WHy bother

​I read an article where a person had a misdiagnosed nerve issue. It brought him from living a normal life and working to being disabled and almost completely non-functional over the course of three years. He had given up hope but his wife continued to hang onto God’s healing promises. Suddenly one day, things began to change and over the course of a year he was healed.

Many people find themselves in a place of hopelessness. With life's frustrations many times we ask why even bother. It seems like no good deed goes unpunished. How come it works out for others and not for me? Is this how life is supposed to be? Stress and anxiety are daily factors in almost everyone’s lives. The world of information brings with it unbearable responsibility. Many of these responsibilities are overwhelming and difficult to comprehend.

In 2 Samuel 12, we arrive at the explanation of David’s first child with Bathsheba. The passage doesn’t say how old the child was, but it does say the child became ill. David the King with all sorts of means felt completely helpless. I fell prostrate and worshiped God including fasting and praying. His chief staff encouraged him to eat but he refused to do so. After seven days the child died. None of the staff were willing to tell David he was dead because they saw the passion and intercession David had for his son.
Soon David figured out his child had died. Instead of continuing his fast, he freshened himself up and began to worship God. I don’t know about you, but in my darkest moment with such a painful tragedy, I’m not sure worshiping God would be the easiest decision to make. Yet this is the absolute perfect decision to make. We will never understand God but it doesn’t mean we give up. David was given another son and it’s only my opinion, but I believe part of that reward was because of how he handled the previous son.
 “With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.”

Romans 8:1-2 MSG
“Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self-ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.”

Romans 8:5-8 MSG
“But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!”

Romans 8:9-11 MSG
“This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!”

Romans 8:15-17 MSG
“That’s why I don’t think there’s any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times. The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.”

Romans 8:18-21 MSG
 “All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We’re also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.”

Romans 8:22-25 MSG
“Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.”

Romans 8:26-28 MSG
“So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture: They kill us in cold blood because they hate you. We’re sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one. None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.”

Romans 8:31-39 MSG
When you find yourself on the edge press on. If God is for you who can be against you. You have an appointed call for your life nobody can interpret except for you. 
“For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable [for He does not withdraw what He has given, nor does He change His mind about those to whom He gives His grace or to whom He sends His call].”

Romans 11:29 AMP
No matter how hard it is, you are to press on. The trials are part of the process and you cannot allow the devil to defeat you. When you ask if you should bother realize it's a God ordained must. Good things come from failures. Some of the greatest inventors, leaders and innovators throughout history have been deemed failures in multiple facets.
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 “Whatever you do [whatever your task may be], work from the soul [that is, put in your very best effort], as [something done] for the Lord and not for men,”
COLOSSIANS 3:23 AMP

You cannot get caught up in the self-evaluation of your life and circumstances. The Lord is your evaluator. I'm sure it didn't make sense to Moses to go back up the mountain for more tablets. In fact many of the things performed in the bible don’t make sense at face value. Know this, you are fearfully and wonderfully made. God is for me so nobody can be against me. No matter what situation or task we always bother. This is because we work for the Lord and not ourselves.  A thousand may fall at your side and 10000 at your right hand and you will continue to bother because you have a destination with the anointing of Christ upon you.  You will get through it and God will be glorified because of it. So bother to go the extra mile, bother to lend a hand, bother for breakthrough, bother to forgive and bother for a better life.