How To Get The Greatest Benefit From Your Problems

 Most of us want quick solutions to our problems, but God wants to make sure that all His disciplines for character development in us and those around us are accomplished before He removes the problems.

He is also more concerned that the right procedures be followed in solving the problems than that the problems are actually resolved. It is the process of solving our problems that constitutes the most meaningful chapters of our life message and becomes the greatest help to other people.

We want to get out from under the pressure of our problems, but God wants to use that pressure to motivate us to a greater level of spiritual maturity than we would otherwise have achieved.

Often our present problems are the results of past purposeful disobedience to Church teaching, to scripture we have understood and ignored, and to the prompting of the Holy Spirit. Now God is using these problems to apply the pressures we need for complete surrender and obedience. If we fail to gain these benefits from our present problems He will only have to raise up new problems.

The Benefit of Getting More “Actual Graces From God”

The success of our lives is entirely related to how much actual grace God gives us. Actual Grace is the desire and the power to do God's will.

(Philippians 2:13) For it is God who worketh in you, both to will and to accomplish, according to his good will.

The Baltimore Catechism defines actual Grace as this: “actual grace comes to us only when we need its help in doing or avoiding an action, and it remains with us only while we are doing or avoiding the action.”

How do we receive this actual grace to help us with our problems? Two things are needed to receive this Grace.

• Ask God in prayer for Grace.

(Hebrews 4:16) Let us go therefore with confidence to the throne of grace: that we may obtain mercy, and find grace in seasonable aid.

 You may say, “I can't go confidently before the throne. I am to messed up.” but that is one of the reasons why verse 15 of Hebrews 4 says, “For we have not a high priest, who can not have compassion on our infirmities: but one tempted in all things like as we are, without sin.”

•  Along with prayer we must have humility

(James 4:6) But he giveth greater (more) grace. Wherefore he saith: God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble.

St. James goes on to say, “Be subject therefore to God, but resist the devil, and he will fly from you. Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners: and purify your hearts, ye double minded. Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned into mourning, and your joy into sorrow. Be humbled in the sight of the Lord, and he will exalt you.”

Nothing is more humbling than experiencing conflicts we can not solve....

especially when others know about our problems. But it is this very experience that God uses to break our pride and give us grace. That grace, actual grace, will be the prompting of God's Spirit to accomplish the next four benefits God intends for our problems. We will talk about these four benefits in the next few weeks.