Lesson 15: Now - Where Can I Find Answers to Hard Questions? (1)

Before we can even begin to find answers to hard questions of our lives, we must first answer the question of why are there hard questions in our lives to begin with. Am I not a believer? Isn't God always with me to help me through things? Did God not promise to never leave me? If the answer to the first of these three questions is yes, then the answer to the other two is yes as well. But God never promised to make our lives easy. In fact, the opposite is true. Look at John 16:33 which says, "in the world [we] will have tribulation." God did not save us to live on easy street. He did not save us for a life of leisure and pleasure here. He saved us to become like Himself.

So now the question stands, why are there hard questions in my life? The answer is because God wants us to become like Himself. This process of our becoming like Christ is a two-sided coin: God's side is called sanctification, and our side is called holiness. Sanctification is the process, holiness is the goal. The two are completely intertwined; one cannot exist or function without the other.


Let's look first at God's side, sanctification. There is a sense in which sanctification is accomplished by God in the moment of our salvation. Just as we are by position justified (declared to be righteous before God), so we are also by position sanctified. This means we are set apart by God for a specific purpose, the purpose, again, being that we become like Christ. We read this in 1 Corinthians 1:30, "And Because of Him that you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption”. Just as Christ became our righteousness and our redemption, He also became our sanctification. He set us apart. He made us different. He made special and unique.

Our sanctification is also continuing and building. Hebrews 12:14 tells us it is something we must pursue. It is something we must take a vital interest in for our lives. We must constantly and diligently seek God's work in our lives which stretches or cuts or pulls us into the form of Christ. Christ does this by placing events or situations into our lives too big for us to handle by ourselves. We must come to Him, we must rely on Him, we must seek His face. Every such event or situation should drive us ever deeper into the Scriptures.

We continue with Sanctification in the next lesson.

*What is happening in your life today that is too big for you to handle?