|
||
|
James 1:1-18 Review: ● Faith is the ability to look honestly at your confusing and often painful life-circumstance and see something else! Herein lies the chance for maturity (wholeness)… finding joy in unexpected places. ● The reason we don’t typically find joy in adversity is because we are not looking! But, even though it’s not the most obvious place, maybe it’s the best possible place to find it! ● Commit yourself to God, not to making sense out of your circumstance. Learn to rest in God’s sovereignty. (i.e. like playing chess or Stratego with my cousin Mike: no matter what the score or what the board looked like, the outcome was never in question). ● We have a tendency to seek wisdom only when we can’t figure life out for ourselves! We tend to seek wisdom only in crisis; for all the routine events in life, somehow our own resources and reason seem sufficient. Wholeness… The ‘blessed’ life is not one that has learned how to use its faith to avoid adversity, but one that has proven able to consistently and successfully meet the challenges of life. Hope… The conviction that there will never be a circumstance in our lives, whether self-inflicted or unexplainable, which God cannot “reclaim” (restore) and use to accomplish something of greater value. * Somehow, the “good faith” that we desire is indisputably connected with ‘wisdom’. Wisdom… - Entire books of the Bible given to the topic (Proverbs and Ecclesiastes). The Bible tells us repeatedly to ‘get it’; to ‘search for it’. “Joyful is the person who finds wisdom…” Prov.3:13 “Getting wisdom is the wisest thing you can do! And whatever else you do, develop good judgment”. Prov.4:7 “…get wisdom, discipline and good judgment”. Prov.23:23 “But wisdom is shown to be right by its results”. Matt.11:9 - When God appears to Solomon and says, “What do you want? Ask and I will give it to you!” (1 Chronicles 1:7-10), Solomon asks for wisdom (knowing it was that one virtue that would add value to all of life). Wisdom is connecting the dots! What’s obvious is that life provides a dot that says “start” and a dot that says “finish”. It’s how you connect the rest of the events which will ultimately determine the shape of your life! It’s the art of living well! Proverbs 1:7 “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. God is the point of reference. Conversely, Ps.53:1 says, “The fool has said in his heart, there is no god”. The fool is the one who thinks they are the center of their own world Reflections… ► Make sure that your request for wisdom does not involve a “Plan B” (should God fail to come through!) “when you ask, be sure that your faith is in God alone”. If we are honest, most of our requests are accompanied by a ‘contingency plan’! Any time that God’s interaction with us is determined to be delinquent, it creates a void and provides the perfect opportunity for us to screw it up! ► Resentment often follows disappointment. “How will we respond to God when it becomes clear that he is not going to intervene in the way that we had expected?” Matthew 11: John sends his followers to ask Jesus if he is the one because although he believed Jesus to be the Messiah, he had not acted in a manner consistent with John’s expectations. “Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me” (Matt.11). Greek: “to cause a person to begin to distrust and desert one whom he ought to trust and obey; to be offended in one, i.e. to see in another what I disapprove of and what hinders me from acknowledging his authority”. ► Most often, our greatest demonstration of faith is just to remain faithful. There will be times when no amount of faith will change your circumstances. Good faith is trust in God which, in turn, produces faithfulness. * Much of our considerations of faith have to do with how we might get God to respond to us (ensuring proper belief), rather than our response to God (faithfulness). Faithfulness is our determination to continue to do what’s right, even when our circumstances don’t change. ► Adversity often reveals a faith that will only take you half way! James speaks of prematurely aborting the process: “let it grow”. * Endurance implies an unwillingness to give up (on God and our circumstance) until the process is done; Patience implies active waiting. * Interestingly, the same word can be translated either “endurance” or “patience”. Endurance seems more closely connected to our unwillingness to ‘give up’, while patience speaks to our attitude ‘while we wait’. * If you bail early (either by devising your own remedies for life’s pains or shifting the blame on God), you’ll end up resentful and empty over what proved to be “senseless suffering”. Patience usually comes somewhere between ‘faith’ and ‘fatigue’. ► Crisis always allows our heart to catch up with our mouth (profession). Or our convictions to match our faith-declarations. It invites us to ‘go deeper’. * Wisdom is not the guaranteed outcome of adversity. Wisdom is not the guaranteed outcome of experience or age (you can old and still be foolish; we identify people who are young and living well as ‘wise beyond their years’). Wisdom is not the reward of suffering; wisdom is the potential insight gained as a result of your experience. ► Adversity always reveals what’s in our hearts, because we’re too good at pretending! (too easy to fake it) Deuteronomy 8:2-6 “…to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would obey me.” The testing isn’t for God’s benefit, but for ours! ► The wholeness that we desire is both the result of divine interaction and human decision. God does (provides) what we cannot do without him, and we do what God will not do for us! * God’s desire is not to keep us spiraling in an endless cycle of senseless suffering and defeat. He desires for us to develop a life that is coming together; missing nothing… but, he won’t forego the process! Principle: Obedience to the obvious. If we are unable/unwilling to obey what appears obvious, it will produce great difficulty in the absence of clarity (adversity). Unless obedience has been rehearsed, it will not become our spontaneous response in crisis. How do we again wisdom? As Jesus did: we “pause”. * Purposely dwelling on God in order to encourage intimacy. Intentionally looking for ways for God to interact with you daily (to form and inform you daily). * In pausing, we remain conscious of the parallel universe in which we live. In pausing, the only thing for you to do is BE PRESENT. Illustration: “negative”. We call the undeveloped picture a “negative”; because it lacks clarity and color; no definition, only vague shapes. Once the negative has completed the developing process, we have the completed picture.
The outcome (completed picture) was
already present (in the negative), but it couldn’t be realized absent of the
process! |
