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Do you have a pure faith in Christ?
As Christians, we're familiar with Roman 8:28: "... all things work together for good for those who are called according to [God's] purpose." While that verse can often be a comfort, it's also sometimes one of the most difficult passages in the Bible. When we see stress and suffering impacting other believers' lives (or our own), it may be hard to reconcile the idea that something positive can really come out of such challenges.
The Apostle Paul's point is not that pain doesn't hurt, or that there's no such thing as evil, or that bad things never happen to God's people. It's that the Lord, in the mystery of His sovereign grace, somehow interweaves both dark and light threads so as to produce a beautiful tapestry.
Elsewhere, Paul (Romans 5:3-4) and James (James 1:2-4) indicate that the good that comes to us through bad experiences has nothing to do with feelings or circumstances. Instead, it's a question of becoming different than we were before our troubles began: stronger, more hopeful, more loving, more faithful. Various Bible passages use the illustration of refining gold or silver through fire—a process through which contaminants and extraneous materials are burned off to leave nothing but pure precious metal. If the end result of a heated crisis is a purer faith in Christ, that's good.
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