughes of Crusade For World Revival (CWR.) Selwyn’s thoughts will I hope give another view at looking at this most challenging of issues.

We continue exploring the question: If God loves us so much why does He allow so many seemingly bad things to happen to us? What the Christian life all boils down to says a preacher friend , is this – can this love, which God says He has for us be trusted?

A counsellor tells how someone he was counselling spoke about how reckless and unpredictable God seemed to be in allowing tragic things to happen to her. She asked him: “How can I trust a lover who is so wild”?

Walter Bruggeman, and American writer and theologian put it like this: “We live our lives before the wild, dangerous, unfettered and free character of the living God.” Before reading that statement some years ago I confess I had never thought of God in this way. In their book “The Secret Romance; writers Brent Curtis and John Eldridge say that God leaves Abraham with his knife raised and ready to plunge into Isaac’s heart and Isaac waiting for the knife to descend; he leaves Joseph languishing for years in an Egyptian prison; he allows the Israelites to suffer 400 years of bondage under the Egyptians and leaves the same Israelites backed up against the Red Sea with Pharaoh’s chariots thundering down on them. He abandons Jesus to the cross and does not rescue Him at all. You have to admit that God allows some pretty strange, even startling things to happen to His children. There is no doubt about it – the Almighty’s love for us really is wild…………………. to be continued.

Quote for the week

“Faith does not exempt you from life’s storms but it does equip you to go through them”

The Word for Today