Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
One of the most encouraging realities of the Christian walk is the truth that we are divinely enabled to endure more than we think we can. Of course this is a potentially daunting reality as well. What is daunting is the implication that we can expect to feel stretched to what feels like our limit more than once in this life.
It can be a profoundly encouraging thing to find ourselves still standing after doubting for a thousandth time that we could. At such moments, when we realize that the faithfulness of God has preserved us a thousand and one times, we can breathe a sigh of relief and marvel at the power of grace. However we may also find ourselves asking why life has to be so hard to begin with and wondering when the next seemingly unbearable trial can be expected. I’d venture to guess that many of us are more prone to the latter reaction than the former.
Of course, from a theological perspective, we who hold to Biblical Christianity believe that the persistence of tribulation in our lives is a byproduct of living in a fallen world, the fallenness of which we happen to be complicit in. The Bible makes it clear that in such a world even the children of God are in no way immune to trouble. Beyond that we also bring some of our problems on ourselves through disobedience and unbelief. We suffer either way, but the second kind of suffering is avoidable to at least some degree, the first is not.
Whatever the source of our difficulty we can be sure of two things:
-When we do somehow hold on to God in the difficulty He will bring us through it.
-Once we are through it we are faced with deciding how to interpret what happened to us.
This is where the temptation to fear the future comes into play. “Yes”, we think to ourselves, “I wasn’t destroyed by this thing I thought might destroy me, but what about the next thing that may be lurking around the corner? How do I know that one won’t get me?” Instead of thanking our Lord for the incredible persistence of grace in our lives we are tempted to think that if that was bad what might be coming down the proverbial pipe next?
It may be that those of us whose trials tend to be self-inflicted are more likely to feel this way. Perhaps God’s more faithful and obedient children have less to potentially dread because they are not facing so many sin-induced troubles mixed in with the purely trust-building ones that He allows in their lives. This is not something we hear very often these days, the suggestion that some Christians are better than others being considered a bit “spiritually incorrect” in the contemporary church, but the Bible bears this idea out. Does it not tell us that some will have great reward in Heaven while others will be saved only as through the flames? That some believers are at least more deeply committed to personal holiness than others seems hard to refute as an experiential proposition.
If this is true then maybe those of us (the author included) who are more apt to worry about future trials than give thanks for enduring past ones need to take a look at our own heart-attitudes. The bottom line is that God’s intention for us in faith-building trials is perseverance, in self-inflicted trials, repentance. Both His intentions have our good as the goal. It is up to us to believe this is true and react in the best possible way to both the difficulty and the temptation towards fear of the future in its aftermath. If we do react in such a way we will, in the end, only be the better for whatever we have gone through.