Many believe that when something is God’s will, it means there will be nothing but smooth sailing … everything will just line up and fall into place.

Tell that to Joseph, or Daniel, or Job. Ask Paul or John the Baptist if that theology panned out for them!

Struggle doesn’t mean you are going against God. In fact, sometimes peace takes war. Sometimes walking in God’s will requires more fight than you could have imagined you had in you.

Not always, but sometimes. 

Most things God asks of us take some effort. He is a God of process. Our destiny is more about developing our God-given, God-breathed, God-fashioned identity than it is about a specific task or assignment we were placed on this earth to accomplish. Everything we do, every choice we make, is either releasing or restricting that identity.

Walking in God’s purpose requires death to self, death to the flesh. It will take sacrifice. “Living your best life” is rarely about skating along on a rainbow river without adversity or care. Living your best life is the cruciform life—the Cross-shaped life. This life enters the fellowship of His suffering and realizes the joy in sacrifice for something greater. 

Abraham was asked to take his beloved son, Isaac, to the top of a mountain and be willing to surrender all his dreams and walk through the intense contradiction of sacrificing a promise God made to him. I cannot imagine his anguish at tying his son to that rock, totally unaware that God had a plan all along. Sometimes the death of a vision is required before the solution manifests. Obedience can be costly. The journey up the mountain was the process required for Abraham’s transformation. The ram in the thicket was the sovereignty of God to perfect that which concerned him.

Struggle is part of the process of sanctification. 

Don’t let the contradiction you are living through convince you that what you are standing on and believing for is crazy or that it is not from God. Instead, let your mind align with His Word, embrace His promises, and keep pushing through that struggle.

Jesus met opposition in the wilderness. He agonized through the Garden and embraced the painful process of the Cross. He was smack dab in the center of God’s love, protection, and purpose the whole time.

If you don’t quit, you’ll win! 

The opposition you are encountering can serve as an indication that God is at work in your life. Opposition is the training ground. It is the boot camp that strengthens and prepares you to perform greater works.

“Truly, truly; I say to you, whoever believes in Me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will He do, because I am going to my Father.”
John 14:12, ESV