Is Christianity a Life of Ease?

There is a certain segment today in Christianity that says that if you believe in Jesus, you will be healthy, wealthy, and wise. All your problems will be solved. You will be rolling in cash by just claiming it in Jesus name and healed of anything from a headache to catastrophic disease, just by speaking it so. Life will be a one way ticket to easy street. If you happen to be struggling with a trial, have deep inner emotional struggles, or are suffering in some way, well, you just do not have enough faith. Or, according to a TV preacher, perhaps you need to "sow a seed" of cash in his or her coffers to reap these benefits..

This is completely opposite the Scriptures. There we are promised that not only will we have trials, but sufferings of some kind or another. In fact, it is the primary way God uses to reduce our own tenacious hold on our lives to learn to trust in Him alone. God takes our defeats, our pain, and our deepest trials and makes something beautiful out of them. What He does in them and through them is far more valuable than the baubles and trinkets of life. Instead of the pipe dream of a life of ease, we find joy and the completion of the deepest yearnings of a heart that cries out for our God. It is said that happiness depends on the convenience of our circumstance, while joy is regardless of circumstance and transcends the worst of them.

God does not want us to have so much that we forget Him, or come to believe we do not need Him. How many societies have spiraled downward this way? This is not because God sentimentally wants us to feel we need Him. Rather, we are created that way. A flower can not live without the sun and water. In the same way, we need the Son and the water of true life to truly live. Abundant life is a promise even in the midst of the greatest obstacles of life.

Life is hard; it gets tough, to say the least. Yet God is mighty to save, to keep, and to care for us though it all. As we love Him who first loved us in Christ, we would have it no other way. He is the joy of our heart, what else we strive for can compare?

Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. 2 Corinthians 4: 16-18.