Storm Survival
by Pastor Greg Laurie
“So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever” (2 Corinthians 4:18 nlt).
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are going through a crisis, and those who will go through a crisis. These days, it seems you’ll encounter more of the former.
Jesus, at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, talked about two men who built houses. One built his on a solid foundation of rock, while the other built his on an unstable foundation of sand.
Then Jesus said this about both houses: “And the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house” (Matthew 7:25, 27 nkjv). It is not a matter of if the rain descends; it’s a matter of when.
I wish I could say that we’ll reach a point in our lives when all our problems go away. In reality, some problems simply replace other ones. If we’re not pulling into or out of a storm, we’ll face one eventually.
Worse yet, storms can seemingly come out of nowhere. It might be a hardship. It might be anxiety. It might be a tragedy. But it’s something that came up pretty quickly, and it’s had a major impact on you.
Sometimes those trials and hardships in our lives seem random, but they never are. Matthew 5:45 tells us, “For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike” (nlt).
The apostle Paul wrote, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! (2 Corinthians 4:17–18 nlt). Storms have a beginning, middle, and end. And something will come out of them: an immeasurably great glory.
We cannot control circumstances. Nor can we control what people say to us or about us. We cannot control everything that comes our way, but we can control our reaction to it.
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