Good Out Of Evil Series

Luther Burbank, the world famous scientist, worked for years to

try and develop a black-petaled lily. He had several thousand

experimental lily plants in his laboratory. A sudden cloudburst let

loose a flood of rain that they were all washed away. William Stidger

tells of sympathizing with him over what had happened, and Burbank

said to him , "When anything like this happens I always remember a

little couplet my mother use to quote:

From the day you are born

Till you ride in a hearse,

There's nothing that happens

Which couldn't be worse.

We have all sought to comfort ourselves at some point in life by

recognizing this reality-it could be worse. It is almost always true, but

still it is a negative comfort. Your life can be a mess, but others are

even worse. If this is the best you got, then it has to be what you hang

on to, but there is a better and more positive way to deal with the

negatives of life, and that is to wait and see if what you thought was

bad turns out to be good, and instead of being the worst, it may in

reality be the best thing that could have happened.

That is what Paul is writing about to the Philippians. They are

worried about Paul. They heard he was thrown in prison in Rome,

and they have naturally concluded that his being arrested was not a

good thing. They assumed that his ministry, which they supported,

was now on hold, and Paul would be of no value in advancing the

Gospel now. Paul says not to worry, for your gifts are not money

down a hole. His being arrested turns out to actually help the

advance of the Gospel, and give him a better ministry than the one he

had planned.

The key to being an optimist is having the patience to wait and see

what God will do with your negative experience. We so often jump to

the conclusion that bad stuff is just that, and that alone. Sickness,

trials, shipwrecks, stoning, and prison do not sound like prizes for

which you would sell many lottery tickets. Nobody wants this sort of

stuff in their life if they can avoid it. What Paul learned by his

experience is that the bad stuff of life can be a way for God to use your

life in a way that good things could not be used. Paul's being a

prisoner led to his having a ministry to the palace guard of Nero, and

some of these soldiers came to Christ, which never would have

happened had he not become a prisoner. He never would have crossed

their path had he not been arrested.

The fruit of Paul's ministry in prison was quite extensive, and he

writes in 4:22, "All the saints send you greetings, especially those who

belong to Caesar's household." Paul had Christian friends in the

highest places, even the house of the Emperor. There is no reason to

believe this ever could have happened if Paul had not been treated like

a criminal. This is one of the answers to the question-why do bad

things happen to good people? It is because bad things are often the

only way to get us in touch with the right people, and to make us

willing to go the way God wants us to go. In other words, bad things

are tools God uses to get the job done in our lives. The point is not to

rejoice in bad things, but to rejoice in the Lord who can use bad things

for good goals we never would have achieved without the bad things.

Colonel Bringle of the Salvation Army became a very popular

author. He came out of Harvard with honors, and began his ministry

on a street corner in Boston. A drunken hooligan threw a brick at

him and hit him in the head. He received a concussion that put him in

the hospital for months. During his convalescence he wrote a book

called Help To Holiness. He added four volumes, and these devotional

aids sold in large numbers around the world. He said, "My brethren,

if there had never been a brick, there never would have been a book."

His bad experience opened up doors he never would have entered had

they not compelled him to do so. Don't be so quick to label bad things

as a curse. Wait to see if it might be a blessing. Even pray to that

end. Grace Crowell wrote a poem that says it all.

Yet as I live them, strange I did not know

Which hours were destined thus to live and shine,

And which among the countless ones would grow

To be, peculiarly, forever mine.