OverlapStudy guideThe Abundant Life
The promise God actually made about your suffering
By the end of this guide you will be able to tell the promise God made about your suffering apart from the one you were handed, and you will know what to do with the hard days you are actually living.
By Tim Barber·
Photo by Eline Vijfhuizen on Unsplash
A study companion to the video
Did God promise me a good life?
Watch it first if you can, then read with your Bible open.
Start here
This is the study companion to the video "I Stopped Believing God Owed Me a Better Life." It is for the person who was issued a set of promises about a safe, smooth life, watched those promises fail in a hospital room or at a graveside, and then did the honest math: it looks like God broke his end of the deal. If that is you, I wrote this for you. I am going to ask you to stay with me through a fair amount of Hebrew and Greek, because the whole thing turns on a handful of words, and I would rather show you the words than ask you to trust me.
Here is how to use it. Watch the video first if you can. Then open your Bible to Genesis 2 and keep it open beside you; you will be flipping to John 16, John 10, Revelation 12, and John 11 as we go. Read "The teaching" straight through, because it carries the whole argument on its own. Then work through "The passages" slowly, with a pen, checking every quotation against your own Bible. Save "Questions to sit with" for last, and answer them on paper. Paper is slower than your head, and slower is the point.
One thing before we start. Being right about any of this saves nobody. Faith in Christ does. I have friends all over the map on how God relates to suffering, people who love the Lord and love others, and I am not going to break with any of them over it. So hold this study with an open hand: be convinced by the text if the text convinces you, and be kind toward everyone who reads it differently. My hope is that you walk away trusting God more, because you finally saw what he actually said.
This matters because the verdict you have been carrying, that God either failed you or was never going to show up, is costing you every ounce of trust and depth in your relationship with him. Every hard day gets filed as one more piece of evidence against his goodness. If that verdict was built on a forged document, you are allowed to put it down. This guide is about showing you the forgery, and then showing you what he really signed.
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Now to the passages themselves. Read each one slowly, in full, with your Bible open beside you.
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Get the whole study guide
Seven more sections: the teaching, key terms, the glossary, every passage in full, questions to sit with, where to go deeper, and a PDF you can print.
The next step is a conversation. Bring what you wrote to the community, or go back to the video.
