Adventure in Adversity

 

 

Amongst the great principles of victorious Christian service which God has been teaching us in our morning headquarters meetings has been the true method of facing, handling and using for good all forms of adversity, all experiences of what we call evil--shocks, suffering, difficulty, disasters, unjust treatment. 

The first key, put in a sentence, has been this: that our "evils" are never the happenings in themselves, but the effect we allow them to have upon us. No matter whether objectively an experience is apparently good or evil, subjectively, to the one who fears and doubts, all is evil; to the one who trusts, all is good.

To all appearances Calvary was Satan-engineered ("Satan entered into Judas"); but Peter later confirmed his Master's attitude by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, when he declared, "Him being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God."

But the adventure of adversity goes even far deeper than this. When seen in its true perspective, it is found to be the doorway into God's most transcendent secret--that adversities and sufferings, which in their origin are the effects of sin and instruments of the devil, in the grasp of faith become REDEMPTIVE. They are transfigured from the realm of merely something to be endured as an opposition of Satan, to something to be used to conquer their author and redeem his victims. Faith in times of adversity makes the serpent swallow itself! Once again the supreme proof of this is that when Satan made his fiercest attack in history on the person of Christ, God used that attack through the faith and endurance of the Sufferer, to bring about the world's salvation. God uses evil to bring about good. 

If God's gifts are our blessings, and the devil's assaults are also our blessings, what remains to harm or depress us? If good is good and evil is equally good to the enlightened, then a realm of life is entered where we rejoice always, in everything give thanks, and in all things are more than conquerors.

 

Taken from World Conquest magazine: Mar/Apr 1938