James must have been crazy - “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds”. Likewise Paul - “That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, I am strong.” Perhaps the craziest one was Oswald Chambers - “We shall be scattered…into inner desolations and made to know what internal death to God’s blessings means…until we have been through that experience, our faith is bolstered up by feelings and blessings.”
It seems like these guys were addicted to being miserable. Where in the heck is all this joy that I’m supposed to have as a Christian? I’ve been in a wilderness for the past few years of my life, dealing with an issue that is a constant source of pain and temptation. This morning, spending time with the Lord, I asked him to help me overcome the issue and have more faith. Then, bang! All of a sudden, I felt as though I was under a huge spiritual attack, lusting in my heart and feeling as though God’s presence had suddenly left me. I was immediately furious with God for allowing me to go through the such an experience RIGHT after I prayed to him for more faith. Then, it clicked. I began to recognize a recurring pattern. Everytime I would pray for faith, all these difficult circumstances in my life would suddenly be magnified and I would feel as though God had abandoned me right then and there. Every time! Request for more faith = bad stuff happening. Coincidence? I think not.
Why though? Well, simply put, my faith is growing. A child cannot be sustained on milk forever. She goes on to apple sauce and then, eventually solid and more heavy foods. So it is with my faith. At first, my faith was based on emotional experiences and God’s constant blessing. But, that kind of faith is baby faith - easily shaken. Per my request, God sought to move me to the kind of faith based on more than outside circumstances. He sought to move me to faith based only on his word. And such faith can only be developed in harsh circumstances, where the temptation to trust in the easily manipulative environment of spirituality is removed - and replaced with the a desire to trust in Christ alone. God stops being our pawn and starts being our Lord. And, as Chambers says, “until Jesus Christ is Lord, we all have ends of our own to serve; our faith is real, but it is not permanent yet.”
Paul, James, Chambers and the others weren’t ascestics. They didn’t endorse pain and hardship just to heap burdens up on people. They did so because they truly understood that the harsh, God-instigated environment of loneliness and emptiness and pain was the well-trodden bridge to deeper faith that so many before them had traveled. In fact, search the lives of the biblical heroes and you’ll find one startling parallel - pain. Harsh, debilitating pain. And not for its own sake - but for their faith’s. Hmmm…maybe these old men weren’t so crazy after all?
SRay
