Couch Potato

Pastor talks about hanging onto God's word of promise against all evidence to the contrary. When he talks about how affliction "exercises" our faith, I'm not sure I want exercise. Unfortunately, sometimes I just want to be a couch potato. But nevertheless, what Pastor says is true. (And when you get to the last sentence, you realize that it is good.) Following is a brief excerpt from a recent Bible class:

He wants you to live by joyous confident faith in His mercy, even though you've got people that smack you down. In the story of the Canaanite woman (Mt 15), we have the experience in our life sometimes that He is not listening or not answering. What does this mean? Does it mean that He sometimes doesn't care? No. Does it mean that He sometimes has turned a deaf ear to us? No. Whatever it is that He allows us to pass through -- whatever it is! -- it is always to exercise our faith in His goodness, in His love, in the Gospel of His Son. Always! Our sinful reason and sinful flesh will never conclude this. Sometimes it might actually be salutary if we suffer a while, if we have a cross laid upon us for a while. Sometimes that teaches us to despair completely of ourselves. It is always the will of God in the face of such crosses to draw us ever closer to His Son.