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I just wrapped up a series on the book of Habakkuk. In it, Habakkuk wrestles with God to try to understand where God is in our pain, what God is doing when life seems out of control, and why evil seems to prosper. 

The book begins with Habakkuk questioning God in prayer, asking, “How long, O Lord,” and ends with a prayer of praise. 

Habakkuk ends by saying, “God, I have found you in the joy, the sunshine. I have found you in the storm, when life is hard, and because I have found you in both places, when the silence comes, when I don’t understand what is going on, I know you are still there.”

But we are still left to wonder, why? Why do we have to walk through this? Why are there trials? Can’t we get to that place of trust and praise without the valleys?

The answer seems to be no. 

Over and over in the Bible, we are told that we cannot become who God has called us to be without adversity.

James tells us: Consider it a great joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you experience various trials, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.

The only way endurance is produced is through trials. The only way that endurance will have its full effect to bring us to a place of being mature, complete, and lacking nothing, is through trials. 

Tim Keller, in his book Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, said, “There is no way to really learn how to trust in God until you are drowning.”

There is no way to really learn how to trust in God until you are drowning. -Tim Keller
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So, how do we do that?

Keller goes on, “To walk with God through pain and suffering means we must treat God as God and as there with us. It means we speak to him, pouring out our hearts to him in prayer, like Habakkuk. It means to trust him. But it also means to see with the eyes of your heart how Jesus plunged into the fire for you when he went to the cross. This is what you need to know so you will trust him, stick with him, and thus turn into purer gold in the heat. If you remember with grateful amazement that Jesus was thrown into the ultimate suffering for you, you can begin to sense him in your smaller sufferings with you.”

If we don’t walk with God in pain and suffering, and go it alone, we will not find God there. We will walk all alone.

What we have seen from Habakkuk as he walked with God is not an instantaneous answer. He got some answers right away, but some questions God did not answer. He got some deliverance, but not all of it right away. He received the peace that passes understanding, he gained new insights, but what we see is the slow and steady movement towards the person God calls him to be.

Notice what Habakkuk didn’t do: He didn’t pretend his pain, suffering, and questions weren’t there. He didn’t act like life was okay. He didn’t put on a smile and pretend.

Often, our culture says the way forward when life is hard is to think positively, pretend it doesn’t hurt, numb it with ice cream, shopping, alcohol, work, exercise, sex, or sleep. The problem is, after you do that, life still hurts. You can’t relax it away.

Instead, Habakkuk faced life. He faced the hardship and, in it, found that peace is there because God is there.

God’s presence enables us to face anything. 

God’s presence enables us to face anything.
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Did you know that God’s goal for us is to be complete? (James 1:2 – 4; 1 John 1:4)

Complete.

1 John 1:4 says complete joy.

Everything in our lives is the pursuit of completion.

We want the end.

We move as quickly as possible.

We get angry when things take so long.

We describe relationships in terms of “they complete me.”

Interestingly, our goal is the same goal God has.

The difference?

We go about it differently than God.

What John tells us in 1 John 1 is that completion will come through the transformation of Jesus and in community.

James tells us in chapter 1 of his book that completion comes through trials.

For us, we try to find completion on our own, away from community and certainly not through trials.

Why?

Community and trials are difficult. They are painful.

The reality is, you can’t find completion and joy without community and trials. We must engage them.

Right now complete joy for you is on the other side of trials and community.

What will carry you through? The transformation and change found only in Jesus.

It is the redemption, grace and love of Jesus that will give us the courage and power to walk through trials and the difficulty of community. It is what gives us the power to face our stories and our hurts and not allow them to become bitterness and anger, but become beautiful.

I know it is not easy to face your story and hurt. There are things in your past you want to pretend didn’t happen. You are tired of facing your past. You are tired of feeling “this way or that.” Yet, as a mentor told me, “Our breakthrough is often right on the other side of the decision not to quit.”

Here’s what we’re chasing after: Joy.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, Joy is something very deep and profound, something that affects the whole and entire personality. In other words it comes to this; there is only one thing that can give true joy and that is contemplation of the Lord Jesus Christ. He satisfies my mind; He satisfies my emotions; He satisfies my every desire. He and His great salvation include the whole personality and nothing less, and in Him I am complete. Joy, in other words, is the response and the reaction of the soul to a knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

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Most of us love options. It makes us feel like we are in control of things and that we aren’t missing anything. This is why churches offer a ton of programs and why we love going restaurants with huge menus (think the Cheesecake factory). Studies show that, the more options you have, the less likely you are to buy. The more options a church has, the less people plug in. They don’t know what is most important and what they should give their time to.

I love the message version of James 1:5 – 8. It says: If you don’t know what you’re doing, pray to the Father. He loves to help. You’ll get his help, and won’t be condescended to when you ask for it. Ask boldly, believingly, without a second thought. People who “worry their prayers” are like wind-whipped waves. Don’t think you’re going to get anything from the Master that way, adrift at sea, keeping all your options open.

That last phrase is crucial.

Many times when we pray, when we seek God’s direction, we don’t fully commit or move forward with God. We keep our options open.

We don’t fully invest in generosity, holding back just in case it rains and God doesn’t provide. We don’t fully commit to community or what He has called us to, just in case we got it wrong. This leaves us feeling in control, but it also keeps us from fully experiencing the life God has for us and has called us to.

Besides control, one of the other reasons we keep our options open in life and with God is boredom. We are creatures who fear boredom, who fear down time. Think about the last time you just sat on your couch. What do you do when life is quiet and nothing is happening? You probably grab your phone and scan twitter, Facebook, pinterest or instagram.

We train ourselves to wait to the last possible minute in life to make a commitment. We tentatively plan on being somewhere, but only if nothing better presents itself.

We keep our options open.

We do this with God. We read something in the bible, hear a sermon and see something we should change, but we wait. What if it wasn’t God speaking? What if there’s a way around this passage? I know the bible says this, but what if I do that?

All the while, we keep our options open.

We want to pray for something, like James tells us, but we don’t. A piece of us doesn’t want God to answer our prayers because that would call us to have faith, to trust, to wait on God and give up control. Instead of pushing all our chips into the corner with God, we hold on to one so we can keep our seat at the table if it doesn’t work out.

And then.

We miss out.

We go adrift. We are tossed around.

If your life feels like it is being tossed around. If you feel like you are being bounced and can barely hang on, there is a moment when you realize, you’ve kept your options open and you aren’t fully trusting God. You haven’t fully trusted His way, you’re still holding on to a piece of yours.

When that happens, James tells us that we don’t just miss out on a small part of Jesus, we miss out on the whole thing. We don’t get anything from the Master. 

We miss it all.

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One of the mysteries in this life is how God turns our pain and adversity into joy.

Often, one of our struggles in pain and adversity is that we look for things that are not promised.

While God does give us answers as to why things happen the way they do, He doesn’t always. Not only doesn’t he always answer the “why is this happening” question, when he does, it is rarely on our timetable.

We aren’t promised answers. We are however promised that we can have joy (John 16:24), we can have wisdom (James 1:5), we can have God’s presence and peace (Philippians 4:7).

Here is our problem with that: we aren’t always content to have God’s joy, wisdom and peace. We want answers.

It is this desire for answers, this searching for answers (while not wrong) that causes us to miss the point of adversity and what God is doing in it, through it and seeking to accomplish.

In short, we ask and seek the wrong the things.

The post How we Miss the Point of Adversity & Pain appeared first on JoshuaReich.org.

All of us have things we wish we didn’t do. Maybe it is something small that doesn’t seem like a big deal, or it might be something that if discovered could destroy your world. It might be that you can’t stop talking about other people, you can’t stop eating, maybe you have to buy something every week and now have a closet full of clothes you don’t use, or maybe you can’t go a day without looking at porn.

Whatever it is, we all fight temptations.

What if there is a way out? What if there was a way to be free of falling into temptation? What if you could really fight temptation?

That’s what we will talk about this week as we continue our series in the book of James from 1:12 – 18.

I think this week has the potential to really bring freedom to a lot of lives.

Remember, we meet at 5pm at 6620 E 22nd St.

See you Saturday.

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We are kicking off a brand new series on James this Saturday. In one of the commentaries I’m reading, the author made this statement which summarizes what I’m talking about on Saturday really well:

We say that we believe that God is our Father, but as long as we remain untested on the point our belief falls short of steady conviction. But suppose the day comes – as it does and will – when circumstances seem to mock our creed, when the cruelty of life denies his fatherliness, his silence calls in question his almightiness and the sheer, haphazard, meaningless jumble of events challenges the possibility of a Creator’s ordering hand. It is in this way that life’s trials test our faith for genuineness.

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