Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. (James 1:2-4)
Okay, let’s be honest. Don’t you just hate the verses above? Be joyful about all the trials you face in life! Be excited about being in a crisis that drags on so long that endurance becomes an issue! Let endurance have its perfect result! My natural man doesn’t want any part of that. I just want God to deliver me from every trial as soon as my first prayer hits the outskirts of heaven. In fact, why won’t God just keep trials from coming in the first place? A little speed bump once in a while would be okay but no storm tossed oceans please!
And yet the storms come anyway. Jesus told us so. “In this world you will have trouble” (Jn.16:33). The problem is that when we signed on to be a follower of Jesus, we were usually not told the whole story by well-meaning evangelists. Our introduction to following Jesus went sort of like old navy recruiting posters that declare, “Join the navy and see the world!” The background on the poster always had palm trees and sandy beaches or other exotic destinations like Tokyo. The impression was that a young man would sign up, do a little basic training and spend the rest of his tour in Hawaii or Tahiti or some pleasant, peaceful, exotic location. However, after signing up, he found himself in forty-foot seas in the frigid northern Atlantic, dodging missiles in the South China Sea, or sweating his way through the Panama Canal.
The fact is that those who follow Jesus are in a war against the world and the devil. Trouble is sure to come. We will experience protracted trials that tax us. There will be seasons of peace and blessing but those seasons will be punctuated by seasons of crisis. Most believers push back against that reality.
Graham Cooke puts it this way. Many Christians cannot tell the difference between warfare, adversity, the work of the cross and training for reigning. They don’t persist; they crumble. An instant society depletes our strength. People are in huge amounts of debt, because they cannot wait; they have not patience to save money, then purchase. They mortgage their future to buy trinkets and then declare that God is providing, which may be true. I mean, MasterCard sounds spiritual. A Visa gives you permission to enter, I suppose. Servicing the debt denies us true flexibility to serve the Lord…To say “yes” to Jesus we must say “no” to something else…
To be a world-class musician, athlete, or actor, it means we have to know what our distractions are going to be and plan to overcome them. We have to affirm the need for personal discipline and develop a desire for it. We have to endure hardness, learn to persist when people around us want to give up, and cultivate perseverance as a way of life. Ordinary people call it obsession because it suits their own purposes. It’s passion – an intense enthusiasm for something and it requires disciplined pursuit, a focus of attention that mediocre people never attain” (Graham Cooke, Coming into Alignment, p. 77-78, Brilliant Book House).
Whether we hate what James said about endurance or embrace it depends on our perspective of the Christian life. If our desire is to live in as much comfort as possible while coasting across the finish line then we avoid hardship at every turn and either despise the storms or puzzle about them. If, however, we reject spiritual mediocrity and desire to be great men and women spiritually, then we see storms as an opportunity to sharpen our skills, grow in strength, learn valuable lessons for the next storm, and to be heroic in the face of forty-foot seas.
Two teams face off for the super-bowl today. Both teams faced weeks of pre-season workouts, hours in the weight room, thousands of wind sprints, nagging injuries, a few hard losses, and criticism and stupid questions from the press. They didn’t laugh through all of that but they appreciate the values of hardship because it has made them hard for today’s game. Those hardships that lead to victory today make the victory even more valuable. Enduring the process has made them fitter, wiser, more talented, and hungrier for the win.
James’ little paragraph at the beginning of this blog is all about that. It’s not that we look for trials. We don’t have to; they are looking for us. But when they come, we see beyond the hardship and recognize the value of enduring, refusing to quit, and refusing to doubt. In the end we are stronger, wiser, more skilled in spiritual warfare, and hungrier for the win. That is when endurance has had its perfect work. Remember that in your trials because endurance will make champions of us all.
