Coming to Know the Lord

 I have noticed something in my life. When things are going well, it is nice, but it doesn't lead me to be closer to the Lord, most of the time. However, when things go wrong, and when I have pain or suffering, I have been drawn to the Lord in wonderful ways. I think that is human nature for all of us. Therefore, God has to allow troubles to come or to cause us to have problems, so we can come to know Him in a personal way. That is His desire for every person born into this world.

God was very oppressive to the people of Egypt because they did not know Him, and they worshiped Pharaoh as a god. He wanted to change that. (Ezekiel 32:15) He told them that when He made Egypt desolate, and the country was destitute of all that once filled it, and when He had struck all who dwelled there, then they would know that He was the Lord. The trials were His way of showing Himself to them with the desire for them to come to know Him.

When we look back on the way we came to know Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we can see that God engineered the circumstances in our life to draw us to Him. We might not have had terrible problems, but we were troubled by our sins and God's conviction of our sins. We were realizing that we could not forgive our own sins, so we turned to Jesus to forgive us. In other cases we could have committed terrible sins that led to much suffering before we finally came to know Jesus as Lord and Savior.

Much the same is true once we become believers. God uses our trials and pain to show us our need for Him. Each time we trust Him to get us through the problems, we come to know Him better. We come to know He is Lord of all, and we can trust Him in all things. Therefore, our troubles are good, and God allows them to happen because He loves us and wants us to know Him well.

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Tomorrow, I intend to read Ezekiel 33-35.