Affliction

“And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” ( Luke 4:27)

In the 1997 movie Affliction, Nick Nolte is a deeply troubled small town cop who investigates a suspicious hunting death while events occur that cause him to mentally disintegrate. While the late James Coburn won a best supporting actor Oscar for playing the abusive alcoholic father, God is using affliction to make us better.

It’s easy to believe God for something we’ve already seen Him do. But Naaman’s circumstances were unique because not only did he have leprosy, nobody he knew had ever been healed of it, and he had no point of reference to look back on. Naaman, the commander of the army of the king of Syria, was a great and honorable man in the eyes of his master, because by him God has given victory to Syria. He was a mighty man of valor, but also a leper. ( 2 Kings 5:1)

Naaman was a powerful man, but God was about to make him an exceptional one. When God does that, He permits us to get into afflictions and predicaments without human solutions. When God wants us to have extraordinary wealth, power or influence in order to fulfill the Great Commission of Mark 16:15 to preach the gospel of salvation to every creature, He often permits extraordinary affliction, for that’s how He moves us from being just impressive to being truly proven, refined, promoted and exceptional for His glory.

Like Naaman, many of us are being tested and afflicted today in our marriage, our job, our finances, our relationships, our business, our family, and our health. Some of us are even afraid to even talk about it because we don’t know anybody who’s ever beaten our particular problem. If so, we need to stop focusing on the circumstances, attack fear head on, and start focusing on God because He doesn’t need anything to begin with in order to solve our problem.

In Genesis God the Creator created the universe and hung the earth on nothing, and it’s still turning every day. As The World Turns and when God finally delivers us from affliction, be careful, because one of the first things enquiring minds will want to know is, “How did you do it?” They’ll start admiring our elevated status, glory and armor, when all the time it was our exceptional affliction that allowed God to mold us into the person we’ve become.

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