#3Your situation is one God can use to accomplish a whole lot of good.For example, if you look at 1 Peter 2 I think you can see at least two ways God can use your difficult circumstances to accomplish good.To start with in verse 12 of chapter 2, there’s the transformation of unbelievers.There were people who were speaking against Christians as evildoers being transformed to the point where they end up glorifying God on the day of visitation, which is you know a big change.That is something that Peter comes back to again in chapter 3.In this case he is speaking about the specific situation of a believing wife with an unbelieving husband. He writes, “Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives.”The word won there is used in other places in Scripture as a missionary term, basically equivalent to save. Be subject so that even if they are out and pagans they might be saved as a result of observing the godly behavior of their wives.When you are starting to become discouraged by the difficult relationship you are in, you need to remember that it might just be that God uses your persistently good behavior to completely transform someone else’s life and even change their eternal future, which is pretty exciting.You might think of it like a missionary opportunity.We read missionary biographies and we are all impressed about someone leaving the comforts of their home to live in the middle of the desert somewhere to bring others to Christ; it may be that in your difficult relationship God is giving you a tremendous opportunity to do something like that through the difficult relationship you are facing. God may be keeping you in that messy, difficult relationship to accomplish His great redemptive purpose.There’s more.To keep going, Peter shows us something else God might be accomplishing in verse 15 of chapter 2.Where he says, “For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people.”It may be, another option, it may be that through your consistent obedience to God’s Word, doing good in other words, you end shutting the mouths, silencing, those who are attacking you and the gospel. You make their talk about you look foolish.I am sure you can think of all sorts of different ways that might happen.Like someone calling you a liar at work and yet your employer, he has seen you telling the truth for years, and the person attacking you brings his case before the employer and it’s clear he doesn’t have any ground to stand on.The way Peter imagines here is found in verse 14 where he talks about the governing officials recognizing those who are persistently doing good and punishing those who aren’t. In those days it was common apparently for Roman officials to commend those who were doing good in the community, which obviously would have made those attacking believers look pretty silly.The problem I guess over the years is that Christians have responded to the difficulties of life just like the unbelievers around them, they do the right thing when it is easy and then have stopped doing the right thing when it became difficult, and as a result, when unbelievers have gone to attack the church, they have been able to open their mouths very wide because the good works aren’t there to shut them up.It doesn’t take a whole lot of supernatural effort to be in a difficult relationship and do the wrong thing; that doesn’t make anyone take notice but to be in a difficult relationship, suffer and do the right thing, that’s something else.