What makes a shiny apple look delicious? The skin off course. But what is it about an apple that actually makes it delicious? The juice and substance inside. Thats's the apple's real "character."
I learned this as a boy watching my mother make apple sauce. With a wooden pestle, she would mash the soft, boiled pieces of apple thru a metal colander and into a bowl, until all that remained in the colander were drab, flattened skins. but oh, the sauce tasted so good!
God uses life's pressures to bring out the sweetness of Christlike character in us. Tribulation also helps us realise the awful potential of our sin nature and see for what it is --- ugly and tasteless. Under pressure all kinds of sins begin to surface --- greed, selfishness, lust, pride.
Pressure, whether from without or from an unrealistic perfectionism within, is a fact of our fallen world. God controls its intensity and duration so that we can recognise, confess, and renounce those fleshy "skins" that obscure Christ's character in us.
Tribulation is not something anyone seeks. But when it comes, the Holy Spirit will use it to create in us perseverance, character and hope .
All God's testings have a purpose ---- Someday u will see the light, All he asks is for u to trust him, walk by faith and not by sight.
The gem of a Christlike character is formed by pressure and refined by friction
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Therefore since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into the grace in which now we stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our suffering, because we know suffering produces perseverance: perseverance, character: and character hope. And hope does not disapoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
(Romans 5:1-5)
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