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Why are we so surprised that to follow Jesus (the suffering servant) requires suffering? Or better yet, what does it take to steal your attitude? How flimsy a disciple are you?
God makes us know affliction that we would better know ourselves. We see the darkness in our own hearts, in the time of difficulties, which we would not believe was there.
We can also be deceived by our fellowship. We think, that in the conflict and hard places, that God can't be working because:
-- Not everyone is "happy."
-- Not everything is "convenient" and "comfortable."
How easy is it to steal your faith, Christian? What would you allow to knock you out? Are you all in in your present church? Are you facing an immediate challenge? What is grinding on us is a poverty of perseverance. Many in our churches are distracted.
What does God want to teach us? you? Are you in a teachable spirit? Ready to be molded? Zero in with me to Romans 8:28, "God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."
And we know that in all things, From this verse we learn it is God who takes even that which is adverse and painful and brings profit out of it. "For the good"… does not mean that things work out so that believers preserve their comfort and convenience. Rather, such action on God's part enables these difficult experiences to assist in a person's sanctification.
A sick bed often teaches more than a sermon.
"We can best see our own sin in the glass of affliction." (Edwards) Testing teaches us to know ourselves. In prosperity we are for the most part strangers to ourselves. Like Joseph in the house of Potipher and then in prison where he learned his skills, in the same way our adversity is a point of development, a major opportunity from God. If you let go of God in your training, how will you persevere in warfare and stick where you've been planted? Remember Joseph, and that your feelings about a situation are not an accurate measure of its rightness or wrongness.
Your destiny will require you to submit to the "process of God" to transform you. God has to work on your heart, work on you to get out of you everything that will hinder your development for his own purposes. The block of clay, in other words, goes through distress and trauma as it is stretched into a usable bowl. Christian, you are being made into something better than you are, being sanctified, why kick and scream?
God must fit the life to match the calling; sooner or later you will feel His shoehorn! Or, that clay will feel the Potter's hand.
Why are we so surprised that to follow Christ means to pickup our cross?
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Finding Faith is written by area pastors. This week's column comes from Pastor Taylor Camerer of Great Island Presbyterian Church, Lock Haven.