When I was a young Christian, I often struggled with my lack of effectiveness in witnessing to others. I was living onboard a ship in the U.S. Navy, and all my friends knew I was a Christian; I had personally shared the gospel with many of them, but very few had shown any real interest. I had been taught that successful “soul winning” was a necessary part of Christian discipleship, and I was worried about my lack of visible fruit.
So I started looking for ways to improve my witnessing. One of the tools I used began with these words: “did you know that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life?” I read about many people who made use of this booklet and who had led dozens, or even hundreds, of people to make a commitment to the Lord. So I tried it for awhile. But I could never get comfortable with it. What if someone comes to faith through this booklet, then experiences horrible things? Is it right to say to people, “God... has a wonderful plan for your life”? What they’ll understand by these words is that God is going to make everything turn out well: God is going to make you happy, and prosperous, and successful. Whatever we may mean by these words, it’s really not fair to say to someone who has no understanding of Christian discipleship, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” Once they begin to experience it, they may not think His plan is so wonderful.
The world is full of people who are embittered against God because things haven’t turned out well in their lives. They committed their lives to Jesus Christ and sought to follow Him, but then things had gone wrong. God didn’t take care of them. He hadn’t delivered on His promise to give them an “abundant life.” They say things like, “I thought God would watch out for me, and He hasn’t.” Or, “what is the good of following Jesus if bad things happen to me, just like everyone else?” “How can you claim that God is good when He allows His people to experience such horrible things?”
For Christians in the first century, things often went very badly. They were following a man who had been condemned and crucified by the Romans and who had been hated by the Jewish religious leaders. They experienced the literal fulfillment of Jesus’ words: “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you” (John 15:20). James is writing to people like this. This letter is called one of the “catholic epistles,” because it’s not addressed to any particular church. It’s simply addressed to “the twelve tribes scattered among the nations,” not the twelve tribes of Israel, but the Church, which Peter describes as “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” (1 Peter 2:9).
James is writing to the Church, a body of people who live in this world as strangers and aliens. And he assumes that suffering is a prominent part of their lives. That’s the thing he begins with, right after the greeting: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds.” He assumes that they will experience trials; he doesn’t promise anything different. He knows they’re going to suffer, but he wants them to look at suffering differently than they’ve been in the habit of doing. He wants them to reevaluate their attitude toward trials and difficulties. He wants them to begin looking at these things in the light of what they’re accomplishing, rather than how they make them feel. He wants them to take a longer-range view of their lives.
The first thing he says is in verses 2&3: Because the outcome is going to be good, consider it pure joy when you encounter trials. Notice that he’s not saying, “you need to feel good about all the things that happen to you.” He’s saying “you need to think differently about your life.” “Consider it pure joy.” He’s calling them to a completely different way of looking at things.
Why should they consider it pure joy? Because the things that are happening to them will prove the genuineness of their faith and will develop perseverance: “You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors.” God is going to do good things in their lives through these experiences. They wouldn’t choose for things to go this way. Jesus recoiled from going to the cross; it wasn’t what He wanted to experience. But He said to the Father, “let your will, not mine, be done.” We can’t feel happy about suffering (and if we do there’s something wrong with us). But we can rejoice that our loving Father is using these things to transform us into the image of Jesus and to prepare us for the life of eternity. God isn’t just making us into better people. He’s purifying us, so that we’ll be able to live in His presence and see Him face to face.
We need to know that true spiritual joy is compatible with deep sorrow. Both can be present at the same time. Peter’s outlook, in his first letter, is very similar to that of James. He’s writing to encourage Christians who are being persecuted: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade–kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. [This is what they’ve received from God – but listen to what he says next:] In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith–of much greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire–may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed” (1 Peter 1:3-7). They greatly rejoice, and they’re suffering grief in all kinds of trials. They’re rejoicing in the Lord in the midst of sorrow.
James wants his readers to take a longer-term view of things. The trials they’re facing don’t feel good at present. And he’s not trying to talk them into feeling better. These things are painful. But they’re also temporary. They’re passing by, and God is going to do good things in their lives as they continue walking with Him. He’s going to do things that will spill over into the life of eternity, so that Paul can say: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18). As we encounter trials, we need to know this: these trials are temporary, and God is going to do such things that one day, when we’re looking back on all that’s happened, we’ll be able to say it was all worth it.
The second thing he says is in verse 4: because this takes time – and there are no short-cuts – don’t try to rush the process. You only learn perseverance by persevering. And perseverance accomplishes its work slowly. Listen to this verse in The Message: “So don’t try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way.” We in America may be in a hurry, but God isn’t. So part of Christian discipleship is submitting to His schedule, rather than insisting on ours.
The spiritual director I had when we lived in Collegeville gave me this quote: “Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are, quite naturally, impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages.... We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stage of instability – and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you. Your ideas mature gradually – let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make them tomorrow.... Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete” (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin). We can’t be today what we will be after a lifetime of walking with God. Right now we’re in the middle of the process.
God is doing things that we can’t see. We may feel like we’re floundering, like there’s no discernible evidence of progress. Just keep going, and rest in the certainty that God is at work. He’s not in a hurry, and He works in ways that we can’t discern, using methods that we wouldn’t choose for ourselves. Our own judgement in this area is not trustworthy (which is why it’s so often helpful to meet with someone who can help us see what God is doing). God is carrying on His work, even though we may feel, at present, “in suspense and incomplete.” Rushing ahead, trying to find a shortcut, will lead to deformity. It’s only by perseverance that we become “mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way.” So, whatever else is happening, keep going forward in obedience, trusting in the “slow work of God.”
The third thing he says is in verses 5-8: because this is not our natural way of looking at things, because this goes so much against the grain of our natural mind set, we need to cry out to God and ask Him for wisdom. The ability to “consider it pure joy... whenever you face trials of many kinds” is beyond us. It’s not the sort of thing that we can just talk ourselves into. This is more than an exercise in positive thinking, and it’s more than a stoic acceptance of the things we can’t change. James is calling us to a completely different way of looking at our lives.
When we find that we’re powerless to look at our trials in the way James is describing, we need to cry out to God for wisdom. And God will answer, because He “gives generously to all without finding fault.” God is a God who delights in generosity. The temptation is to say to ourselves, “a good God wouldn’t permit these kinds of things to happen, so maybe there isn’t a God after all, or maybe He isn’t good and kind.” And when we do this, we’re putting ourselves outside the realm of God’s help. Or when we waver back and forth, demanding that God prove Himself by taking away the trials we’re enduring, we’re not coming to Him in faith. We’re saying, “I’ll trust you as long as you do what I’m asking.” We’re really not looking to be transformed in the way James describes: “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” (The Message).
The ability to look at our trials in the way James is describing is not within us. We don’t have the resources within ourselves to effect this kind of change in perspective. We need the wisdom that comes from God, so we can’t afford to cut ourselves off from Him by doubting His goodness and generosity. The author of Proverbs says: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight” (9:10). When we find ourselves facing trials and difficulties, we need the wisdom that finds its origins in the “fear of the Lord.”
The thing we’re celebrating during this Lenten season is that God isn’t asking us to do something He hasn’t done Himself. He’s not sitting up in heaven, looking impassively on our sufferings, saying “oh, come on, just get over it. It’s not such a big deal; the whole thing will be over soon.” He knows what it is to suffer. One theologian says this about the Incarnation: “If God really became one of us, then God bears all the pain and suffering that human nature knows. That means that God is able to relate to us as human beings. God has trodden the road of pain, suffering and death before us as one of us” (Alister McGrath, Christian Spirituality, p. 60). God knows what it is to suffer, and He delights in giving wisdom to those who come to Him in faith.
Our problem is that we don’t see the whole picture. That’s why James begins in this way. We need a transformation in our outlook. We need, like the prodigal son, to come to our senses. And the thing that will bring us to our senses is fellowship with Jesus, our suffering Lord and Savior. “Good Friday brings us to our senses. Our senses come to us as we sense that in this life and in this death is our life and our death. The truth about the crucified Lord is the truth about ourselves.... The beginning of wisdom is to come to our senses and know the fearful truth about ourselves, that we have wandered and wasted our days in a distant country far from home. We know ourselves most truly in knowing Christ, for in him is our true self.... His cross is the way home to the waiting Father. ‘If you would come to your senses,’ he says, ‘come, follow me’” (Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p. 4). In Him, and in fellowship with Him, we see what we need to know about suffering as Christians. Does God have a “wonderful plan” for our lives? Yes, but in this life it often doesn’t feel that way. Jesus’ “cross is the way home to the waiting Father.” And through our sharing in the sufferings of Christ, God is purifying us and preparing us for the life of heaven, where we will see Him face to face. Therefore, because we know this is true, “Consider it pure joy... whenever you face trials of many kinds.”
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