God's Hard Gifts

"Thanks be to God for His inexpressible gift!” (2 Corinthians 9:15). Of course that gift is the Lord Jesus Christ.

God's grace in Christ is infinitely valuable, an inexpressible gift, because of Christ's suffering. The Father was willing to go to any length, including the sacrifice of His own Son, to bring us to Himself.

I'm beginning to see that God's best gifts involve suffering. They are all born in grace, fashioned in wisdom and delivered in love. But some gifts, the ones that require our own pain, are harder to receive. We may not even recognize them as gifts at first. They feel more like rebukes, trials, or punishments.

For example, think of Joseph’s life: sold into slavery by his brothers, falsely accused by his master’s wife, forgotten by the prison companion he helped. (See Genesis 37, 39, 40). None of these experiences felt like gifts, but they were.

They forged character and abilities in Joseph that would have come no other way, and made him a savior to his people that otherwise he never would have been. Hard gifts of pain and struggle and disappointment are, in the end, God’s best gifts to us because they move us toward Christ and prepare us for heaven. 

Recently I've been trying to look back at my regrets, heartaches, and failures. I want to see them a new way, as if they might really have been God's gifts to me. Honestly, most of them don't feel that way yet. But I know that my feelings of comfort, satisfaction, or success are not a true measure of God's grace anyway. My hardest times may well have been, from heaven's perspective, the best times.

May God's gift of His Son fill you will joy this Christmas, and may all His gifts, even the hard ones, draw you nearer to the One we love the most.

Merry Christmas!