Sometimes we change God into someone His is not, and a lot of times we do this unintentionally. First, let's consider the fact that our flesh continually battles us for a self-centered worldview. Now, since we are temporal creatures, we may unwittingly take the truth of God's eternal promises and twist them ever so slightly, so that His eternal promises now fit the time-frame and desire of our flesh.
When we do this, we strip God's eternal promises of all their truth and glory and replaced it with what we want to believe and hear. I met a woman once who suffered from a chronic illness for several years of her life. When I met her she had already been healed for a long time. When we talked about her experience she didn't see any benefit to her sickness. She also stated that somewhere in the bible, in the Old Testament, God promised to add these wasted years back on to the end of her life. Meaning that if she was sick for 10 years that those 10 years would be given back to her and she would live 10 years longer than if she had never been sick. When I asked, she was unsure of what book she got that promise from, but she believed in it and hope in it will total faith.
To this day I am not sure what verse she was thinking of (if you know please let me know with a comment), but I do know based on my knowledge of scripture that in her heart this woman had an idol and it was her present life. She could not see the blessing in suffering or the truth in such verses such as Matthew 5:3-12, Hebrews 12, Philippians 3:8, James 1, Romans 5, 1 Peter 1, 1 Peter 4, and most importantly one of my favorite verses:
2 Corinthians 1:8-10
For we do not want you to be unaware, brethren, of our affliction which came to us in Asia, that we were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life;
9indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves so that we would not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead;
10who delivered us from so great a peril of death, and will deliver us, He on whom we have set our hope. And He will yet deliver us.
What Paul valued in these verses was not his life. Paul had died to self. God accomplished that by taking away Paul's idea of life as pleasurable and self-sustaining by giving him suffering. We are incapable of putting the flesh to death. God must act and separate us from what we naturally love most in this world and that is life. If you suffer in the flesh consider yourself blessed (1 Peter 4:1). Suffering is a sign that God is working in your life and has called you to be His child, see Hebrews 12:4-11.
