Sunday, August 29th, 2010

How Adversity Is Better Than Prosperity

If you’ve ever been a member of a church youth group, you’ve probably played the game “Bigger and Better.” In this game, you split up into groups with separate cars and everyone is given something small like a toothpick. Then you go around for the next couple hours trying to get people to trade you something bigger or better.

Sometimes someone comes back with an old TV. I heard about one group that came back with a riding lawnmower. One guy did this over the internet. He started with a red paper clip and 14 trades later, he ended up with a house!

In this chapter, Solomon uses the word “better” 11x. He’ll compare two things and say, “This is better than that.” But in the 1st half of this chapter we see that his comparisons revolve around one bigger comparison. This evening we’re going to see how adversity can be better than prosperity. This seems counterintuitive and hard for us to get our minds around. So Solomon shows us four ways this is true.