You Said I'd Be Amazing! Why is my Life so Hard and Unfair??

I came. I saw. I conquered.

We like the neatness of that. The succinct progression from observation to overcoming. Somehow, we have subconsciously come to expect that to be the reality of life once we submit ourselves to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. He is, after all, in us through the Holy Spirit, giving us power and authority. It should be easy, right?

But that’s not our lived experience.

Our experience is full of hardship. It’s messy and awkward. Our growth has fits and starts. Stuff doesn’t work out the way it should. Even when we are absolutely, one-hundred-percent sure that we have heard the word of the Lord on something, and we are walking in it faithfully, we have struggles and troubles. In those moments of trouble, we have a tendency to either condemn ourselves (Where is my faith? What is my sin?) or blame the devil (My enemy has come against me!). Sometimes we’re right; the fault lies in one of those two places, we identify it, and correct or combat it.

There’s a third option for why we’re going through what we’re going through. It’s a hard one to wrap our brains around. What if the circumstances and situations we are facing are exactly what we need to be facing to accomplish that word of the Lord that we heard and are walking in?

Psalm 105 is a recounting of the faithfulness of God. Amid praising God for His kept promises and upholding hand, his miracles and his righteous judgements, come these verses:

When he summoned a famine on the land and broke all supply of bread,
he had sent a man ahead of them,
Joseph, who was sold as a slave.
His feet were hurt with fetters; his neck was put in a collar of iron;
until what he had said came to pass, the word of the Lord tested him.
Psalm 105:16-19

Joseph was given a dream directly from the Lord. It prophesied his role in God’s Kingdom and his relationship to others. It was clear and promised greatness. And for the entire time in Joseph’s life from when it was given until when it was fulfilled, the very word of God to him caused strife in Joseph’s life.

He did not sin in recounting his dream to his family. His brothers’ sin against him in enslaving him was not a direct attack from the devil, although it was an outgrowth of their own fleshly desires. Nothing in his story recounts Satan asking God for permission to thwart him as in Job’s story, nor does it say that Joseph faltered in his faithfulness. He heard God. He believed God. He obeyed God. And he suffered. UNTIL the word of God came to pass.

Yet it was in the path of his suffering that his purpose was made possible. Without his enslavement, he would have remained at home. He would never have been in the right place to save his family and nation. Without false accusations against him by Potiphar’s wife, he would never have met the baker and the cupbearer in the prison and revealed his gift for the interpretation of dreams. The cupbearer would have no cause to present Joseph as a solution to Pharoah’s troubling dreams. Joseph would have had no opportunity to rise to the position foretold to him in the dream at his father’s home. Not only would his purpose never have been fulfilled without the path of suffering, but his family would have starved and his nation died.
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Y’all, sometimes God gives you a promise. It is clear and distinct and glorious. Be careful not to dismiss the struggles along the path to its fulfilment as your fault or the enemy’s attacks; often, the way of faithfulness leads through the troubles that are necessary to put you in the place of promise. Sometimes, it is the very word that God has given, the very faithfulness in its fulfillment, that is testing you. It is refining you and positioning you, revealing the giftings in you, so that when it comes to pass, His purposes and glory are revealed for you and your family…and maybe even your nation.