The Testing of Your Faith

Greetings All,

     This week's "thought" comes to you from one of my regular (and favorite) contributors -- Charles Spurgeon. It is found in one of the best daily devotionals I've ever purchased -- Beside Still Waters, Words of Comfort for the Soul.

     His words are based on James 1:3 where we read, "Consider it pure joy, brethren, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance."

     If you happen to be going through one of those times of trial or testing right now, I pray Spurgeon's words might bring new courage and spiritual resolve to your heart. Enjoy.

The Testing of Your Faith

     "The safest part of a Christian's life is during a trial.  How we pray in adversity!  At those times we cannot live without prayer.  We carry our burden to the mercy seat again and again.

     When we are depressed, we read our Bibles. We do not care for deceiving light literature. We want the solid promise, the strong meat of God's kingdom.

     In adversity we listen.  We do not care for flowers and fine bits of rhetoric. We want the Word. We want the naked doctrine. We want Christ. We cannot be fed on whims and fancies now. We care less about theological speculation and ecclesiastical authority. We want to know something about the eternal love, everlasting faithfulness, and the dealings of the Lord of hosts with the souls of His people. We walk lightly in the world and hold it with a loose grip because in the pain of trials it loses its attraction. I greatly question if we ever grow in grace unless we are in the furnace.

     This is the way it should be: the joys and blessings that God gives in this life should make us increase in grace and gratitude. These joys should be sufficient motivation for the highest form of consecration. As a rule, however, most of us are only driven closer to Christ in a storm. There are blessed and favored exceptions, but most of us need the rod of correction. We do not seem to learn obedience except through the Lord's chastening."

     Spurgeon's take on suffering grates against some schools of modern theology, yet his words are echoed by many wise believers of the past. Flannery O'Connor said it well when she wrote: "One of the tendencies of our age is to use children's suffering to discredit the goodness of God... In this popular pity we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more."

     She's right. In a culture where people run on feelings far more than they should, they become short-sighted and find it hard (or nearly impossible) to look beyond their present sufferings and view them in light of God's good and eternal purposes.

     They lose hold, so to speak, of the interpretive lens through which one must gaze in order to rightly understand many portions of Scripture and countless aspects of our earthly sojourn.

     "When I was in distress," says the psalmist, "I sought the Lord; at night I stretched out untiring hands..." (Ps. 77:2).  His agony or distress drove him to pursue God with an untiring earnestness.  Likewise, Psalm 119:67 reads: "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word."  Affliction brought about obedience.

     That's why he can follow that statement up with these words in v. 72: "It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees."  Certain portions of God's Word and His sovereign decrees in providence cannot be understood apart from the experience of suffering. Struggle and suffering are necessary ingredients in the soil from which certain spiritual fruits grow, like patience, empathy, compassion, and so forth. Some of the most godly people are those who have suffered much.

     St. John of the Cross (1578) wrote: "Suffering out of love for God is better than working miracles."  Martin Luther (1535) wrote: "God builds out of nothing. Therefore, until a man is nothing, God can make nothing out of him."   Henri Amiel (1882) wrote: "Suffering was a curse from which man fled, now it becomes a purification of the soul, a sacred trial sent by Eternal Love, a divine dispensation meant to sanctify and ennoble us, an acceptable aid to faith, a strange initiation into happiness."  And Anne Lindbergh (1973) adds this helpful reminder: "I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable."

     I would add to her words those of Peter Abelard (1125) who encouraged us not to grow bitter toward God under suffering, but see by faith that we, "may not doubt that these things (our sufferings) have happened to us by divine dispensation."  As with Job, no sufferings can come our way lest they pass through the providential filter of the Sovereign One who loves His people with such a profound love it is beyond the limits of the human mind to fully search it out or understand its unfathomable depths.

In His Service, Pastor Jeff

Comfort from God's Presence

Greetings All,
    This weeks 'thought' comes to you from a collection of Spurgeon's devotions entitled, "Beside Still Waters."  I have quoted from this book before as it is my favorite devotional, and I've also told you that if you do not have a copy you need to buy one.  I will say that again! It's one of the best.
    In fact, I have actually started giving this book to people who are going through difficult times, since it offers such great comfort and wonderful insights from Scripture. Today's thought has to do with the comfort that comes from the knowledge of God's presence in our lives. Enjoy.

    "Sometimes in deep depression, in the midst of the darkest shadows, Christ appears and seems sweeter than He ever was before (Acts 23:9-11).  When all the created streams have run dry, then the everlasting fountain bubbles up with a pure and cooling stream. Remember those occasions and the circumstances that made them cheerful, and say, 'This God, even the God of Bethel, is still my God.'  If I am in trouble, if I am lonely, if I am brought so low that I literally have nothing but a doorstep for my pillow -- if I should lose house, home, and be left like an orphan with no one to shelter me -- oh God of Bethel, you who cover my head and protect my spirit, you will still be with me. The God of Bethel (Gen. 31:13) is a God who
concerns Himself with the things of earth. He is not a God who shuts Himself up in heaven. He is a God who has a ladder between heaven and earth (Gen. 28:12)...
     The Puritans believed in an ever-present God. Oh to be able to feel God everywhere, in the little as well as the great, in our rising up and our sitting down, in our going out and our coming in.  I cannot imagine a life more blessed or a spirit more related to the spirit of the glorified than the mind and heart of the person who lives in God, who knows and feels that God is ever-present.
    If you are in personal danger, or in the midst of a storm, or facing illness, and if you hear a voice saying, "Surely the Lord is in this place," you will be perfectly at rest.  The anxious air grows pure if He is there. Lightning cannot strike you, or if it does, there will be joy. 

 The storm cannot devour you, nor can the hungry ocean engulf you, or if it does, it is happiness if God is there.  There is no need to fear. Nervousness is wickedness when 'the eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms; He will thrust out the enemy from before you" (Deut. 33:27). 
     You may be in great poverty.  Your walls may be bare and your furnishings scant.  And still you may say, 'Surely the Lord is in this place.'  Remember the old Christian's exclamation, 'What, all this and my God present with me too?'  Better to have poverty and feel His presence than to own the world's riches and not know that He is here.
    Some of you are in deep affliction.  Your difficulties are so great that you do not know where things will end, and you are deeply depressed. But remember, 'Surely the Lord is in this place' (Gen. 28:16).  Some of you are called to some extraordinary duty and do not feel strong enough. Yet follow that call, and remember that surely the Lord is in that place. He will help you."

      How true it is that any hardship or affliction is endurable -- and can even seem like a weightless burden -- if we know and can sense God's presence with us in it.  Few words should bring more comfort to the believing soul than the words of Jesus Himself where he says: "Lo, I am with you always..."  Or the assurance of the psalmist in Psalm 139 where he tells us it is impossible to be in any place that God is not.  After all, as believers in Jesus His presence -- the presence of the Holy Spirit -- lives within us.  He doesn't just go with us, He has taken up His residence within us.
    And though the felt presence of God is a blessing beyond words, we need to remember that His actual presence is a reality whether we can feel it, or sense it, or not.  Although we as people tend to be so reliant upon our feelings, the truth of His presence with us and in us stands as undeniably true whether we can feel it or not.  For as one preacher has said, "I am asked to believe it, not feel it."  And when I do it makes all the difference in the world.

                   With you in the fight, Pastor Jeff