Trusting God in a hard providence, September 1st, 2025.

Introduction. We live in a world where rough things happen. Despite all our advances in technology,

everyone reading this will still at some point die. We still get sick. We still have

financial challenges. We have the heartbreak of wayward children. We still have to deal with

the perversity of sin that we can still find stirring under our own breastbone. In other words,

as it says in Job, man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. How are we to respond?

If we want to avoid the cold comfort of platitudes, tough times demand tough thinking, as we have previously dealt with anxiety,

where nothing bad has happened yet, but we are worked up over the fact that it might happen soon,

we now need to deal with the challenge of trusting God when the things we have feared have actually

started to come to pass. We are not yet through the trial, but we are certainly into it.

We are past the point of worrying about the possibility of a bad diagnosis. We have already

received the bad diagnosis. Now what? In everything, give thanks, for this is the will of God

in Christ Jesus concerning you. 1. Thessalonians 518. Giving thanks always for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. 1 Thessalonians 518.

Giving thanks always for all thanks unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,

Ephesians 520. The context of the exhortation in Thessalonians is this. Paul is in the midst of delivering

a rapid fire series of exhortations to them, including esteeming

your leaders, being at peace with one another, warning the unruly, comforting the feeble,

and so on. He then tells them to pray without ceasing, and then comes to deliver our text.

And then right afterwards, he says not to quench the spirit. Now, this cluster of exhortation

shows that Paul is not assuming that the Thessalonians are

somehow living in the Lala land where it is quite easy to give thanks and everything.

There are tough challenges in the same breath.

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