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    Between a Rock and a Hard Place
    Between a Rock and a Hard Place
    Between a Rock and a Hard Place
    Ebook150 pages3 hours

    Between a Rock and a Hard Place

    By Tony Evans

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    About this ebook

    You know the story: God told Abraham he would become a great nation. Then he told him to sacrifice his own (and only) son, Isaac. Abraham obeyed God and was about to kill Isaac—when God intervened.

    This is a classic 'between a rock and a hard place' situation. So how was Abraham able to obey in the face of losing it all? Or to bring it closer to home—what would you have done?

    In this powerful book, Tony Evans reveals what to do when your love for God is tested. According to Evans, “When you don’t know God, or when you either forget or dismiss what is true about Him, then you don’t know how to respond…”

    Moving through passages in both the Old and New Testaments, Evans makes a powerful case for obedient living as the key to an abundant life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMoody Publishers
    Release dateOct 1, 2010
    ISBN9781575675633
    Between a Rock and a Hard Place
    Author

    Tony Evans

    Dr. Tony Evans is founder and senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, founder and president of The Urban Alternative, and author of The Power of God’s Names, Victory in Spiritual Warfare, and many other books. Dr. Evans is the first African American to earn a doctorate of theology from Dallas Theological Seminary, as well as the first African American to author both a study Bible and full Bible commentary. His radio broadcast, The Alternative with Dr. Tony Evans, can be heard on more than 2,000 US outlets daily and in more than 130 countries. Learn more at TonyEvans.org.

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      Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Tony Evans

      Acknowledgments

      INTRODUCTION

      EVERY SUMMER I GO to the doctor’s office for an annual medical exam. Of all of the things that my doctor does during that health examination, the one that I despise the most is the stress test. He attaches electronic probes all over my body. Then he sticks me on a treadmill. Next, he makes the treadmill go faster and faster up an incline because he wants to know the real condition of my heart.

      My heart might feel fine to me but it might not be fine. The doctor can determine the strength of my heart only when he measures it under stress. So what he does is create a stressful situation: I’m walking for a long period of time, huffing and puffing, climbing a hill that never seems to end. He’s testing my heart to see whether how I feel is how I really am. Because it’s possible to have good feelings yet still have a bad heart.

      Living the Christian life is no different. It’s possible to come to church every week, sing worship songs, memorize Bible verses, serve on a variety of committees, and assume that your heart, faith, and soul are strong. It’s even easy to say things like, I love you, God. God, you are so good. I’ll follow you, God. I’ll do whatever you say.

      But God doesn’t want to just take your word for it.

      He tests you and me because He wants what is best for us. He tests us because He is getting ready to do something amazing in our lives. The way that He tests us is by putting us in a stressful scenario. God puts us on a treadmill. He designs a unique treadmill test to measure and reveal the real condition of our souls.

      Much like the stress test my doctor puts me through every summer, God allows trials and tests in our lives in order to reveal where we are along our spiritual journey. He does this for the purpose of correcting whatever happens to be wrong, revealing whatever needs to be exposed, and strengthening whatever seems to be weak so that we might move on to what He has in store for us.

      In this book we’re going to go deeper into the lives of Bible characters, from Abraham to Mary and Martha, who ended up between a rock and a hard place—pinned in really tough situations. There are a myriad of these types of situations in the Bible. In fact, when I first started studying the Bible early on, I would come across these trials all the time. It didn’t take me long to begin to see a pattern emerging as the same type of trial would appear again and again, just with different names and faces.

      These were trials where it was not just a person having a problem to deal with, but God was actually creating a scenario where the person was caught between a rock and a hard place. I began to study these scenes very closely, and I discovered patterns that kept coming up in them time and again. God gave such trials to examine and strengthen the faith of those who followed Him.

      When we find no clear direction to turn without there being a problem, and when any decision we could make is potentially the wrong one, God is getting ready to do a substantial thing in our lives. Keep this in mind as we go through these different biblical examples of others who were caught between a rock and a hard place. Keep this in mind because, with this guiding principle of truth, we can find hope and peace in the middle of a trial. God will use that hard place to do something significant in our lives.

      1

      Abraham and Isaac

      A SPECIAL

      KIND OF TEST

      HAVE YOU EVER RECEIVED mail that isn’t addressed to you? You take it out of your mailbox and read that the address doesn’t have your name on it. It just says Occupant. You get that piece of mail by virtue of you being the occupant of that home. Trials are a lot like that. Just by virtue of being an occupant on this planet in a fallen world, we will face trials.

      Of course, no one likes a trial. No one wakes up in the morning, stretches, and says, Ah, what a beautiful day for a trial! I think I’d like to have a trial today! That would be an unusual person who would do something like that. Yet no matter how much we want to avoid trials in our lives, trials are inevitable. No one is immune to trials.

      Trials are adverse circumstances that God allows in our lives to both identify where we are spiritually as well as to prepare us for where He wants us to go. There is no escaping them. You are either in a trial now, you’ve just come out of a trial, or you are getting ready to go into a trial. Trials are unavoidable realities of life.

      But even though we all have to experience them, we can take comfort in knowing that trials must first pass through God’s hands before reaching us. Nothing comes our way without first having received His divine approval. And in order to get His divine approval, there must be a divine reason for Him to approve it.

      There is. God allows trials and tests in our lives in order to reveal where we are along our spiritual journey, to correct us when necessary, and to strengthen us for the journey ahead.

      PULLING OUT THE TRICK BAG

      A good friend of mine is an assistant football coach for the University of Texas, and he’ll call me during all hours of the day or night when he’s facing one of these trials. He calls me to talk through his trial, or as he puts it, the trick bag. In fact, he calls me so much about his trick bags that I’ve now nicknamed my friend Trick bag, and I call him that every time I see him.

      A trick bag is a catch-22. It’s where you find yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place. Your back is up against the wall, and no matter how hard you try, there seems to be no visible solution. The only way to get out of your scenario would be illegitimately, because there is no valid way out.

      When you are in a trick bag, you feel trapped, stuck, and tired of where you are. You either don’t know what to do, or you don’t know how to legitimately do what you feel you need to do. You are like Israel when they faced Pharaoh on one side and the Red Sea on the other, and certain death was upon them.

      A trick bag is a lose-lose deal. If it were a clear win-lose deal, then you would know how to choose and where to turn. But what do you do when you’re caught between a rock and a hard place? What option do you choose when both options are bad? Have you ever been in a situation where all of the ways that you turn to are problems, and you are just trying to find the least possible problem to choose as the solution?

      I’ve been in situations like that and it’s not fun. It’s about as fun as huffing and puffing on that treadmill in my doctor’s office during my annual physical exam. But one thing I’ve learned over the years is that God has a purpose for these times in our lives. Just like my doctor is not a mean man for putting my body through all of that stress, God is not a mean God when He decrees that we go through trials.

      When God wants to reveal the real condition of your heart to empower you toward His plan for your future, He puts you in one of these kinds of trials. And when God puts you in a certain kind of trial, trick bag, catch-22, or between a rock and a hard place, He is getting ready to do something significant in your life. That’s the conclusion of this book, and it comes at the beginning.

      This is not the typical trial that is used to develop character and reveal flaws. This trick bag signifies that there is accelerated activity about to take place in your situation.

      GOD’S BLESSING THROUGH ABRAHAM

      The first trick bag that we’re going to look at appears in Genesis 22. It’s part of the story of Abraham and his son Isaac. Earlier God had made a covenant with Abraham—theologians call this binding agreement the Abrahamic covenant. Through this covenant, God promised that He would bless Abraham and that Abraham would also be a blessing to others.

      Notice that God’s covenant didn’t stop at His blessing for Abraham. Rather, God’s covenant went on to declare that others would be blessed through Abraham. A blessing in the Bible means to experience, enjoy, and extend the favor of God in your life.

      Sometimes I get the impression that when we ask God to bless us, we forget the full definition of a blessing. We forget that God doesn’t want us to be cul-de-sac Christians where all of our blessings end with us. God wants us to be a conduit Christian where all of our blessings extend through us to others.

      God said clearly to Abraham, Look toward the heavens, and count the stars…. So shall your descendants be…. In you, all the families of the earth will be blessed (Genesis 15:5; 12:3).

      God said that He was not only going to bring His favor on Abraham but that His favor on Abraham would extend out to be a blessing on others as well. God never designs our blessings to stop with us, but our blessings should always extend to others.

      GOD’S MIRACLE FOR ABRAHAM AND SARAH

      God’s covenant with Abraham would require a miracle just to get it going. Not only were Abraham and his wife, Sarah, advanced in years when God made the promise concerning his descendants, but it would be another twenty-five years before that promise was realized. So here we have an equation that starts with old and then adds twenty-five years to it.

      By the time Sarah was told she would have a son, both Abraham and she were not only old but also starting to get cold. The early nineties¹ is not typically considered to be the prime time of the married life, if you know what I mean. Even Sarah herself had a difficult time believing God’s promise. Sarah laughed to herself, saying ‘After I have become old, shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?’ (Genesis 18:12). In other words, Shop’s closed. This is not going to happen.

      But God is not limited by age or energy. That’s the beauty of God. He is not limited by what our finite minds can understand or even by what our physical bodies can perform. And just as God had promised, Isaac was born to Sarah as the seed of Abraham’s loins.

      GOD’S AMAZING REQUEST OF ABRAHAM

      A number of years later, God spoke to Abraham about his son. He did more than

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