God Will Redeem That Hard Thing

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28

God Will Redeem That Hard Thing

When loss strikes, gnawing pain can become our new normal—for years. Diving into God’s word helps, but sometimes our tears can blur the text. 

We don’t understand the reason for the years of separation, the unreciprocated love, the injustice, the faded dreams. We look to God and whisper, “Why?” striving to squeeze out a shred of purpose.

Since we are God’s children, we are heirs to his glory—and heirs to his suffering. 

We must think of our lives as a novel authored by the living God. A novel may start out on a positive note, and it may have a happy ending. But the middle is hard.

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Pastor and New York Times best-selling author Randy Alcorn, says “You can’t leave a novel in the middle—you’ll never get to the redemptive ending. The main character in God’s story is Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth. Carpenters make things, and fix things. Jesus made the world, the world went terribly wrong, and Jesus is going to fix the world . . . This is the story of salvation. The story of redemption.”

In Romans 8:29 God says He chose His people in advance to become like his Son. He calls us to partake in Jesus’ glory and His groaning—to become like Christ. And in the midst of our groaning, the Holy Spirit is God’s pledge that He will see His work in us through to its conclusion. 

The Holy Spirit living in us joins God’s spirit in an “Abba, Father” way. An intimate, desperate “Daddy!” plea in which we fall into His arms in holy surrender.

Embraced in His arms, his love washes over us and we begin to realize how deep, how long, and how wide His agape love really is. He feels love for us, but we can be certain God’s brand of love does. It acts. It works on our behalf. 

Isaiah 64:4 says God works for those who wait for Him. And His work is unique in every life. God works in our messiness, in everything we think is too far gone. Our loving God invests all His energy in every way for our eternal good. 

In Philippians 3:13 Paul urges us to reach forward to what lies ahead and forget the past with all its mistakes. But isn’t it wonderful to look back at all those mistakes and realize how God has worked on our behalf all these years to carefully weave our beautiful stories despite the failures?

We may think the rubble and ugliness in our lives is beyond repair, but God doesn’t see it that way. The stuff we think is too broken is the stuff God is infusing with purpose. 

God will work it all together for good in your novel. Because he always writes a redemption story.