Synopsis: What Can You Do When Life Doesn’t Turn Out Like You Planned?
How do you respond when your husband or wife tramples your emotions? When your boss fires you unexpectedly? When you lose your life’s savings? When the child you’ve loved and prayed for turns his back on you and your values?
When disappointments like these smash their way into your life, you may want to scream, “How could God let this happen?”
But what if God didn’t just “let it happen”? What if the things you call disappointments are really His appointments—events He is using to make you more like Christ? What if your circumstances are actually the flames of His grace, intended to melt and burn away the undesirable elements in your life, leaving you pure and radiant—like refined silver?
You can be defeated by life’s unavoidable disappointments, or you can become stronger because of them.
Life’s disappointments can send you on a dangerous downward spiral into discouragement, depression, or even despair. But in this eye-opening book, Kay Arthur guides you to biblical truths that will help you break that cycle and instead embrace disappointment as the cleansing fire God uses to make you—as silver refined—a reflection of His goodness.
Review: The author says that Christianity does NOT exempt us from pain, from disappointment, from the hardships of life. Nor does it demand that we hide our hardships and disappoints, rather it gives us a purpose, and an end purpose to get through them. This is something that most of us forget when things go wrong, or we feel we have been disappointed in our wishes and expectations. When we communicate with God, and hear what he has promised us, we will know that disappointment, discouragement, dejection, despair and demoralization, is the path that leads us away from him.
When we have 'failed', we need to confess it. Confess our disobedience, to God's rules, to our transgression of not trusting god's plan for us. When we communicate and talk to God, we might be surprised at the response we get from God. What we deem as a 'failure', God sees as a training path. A way to bring us closer to him. We may not LIKE the disappointment/problem, he has given us to get through. But there is a reason,it is just not known to us. What we call courage is just that. Through suffering and overcoming/getting through it, we see strength, and God's will shining through it. We are a mirror, showing others the right path. Which is why we admire those with courage to get through the toughest of situations.
God's grace and compassion is always there for us, for our taking, when we feel we have regressed away from him. When we believe, God will be there for us (see 1 Peter 1:6-9).
When we have 'failed', we need to confess it. Confess our disobedience, to God's rules, to our transgression of not trusting god's plan for us. When we communicate and talk to God, we might be surprised at the response we get from God. What we deem as a 'failure', God sees as a training path. A way to bring us closer to him. We may not LIKE the disappointment/problem, he has given us to get through. But there is a reason,it is just not known to us. What we call courage is just that. Through suffering and overcoming/getting through it, we see strength, and God's will shining through it. We are a mirror, showing others the right path. Which is why we admire those with courage to get through the toughest of situations.
God's grace and compassion is always there for us, for our taking, when we feel we have regressed away from him. When we believe, God will be there for us (see 1 Peter 1:6-9).
The book also includes a 16 week Bible study, that corresponds to each chapter in the book. i think this book would be an excellent bible study class for any faith, as it gets to the CORE of God's grace and plan for each of us. Even if you are secure in your faith, the book is very helpful to remind us how to bring other's through the tough times in their lives, and how to be examples for them. I highly recommend it!
About the Author: KAY ARTHUR founded Precept Ministries International with her husband, Jack, in 1970. What started as a fledgling ministry to teens is now a worldwide outreach with Inductive Bible Studies in nearly 150 countries and 70 languages. Arthur has written 100-plus books and Bible studies. Arthur reaches over 90 million viewers and listeners through her half-hour television program and the one-minute radio feature Precepts from God's Word aired on nearly 1,000 radio and television stations worldwide and available online at www.preceptsforlife.com. She holds an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Tennessee Temple University. For more information about Kay Arthur and Precept Ministries International, visit www.precept.org.
Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this book free of charge, from WaterBrook Multnomah via their Blogger program, for review purposes. A small stipend has been offered, but no othercompensation, has been received or implied for this post. Nor was I told how to post about it, all reviews/thoughts are my own.
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