1 God causes you to experience all manner of tempests, hardships, difficulties, and numerous failures and setbacks, so that, ultimately, in the course of experiencing these things, you come to discover that everything God says is correct, and that your beliefs, notions, imaginings, and knowledge are all wrong. They cannot lead you onto the right path in life, they cannot lead you to understand the truth and come before God, and the path you walk is the path of failure. For you, this is a necessary process, and what you should gain during the process of experiencing salvation. Yet it also saddens God: Because people are rebellious, and are possessed of corrupt dispositions, they must undergo this process and experience these setbacks.

2 No matter what God does, He wishes the best for man. No matter what environment He sets out, He always wishes to see the best outcome. Say you encounter setbacks and failure. God does not wish to see you unable to recover from a failure and plunged into dejection. God wishes to see that you are able to seek the truth, that you find the reason for your failure, and that you realize it was wrong to act as you did, that only acting according to God’s words is right. You understand things and grow up through this setback and failure. This is what God wishes to see. God acts with good intention, and His acts all contain His hidden love. It is good for people to experience failure—though it is also something painful, something that tempers them. But if being tempered thus ultimately makes you return before God, accept His words, and take them as the truth, then such tempering, setbacks and failures are to your benefit.

Adapted from The Word, Vol. 3. The Discourses of Christ of the Last Days. How to Identify the Nature and Essence of Paul