When it comes to hardships, persecution, difficulty…..or whatever word we’d prefer to use, I feel we have many faulty understandings.

One of those is the belief that difficulty enters our life because we haven’t been behaving well. We see it as punishment for a life that has not been lived well for Jesus. It fits into the guilt/justice mindset that we tend to live out in the western world. Then on the other side of the coin is our total disbelief when difficulty enters our life in a season when we feel we have been close, faithful and devoted to God. We just don’t feel we deserve it, we feel our actions have been good so why would this happen to us?

Why am I thinking of this today? Well I read this verse from 2 Chronicles this morning.

After all that Hezekiah had so faithfully done, Sennacherib king of Assyria came and invaded Judah. 2 Chronicles 32:1

Prior to this Hezekiah had led brilliantly as king over the people in Judah. He’d purified the temple, reinstated the priests, invited people to Passover and worshipped the Lord. His actions and behaviour were pleasant to God. The start of the verse in chapter 32 even acknowledges that fact. But, still the king of the world superpower at that time came and invaded Judah.

I’m not going to write fully on warfare and opposition here but all I want to highlight is that even when we are faithful attack can come. Perhaps the enemy does it to try and get us to reverse our faithfulness, maybe he was going to do it anyway, perhaps God thinks we are ready for a greater battle because of our faithfulness. If it’s any of these reasons, all of these reasons or none of them, it doesn’t really matter.

The truth is whatever we might be facing today, whether we feel we deserve it or not, let’s continue to return to the Father again and again. Let’s be faithful to Him and His promises.

I’ll write a little more on warfare from this passage tomorrow…..