We pray that God will deliver us from our trials, but sometimes he does not. We pray that he will relieve us of our burdens, but sometimes they remain pressed hard against our shoulders. Why? J.R. Miller provides a helpful answer in this brief quote.
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Some think that whenever they have a little trouble, a bit of hard path to walk over, a load to carry, a sorrow to meet, a trial of any kind, all they have to do is to call upon God and He will take away that which is hard, or prevent that which impedes, freeing them altogether from the trial.
But this is not God’s usual way. His purpose concerning us is not to make things easy for us, but rather to make something of us.
So when we ask Him to save us from our care, to take the struggle out of our life, to make the path mossy for our feet, to lift off the heavy load, He simply does not do it. It really would be most unkind and unloving in Him to do so. It would be giving us an easier path today instead of a mountain vision tomorrow.
Therefore, prayers of this kind go unanswered. We must carry the burden ourselves. We must climb the steep path to stand on the radiant peak. God wants us to learn life’s lessons, and to do this we must be left to work out the problems for ourselves.
“We must be left to work out the problems for ourselves,” he says. Not without God’s care and assistance and guidance, of course. But without his immediate relief. Sometimes he requires us to lift, carry and even maintain a heavy burden for a long time. For his concern is not to make things easy for us, but to make something of us.