Session Six: Day Two- To Prove The Lord's Boasts

You have heard of Job's endurance.

James 5:11

Patience.  

Quite possibly one of the things that I have the most difficult time with.  It is not something that comes easily to me and it is not something I enjoy having to work through.

List three reasons why patience might be infinitely more challenging in our current culture:

1. We live in a culture of immediate gratification
2. Everything happens at lightening speed.  No waiting for anything
3. Our culture gives us immediate control over everything  

In learning to be patient, we learn that we cannot rush God.  We cannot make Him do things any more quickly than His perfect plan for us calls for.  We can want what we want and we can pray and tell Him so.  But being patient requires us to take a deep breath and remember:  God has a plan and His timing is always perfect.  Without waiting for it, we might not even begin to understand the blessing that He has planned to give us.

When we live patiently under the blessing and plan of our Heavenly Father, we give Him cause to boast of us.  After reading the portions of Job, we begin to see that God does not put us to tests that He knows in advance we don't have the ability to pass.  Read Job 42:1-6.
I know you can do all things.  Once I had heard, now I see.  Again in Job 42:5 it says My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.  Being patient and walking through the trials of life give us an opportunity to not just read the word of God and hear it, but to look back after our trials and testing and actually see where He held us, blessed us and brought us through.


What was the outcome from the Lord according to Job 42:12?  
The Lord blessed the latter part of Job's life more than the first.   He went through trials and came out the other side with more than he had lost.  Isaiah 61:7 tells us that God's people will receive a double portion and because we are His children, as believers, that includes us.

Whatever trial you, my dear friends, are struggling with today, know this deep in your hearts.  This lesson is for all of us.  God loves us so much and His plan is perfect.  We don't know what the other side will look like but He promises us a double portion of blessing.