Maybe the better questions are: Do we understand how God loves us? How does He communicate His love to us?
The OT speaks about seeking His face and I believe that as we seek His face we are to open our hearts to receive what He has to give us. But I’ve seen a certain behavior in myself, and I’m sure it exists in other Christians as well. When we seek His face and He asks us to receive from Him what we perceive as “negative” we turn away, not willing to receive these things from Him because we do not want to go through uncomfortable situations. But what happens (and it has happened to me and my family a lot) when the very thing the Father wants to give to us is really for our benefit? Maybe what we are to receive will allow us to know Him in ways we could never have imagined, wouldn’t we want to receive those things from Him?
The difficulty lies in the actual participation. Once we receive the “waters of affliction” do not run or turn away and hide from Him, but open our arms, embrace the difficulty, learn from it, find joy in it and give that joy to others. The Father loves us and is willing to allow us to suffer for a little while so that He can have His way with us and allow us to see and participate in His divine family. It’s worth the effort and makes all the difference in our lives.
We are in a time and culture that will brook no suffering or assaults on the divine cult of Self! Your appeal for patience in suffering receives a sympathetic hearing in this listener, but observing the present public moral outrage at the selfishness of others all around us and the Playboy hedonistic indulgence of the “good old boy” culture of empowering the powerful at the expense of their neighbors, may reveal a dulling of the senses to the voice of the Spirit and a hardening of the hearts of people to the appeal of their God. Hard to hear that still small voice making it’s appeal to us in our cultural moral desert….But thanks for the reminder!
Be STILL and KNOW…