Daily Devotional: Monday, June 7

Speaker: Ben Sigman

Theme: Dealing with Setbacks

Weekend Music links on iTunes: Salvation is Here by Hillsong; Yesterday, Today & Forever by Vicky Beeching; Cannons by Phil Wickham; Need You Here by Hillsong.

Read:  Ecclesiastes 9:11-12

Think:   One of the great thinkers of our age, Forrest Gump, is credited with a pithy statement we’ve all heard: ‘stuff happens’.  I’m not sure I got that quote exactly right, but you get the point.  Events are not always in our control.  Bad things can happen no matter what we do to prevent them.  No one is to blame.

Many people – including many Christians – reject this idea in one of two ways.  Some become very focused on the fact that their own actions cause specific outcomes.  Obviously, this is true in many ways – pregnancy doesn’t just happen, for example.  It is healthy and appropriate to accept personal responsibility for one’s actions.  However, this can be taken too far.  A mother can blame herself for her child’s illness, or a businessman for the effects of the poor economy on his company.  Even worse, this can become a spiritual problem, with every adverse circumstance viewed as the just punishment for one’s sin. 

At other times, people focus on God’s power and sovereignty in explaining bad things.  Since God is all-powerful and all-knowing, He must be causing everything that happens.  Their thinking seems to be that if my flight is cancelled or my dog runs away, God is trying to tell me something.

Scripture gives us a much more balanced picture.  Our actions do have consequences, and God is all-powerful and all-knowing.  But things happen that are outside our control or even our influence.  And God allows things to happen, including some things that we don’t like and don’t understand.  He can use difficult times for good, as we will consider through the rest of this week.  But as the Preacher writes, ‘time and chance happen to them all’.  Forrest was right.  Stuff happens.

Do:  Take out a coin.  Focus really hard on ‘heads’ and flip the coin 10 or 12 times.  Did you influence the outcome?

Pray:  God, though I’m sometimes tempted to believe otherwise, I can see that randomness is a part of this world.  While You could control everything, You sometimes hold back and allow even bad things to happen.  Help me focus not on the cause of the difficult circumstances in my life, but on how these things can draw me closer to You. Amen.

The eDevotional is written each week by a team of volunteers from Timberlake Church.

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