Amazing Grace Received Through Faith: God's Faithfulness During Great Struggles

Jesus causes the dead to live. He pursues us, faithful to His promises, abounding in love. Though trials and temptations come, God’s grace goes along with us. As Christians we can expect much struggle and suffering. Yet we can also expect to encounter great grace and joy.

As the Apostle Paul wrote: “2 Corinthians 6:5-12 (NLT) We patiently endure troubles and hardships and calamities of every kind. 5 We have been beaten, been put in prison, faced angry mobs, worked to exhaustion, endured sleepless nights, and gone without food. 6 We prove ourselves by our purity, our understanding, our patience, our kindness, by the Holy Spirit within us, and by our sincere love. 7 We faithfully preach the truth. God’s power is working in us. We use the weapons of righteousness in the right hand for attack and the left hand for defense. 8 We serve God whether people honor us or despise us, whether they slander us or praise us. We are honest, but they call us impostors. 9 We are ignored, even though we are well known. We live close to death, but we are still alive. We have been beaten, but we have not been killed. 10 Our hearts ache, but we always have joy. We are poor, but we give spiritual riches to others. We own nothing, and yet we have everything.”

Today we’re talking about grace in the context of struggle. And we’re going to look at three examples of grace in suffering.

First, we talk about Corrie Ten Boom, a young woman living during world war II. She was just an average person, part of a religious family in the Netherlands. When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, a Jewish woman came to the ten boom home, and asked for help. Soon Corrie was sheltering Jews in her home, with her family.

The Nazis discovered what was happening, and imprisoned the entire family including Corrie and her sister Betsie.

Corrie and Betsie were placed in a women’s labor camp by the Nazis. Not only that, but they were placed in the worst building at the camp; it was infested by lice. Corrie was terribly upset, and complained to Betsie about what they were having to go through. Corrie and Betsie prayed for the jews at the camps. But Betsie also felt compassion for the guards, and prayed for them, because she saw them as lost without Christ. But Corrie hated the guards, because they were treated so terribly.

Betsie and Corrie managed to sneak a Bible into the camp, and they held services. How were they able to do so? The guards never went into their building because they didn’t want to get fleas. So God’s grace was upon them, even in the midst of trial.

Betsie died in the prison. By a clerical error, just before the end of the war, Corrie was released from the camp. This was a simple mistake, and the rest of the women in her group were executed in the gas chambers that day.

After the war Corrie continued to speak for Christ, and one day at a church meeting, a man walked up to her. She realized that this man had been one of the guards at the camp, one who had severely abused her sister Betsie. The man said he had found Christ, and been forgiven of his sins, but he wanted to ask Corrie personally for her forgiveness. Corrie didn’t think she could do it. But she felt a surge of power go through her, and she took the outstretched hand of the man and she said to him, “I forgive you.”

God’s grace is given to us, so that we may share it with others. We are called to a ministry of scandalous forgiveness. And Corrie lived it out, to the very end. That’s amazing grace.

The struggles we go through are gifts from God. And though we are constantly tried, we can have joy.

As the word says, in 1st Peter 1:6-7 “Be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you must endure many trials for a little while. 7 These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.”

God refines his people in the furnace of affliction. We know that here: If your like Bob who was afflicted with a rare skin condition, if your like Stanley waking up one day years ago to discover you have stage 4 cancer, if your like Major Ralph and Debbie years ago coming to a new assignment and being told “we got rid of the last officers and we’ll get rid of you too.” If your like Major Leonard and Major Evelyn battling cancer, if your like us, that’s a great sign, your faith is being refined, built up, to endure the starkest struggles.