so God's honor is to take precedence over our feelings. We honor God by choosing to trust Him when we don't understand what He is doing or why He has allowed some adverse circumstance to occur. As we seek God's glory, we may be sure that He has purposed our good and that He will not be frustrated in fulfilling that purpose.

We must believe this and cling to this in the face of adversity and tragedy, if we are to glorify God by trusting Him.

You and I may never have the privilege in this life of seeing an obvious outcome of God's plan for us, as Joseph did. But God's plan for us is no less firm and its outcome is no less certain than was God's plan for Joseph.

Even more so, the wisdom of God is displayed when He brings good to us and glory to Himself out of confusion and calamity rather than out of pleasant times.

When I say we should never ask why, I am not talking about the reactive and spontaneous cry of anguish when calamity first befalls us or one we love. Rather, I am speaking of the persistent and demanding why that has an accusatory tone toward God in it.

One of the most damning indictments of mankind is found in Isaiah 53:6: "We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way" (Niv). Going our own way is the very essence, the very core, of sin. Your way may be to give money to charity; another person's way may be to rob a bank. But neither is done with reference to God; both of you have gone your own way.

Our first priority in times of adversity is to honor and glorify God by trusting Him.

But even here we must be careful that we are not seeking to satisfy our souls by finding some spiritual "good" in the adversity. Rather we must trust God that He is working in the experience for our good, even when we see no beneficial results. We must learn to trust God when He doesn't tell us why, when we don't understand what He is doing.

We are just as dependent on God when the physician diagnoses a routine illness and prescribes a successful medication. We are just as dependent when the paycheck comes regularly and all our material needs are met.

No one can harm you or jeopardize your future apart from the sovereign will of God.

In order to trust God in adversity we must believe that God is completely sovereign, perfect in love, and infinite in wisdom.

One of the speaker's main points was that if we want to live less stressful lives, we must learn to live with a single agenda: God's agenda. He pointed out that we tend to live under two agendas, ours and God's, and that the tension between them sets up stress.