Christian Encouragement – The Plans of The Lord

Things happen in life that take us by surprise, but nothing surprises the Lord. Although it is not His choice that hurtful or injust things should happen to us because His choice would be to see all men accepting and following Christ in love and righteousness, He does have the power to account for and take care of us when they do.

Sometimes bad things happen of such a magnitude they shatter our faith, not in God, but in ourselves and our ability to continue following due to indecision and doubts about where to go from here and how we are going to be able to accomplish it. But even in these cases — maybe especially in these cases — generally speaking, unless the situation is something that we are given specific instruction about either in God’s Word or in prayer, the best way to move forward is to continue on in the direction the Lord was already leading before the bad event happened, because He already knew that thing would happen when He first started directing you in it, and He can be trusted that He wouldn’t have done so without a purpose.

That’s not to say that where a significant loss occurs we shouldn’t acknowledge or grieve over that loss, because that emotional expression is necessary, too. The Prophet Jeremiah also wrote an entire book of Lamentations in addition to the hopeful passage above, so grief and hope are not mutually exclusive of each other. But when our personal foundations crumble, we need to remember that it’s not upon our own foundations that the Kingdom stands, but His, and no action of man or tragic circumstance has the ability to prevail against the love and power of the Lord.