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Originally Posted by Just Me
Wow ok get me thinking this morning KOS. 
I do think that God does bless us when we are living as He sees fit but I think those blessing come in forms of health, happiness, love, very little or no "up hill battles" etc. Which in turn can be converted so to speak into material things. When you are healthy you can go to school and get an education which will help you to get a good job or keep a good job which gives you the money to live well. Or when things are running smoothly in our lives it allows us to reach our goals and succeed which again can create wealth.
I truly believe that if you are living a life that God approves of things just fall into place and this allows one to focus more on their goals and that can mean material things. |
What I do know is this, God gives His people the strength to go through it, but it still does not mean it will be easy. Jesus (God in the flesh) just before He was to be crucified, when He was praying He was in such mental agony that His sweat was like great drops of blood, now that's not easy.
Some Christians were thrown before lions, some were sawed in two, non of these come across to me as easy.
It is one thing for us to sit where we are and believe that persecution is easy, its another thing to go through it.
Jesus never told us that life as a Christian would be a bed of roses, in fact He said we will have tribulations and in the age to come eternal life. This is not to say that Christians can't be joyful or be filled with peace, yes true Christians are but one should never lose sight of the fact the just as Jesus said, we are not of this world. We are pilgrims and strangers in this world, as the scripture said of Abraham and Isaac and all the righteous men of old, they had opportunity to go back from where they came from, but they looked for a City whose builder and maker was God.
We must never forget that; some of us have become so comfortable in this world that rather than be out doing our Father's business, as Jesus did, we turn our attention to politics. We seek to make this world/system our home, we say we are trying to make this world (which the Bible says that Satan is the God of) a better place, ignoring the fact that the Bible says that this world will steadily get worse to the point where it says unless those days were cut short no flesh would be saved.
It is no wonder why in the book of Revelation Jesus have to say to some, come out from among them less you share in here sins and partake of her plague.