Unexpected complications

A recent extensive road trip around South Africa was plagued by things going wrong or not turning out as expected. Time after time, events were just not as planned or anticipated. This led to disappointment and a sense of uncertainty. It has also highlighted some interesting if rather uncomfortable ungodly beliefs.

We did a similar trip 4 years ago and everything went really well. It was a wonderful time with few hiccups. I expected the same this time but even when booking accommodation, nothing worked out as hoped. What we wanted was not available and we had to compromise and juggle all the arrangements. Finally we had a workable itinerary.

However as we travelled we faced all sorts of unexpected challenges often to do with food or weather or an unwelcome number of bugs trying to share our safari tent. Nothing was too bad but after three punctures, two of them out in the bush requiring a wheel change with dangerous animals around I really began to question what was going on.

My first thought was that maybe I had done something wrong or had I sinned? Maybe we shouldn’t have done this trip at all and God was showing his displeasure by not blessing our travels.  It was at this point that I pulled myself up short and realised my mind was on a journey of its own with a dangerous destination.

Does God really only bless us if we do as he wishes? Does God only bless good choices? Of course not! God is good and kind and blesses us all the time whether we deserve it or not. It is a lie to believe that when things are going well God is pleased with you and blesses you but when things are not going well God is displeased with you withholding his blessing. The truth is that you are pleasing to God all the time and God is blessing you in every way that is good for you and will bring forth fruit from your life.

There is no doubt that God uses the bad times, the difficulties, the unexpected, the pain to mould our character and help us trust him. If everything goes swimmingly all the time, we hardly need God but when difficulty upon difficulty piles up we have to lean into God and trust him. When we trust God is doing good even in the midst of problems, troubles, hitches and complications especially unexpected ones, faith and trust in God grows.

Every time something unexpected happens leading to disappointment, even over things as trivial as the weather we need God to set us on our feet again, assure us that nothing has gone wrong because of something we have done or not done. We haven’t sinned – this is just life.  By the way, the disciples had the same problem believing that difficulties came from someone’s sin (Luke 13: 1 -2 and John 9: 1 – 3).

I was reading that it is in the pressure of the cocoon that the caterpillar turns into a butterfly. It is a process that cannot and must not be bypassed or hurried. It is an essential process.

All our unexpected difficulties and experiences led me to realise some ungodly beliefs that I had hidden in my heart that would never have come out or been confronted if everything was going well.  I’ve had to let God soothe my disappointments and show me that things were not that bad. He was always with us in the good and bad days. I can trust him.

After all ‘all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose’ Romans 8:

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Trusting God in the bad times

One of the hardest things I think we are called to do as Christians is to accept the place that God has put us in with grace and trust especially when it is the last thing we would ever want. It may be a place of great trial and difficulty and we do not feel we have done anything to ‘deserve’ it but this is where we find ourselves.

There is an incredible clip on YouTube of a young mother dying from cancer explaining how she is managing to cope in this heart breaking situation.  Four months later she died leaving two small children.

This is some of what she said: People ask me why is God taking me away when a murderer gets to live a long life? There is an implicit assumption in this that I am a good person – I deserve better.  I am not a good person.  I do not deserve better.  As it says in Romans 3: 23 we have all done wrong things.

I have railed against not being able to do what I want.  It is frustrating and I get angry but the root of this is unbelief. What I am saying is I do not believe this is right for me.  God you do not know what you are doing. If you do know then you are not good or you are not in control. I don’t want this.  God you are not being fair because you are not giving me what I want. This is what our hearts say when faced with circumstances we do not like but God is good. He is in control. He is fair.

When I try and make him into a God who serves me – I sin. Our natural bent is to sin and that is our greatest problem.

I am so challenged by this.  I am not in the circumstances of this young mother but I have been in circumstances I do not like. I may rail against God and what is happening. I too get angry and frustrated but this will not help me or those around me.

Too often our default position as Christians is that God is good and therefore only good things should happen to us as his children. When bad things happen, it must be because we have sinned or because the devil is attacking us. This may be true or we may be in this place just because that s where God has us at this time.

Trusting God in these times is the answer; believing that God is good, he does know best and he has a bigger picture and purpose that he is working out in our lives. He has not forgotten or abandoned us but is holding us securely in his hand despite all our emotions that tell us otherwise.  We can and must trust him.

Rejoicing in trials

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.  Matthew 5: 11 – 12

I have been reading The Heavenly Man by Brother Yun, a Chinese pastor who along with many Chinese Christians has been imprisoned and horrifically beaten, tortured and persecuted just for being Christian. They have an understanding of the joy of persecution that I have no comprehension of.  Yet their experience is Biblical.  Jesus suffered greatly for us. His disciples and the apostle Paul all suffered terribly for the Gospel and most were martyred yet I doubt any would have preferred an easier life.   

James tells us ‘to consider it pure joy when we face trials of many kinds’. Why? Because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.  Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything (James 1: 3 – 4).

Brother Yun says, ‘There are many ways the Lord may lead a Christian during his or her life but I am convinced that the path of every believer will sooner or later include suffering. The Lord gives us these trials to keep us humble and dependent on him for our sustenance. I believe when suffering and pain increases, sinning decreases. … How we mature as a Christian largely depends on the attitude we have when we are faced with suffering. Some try to avoid it or imagine it doesn’t exist, but that will only make the situation worse.  Others try to endure it grimly, hoping for relief.  This is better but falls short of the full victory God wants to give each of his children.

The Lord wants us to embrace suffering as a friend.  We need a deep realisation that when we’re persecuted for Jesus’ sake it is an act of God’s blessing to us. This might sound impossible but it is attainable with God’s help.

When people malign you, rejoice and be glad. When they curse you, bless them in return.  When you walk through a painful experience, embrace it and you will be free! When you learn these lessons, there is nothing left that the world can do to you.’

Most of us have little experience of what Brother Yun suffered, yet how to endure and, yes, rejoice in our lesser suffering is the same.  His experiences were so extreme and dreadful yet all of us will also have trials at some time with family difficulties, work problems, financial worries and church! It is through these that we can know that God is always with us and will use these circumstances to bring about his plans for our lives as we press into him.  Self pity will always try and grip us but instead we must embrace God.  Our character and maturity grow to bring us to completeness as we persevere in the midst of our difficulties and as we test God’s eternal word and find it is completely faithful and trustworthy.  Maybe we will even learn to rejoice in our suffering realising God is doing a great work in our lives.

 

Psalm 13

How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me? Psalm 13: 1 - 2

It is one of the hard facts of the Christian faith that it is the difficult times that produce the greatest fruit in our lives, if we make the most of them. That of course is the dilemma because it is the hard times that are most difficult to make anything out of.  All of our good intentions fly out of the window and every truth that we believe about God and our lives as Christians is tested to the limit in our trials.

A year ago our youngest son, who had been living in America for a year, was getting ready to be married to a very nice American girl in USA and two weeks before the event everything went wrong.  Our daughter in law was having great difficulty getting a British visa and to add to the difficulty the dog chewed her passport making it unacceptable to be used at all. The delay caused by getting a new passport meant she would have no passport to go with on honeymoon. They had spent a lot of money on the honeymoon, applying for a visa and now she needed a new passport as well.

In addition to all this, Hurricane Irene blew up the north east coast on USA wrecking the park they were going to use for the picnic that they had planned for their reception. They had no visa, no passport and it looked like no reception venue and no honeymoon. Everything was awful – it was no one’s fault but why had God allowed it? They were two lovely Christian young people who had been faithful to God and now on the biggest day of their life so far everything had gone pear shaped. Why hadn’t God intervened?  It just wasn’t fair!

They were upset and all parents on both sides of the Atlantic were upset and personally I found it very hard talking to a devastated son who was thousands of miles away. I felt really down and moaned and moaned to God. My attitude was not good but at least I was talking to the only person who could actually do anything about the situation. Two days later I felt so low and quite ‘by chance’ I listened to a song called Psalm 13 by one of the Vineyard bands. The lyrics touched me deeply as they spoke right into the situation. I read the psalm and the last two verses were ‘But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the Lord’s praise, for he has been good to me’ Psalm 13: 5 – 6. The light bulbs came on and with no evidence to support it I declared that I will trust in God’s unfailing love – why?  Because the Lord has been good to me.

I may have been squeezed till I almost screamed but I could never deny that God had been good to me so I could trust him despite all the evidence to the contrary. I knew all would be well. On the other side of the Atlantic my son’s future mother-in-law was urging them to trust God. Within a week all the situations had been turned around; the sun shone on the wedding day, another reception venue had been found for the picnic, our daughter in law got two passports – one for the honeymoon and one for the visa - and two days after the wedding her British visa was granted.

God is good and utterly reliable and trustworthy despite the circumstances and we will never discover this for ourselves till we have had this truth tested in the fires of adversity. I now KNOW I can rely on God because he has been good to me and even in the midst of difficulties God is still good to me and all his children.

Do not fear the fires of afflictions but ask God to help you walk through them with integrity and honesty, praising and worshipping our Creator who is good and wonderful no matter how hard the road we are walking on. You will bear increasing fruit as you trust him because you will know for yourself the truth of God’s goodness and faithfulness even in the midst of adversity. Cross references:

1. Psalm 13:1 : Ps 6:3
2. Psalm 13:1 : Ps 42:9; La 5:20
3. Psalm 13:1 : S Dt 31:17; S Ps 22:24; S Isa 8:17; S 54:9
4. Psalm 13:2 : Ps 42:4; 55:2; 139:23; Isa 33:18; Da 7:28
5. Psalm 13:2 : Ps 94:3
6. Psalm 13:3 : Ps 9:12; 25:18; 31:7; 35:23; 59:4; 80:14; 107:41; 119:50, 153
7. Psalm 13:3 : S Ps 4:1
8. Psalm 13:3 : S Ezr 9:8
9. Psalm 13:3 : Ps 76:5; 90:5; Jer 51:39
10. Psalm 13:4 : S 1Ki 19:2; Ps 25:2
11. Psalm 13:4 : Ps 38:16; 118:13
12. Psalm 13:5 : S Ps 6:4
13. Psalm 13:5 : S Job 33:26; Ps 9:14; Isa 25:9; 33:2
14. Psalm 13:6 : S Ex 15:1; Ps 7:17

 

Years of plenty, years of famine

The seven years of abundance in Egypt came to an end, and the seven years of famine began, just as Joseph had said. There was famine in all the other lands, but in the whole land of Egypt there was food. Genesis 41: 53 – 54

It is an unfortunate fact of life that Christians are very bad at storing up in the good times of plenty so they have something to draw on in the famines or difficult times when a crisis hits. There is a tendency when things are going well to cease to prioritise our Christian walk. It feels like we are doing fine and so we no longer prioritise Bible reading, prayer and church attendance. Very quickly other things rush in to fill the void and we no longer always make time for spiritual things and whilst life is trundling along happily that is fine.

Then the wheels fall off and a crisis hits and we are in famine and have nothing to draw on. A time of crisis is not the best moment to start to rebuild our walk with God. Our trouble may be all consuming and what we need at that moment is to be drawing on all the good things we have stored away in the good times.

These will be the times to remind ourselves of God’s amazing love and faithfulness not to worry about whether God still loves us. By the way He still does!  A time of crisis will be a time to go back to our favourite Bible verses to find strength and solace, not a time to be desperately trying to remember that half forgotten verse that we liked. The difficult times will also be when we draw strength and comfort from our Godly friendships formed during the good times. Just as Jonathan helped David find strength in the Lord (I Samuel 23: 16), so we too need to be available to both give and receive that kind of friendship and they are forged during the times of plenty.

If at the moment life is going well, store up as much as you can in terms of relationship with God and others. Make a note of encouraging Bible verses and things God has spoken to you about. File away answers to prayer and great testimonies you have heard. Make a store of things to draw on so when the difficult times come as they surely will, you have much to feed on during the spiritual famine.

If however things are a bit hard at the moment and you feel you have little to draw on, prioritise God, read your Bible, seek him because he will be found and he will comfort you and strengthen you. Seek out your Christian friends and re-establish your friendships if they have lapsed and learn from the experience.

God never gives up on us, no matter how lax we have been and He is always there during the good and difficult times.

How long O Lord

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?

But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord, for he has been good to me. Psalm 13: 1 -2 and 5 – 6

It is an unfortunate fact of Christian life that sometimes things go wrong and in some cases very badly wrong. In the last 24 hours I have spoken to people whose lives have literally fallen apart leaving them feeling that God has forgotten them and does not care about them.

Nothing of course is farther from the truth but that is certainly how it looks and feels and David must have felt exactly the same in order to write this psalm. So often our first thought in these awful circumstances is either ‘why me?’ or ‘what have I done wrong?’ There can also be an implication that God is punishing us for some misdemeanour.

Let me assure you, you have done nothing wrong and God does not punish us. All of our sin was punished on the cross when Jesus paid in full for our salvation. However we live in a fallen world, full of fallen people who do not necessarily do or say the right thing, egged on by a devil who wants to cause as much misery to as many people as possible. It is not personal. The devil is horrible to everyone.

What the devil wants more than anything else is to drive a wedge between you and God and fill your head full of lies about how much God does not care for you and has no interest in your life. He wants you to believe that the horrible things happening to you were orchestrated by God.

Dear friends, God only does good things. He does not send us nasty things to teach us lessons. He does not send sickness and cancer to help us grow in faith. He does not break up marriages because we have not been a good husband or wife. What God does do is promise never to leave you or forsake you. He promises to be your healer when sickness does strike. He promises to be your provider at all times of everything you could need (II Corinthians 9: 8).

Neither does he leave us in the lurch. How can our loving heavenly Father leave us at our most awful times? He can’t - he is there with us. The thing we have to do is find him in the midst of difficulties that are threatening to swamp us. We must do as David did: But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, for he has been good to me.

Hard as it may seem, with the world around you collapsing, that is what will get you through. God and his unfailing love for you. I pray you find him and his love to strengthen you in your hour of need.

Boasting in the Lord

But let him who boasts boast in the Lord. For it is not the one who commends himself who is approved, but the one whom the Lord commends.  II Corinthians 10: 17 – 18

Have you even been part of a conversation where two people are boasting about their illnesses or ailments or have you listened to people who have had bad experiences in a church? Their difficulties have almost become a badge of honour for them. Too often Christians enjoy boasting of their problems as if it makes them a better Christian.

Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians sounds rather like this as he lists all his difficulties (11: 21 - 28). In fact he was refuting the allegations made against him by some false teachers and self styled apostles who had infiltrated the church. They accused Paul of being weak, self serving, money grasping by pretending to offer his services for free whilst keeping the collection of money for the Jerusalem church to himself and being neither a speaker not a real apostle. Paul spends some time in II Corinthians chapters 10 – 13 on what appears to be a self promotion exercise. However its purpose was not to exalt himself as evidenced by his embarrassment at having to do that (II Corinthians 11: 17 and 23) but to open the eyes of the Corinthian church to the fact that it had been infiltrated by false apostles.

The church was being led astray and Paul with great fatherly concern for them wants to bring them to the truth of Jesus Christ. In order to do this he has to refute the lies and put forward his credentials as a true apostle of the Lord.   However he concludes that despite all the hardships he had gone through for the sake of the Gospel and the wonderful visions of the third heaven, he had been given a thorn in his flesh to keep him ‘weak’ and dependent on God.  Paul boasts of his weaknesses so that Christ’s power may rest on him (13: 9). When Paul was weak, he was made strong (13:10).

As Christians let us, like Paul, boast not in our difficulties but in the strength of God in the midst of our difficulties. I so admire Christians who despite illness or problems speak only of what God is doing in their lives and of how wonderful a Saviour he is. Illness and difficulties are not a badge of honour – let us instead boast of Jesus Christ, his love, his faithfulness, his goodness, his kindness, his mercy and the strength he gives us in both the good times and the bad.