How many of us have found ourselves with burdens that affect our lives? In reality, we all have our hardships, don’t we? Have you ever wondered why God lets His children suffer such unpleasantries? Let me give you a little hint. It has to do with our huge egos that think we are the ones in charge.
When we act like we are the ones who must take care of us, we actually deny a place in our lives, and we must learn how to go back to putting Him first in our lives. So, I guess we could say that by experiencing a storm in our lives becomes a teaching experience.
I want to talk to you this morning about hardship in our life, but first, let’s open in prayer.
OPENING PRAYER
Open your Bibles to JAMES 1:2,3 and read with me.
‘2- Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3- because you know that the testing of you faith develops perseverance.’
The first thing you will notice is that James does not say we should rejoice “if” we have trials. He said “whenever” we have trials. I think that pretty much means that all of us can expect to have troubles come into our lives on a regular basis as long as we live here on this earth.
There are three points I want to bring out today about having problems in our lives.
1. WE WILL HAVE PROBLEMS – GET USED TO IT.
It has been said that all of us occupy only three positions in life: Getting ready to go into a storm, being in the middle of a storm, or just coming out of a storm. And, if we are just coming out of a storm, we can be sure that before long, we will be starting to go into another storm.
I asked you why God would let us go through our many trials. I think the answer is quite obvious. The most important word in the human language always seems to be “I”. That’s like the man who could not focus on anyone else because his “I’s” were always too close together. He would always be thinking about himself. All of us tend to be like that, don’t we? The problem is when we are thinking about ourselves, we don’t have room enough to think about anybody else, especially the Lord.
There are some who teach that if you have a problem in your life, it is because you do not have great enough faith. They always say that the amount of faith you have is directly proportionate to the amount of problems you have in life. I do not believe that. Let me give you one very clear example of why I do not believe that.
Nobody could have had any greater faith that the apostles, yet every one of them suffered untold calamity and persecution in their lives. Am I supposed to believe that the Apostle Paul had problems because his faith was not in order? Not for one second.
The Bible clearly teaches us that we will reap what we sow, and it is a fact that when we make bad choices, we often have bad consequences, but that is not the only reason we have trials. God uses these trials to mold the willing believer into a stronger believer.
In DEUTERONOMY 8:1-8, we find that the Lord wants us to remember that the most important thing in our lives are the Words that come out of the mouth of the Lord. He is disciplining us as we discipline the children we love – all so they will know right from wrong and live accordingly.
We don’t seem to be able to read God’s Word and fully put it to use in our lives, and we certainly cannot seem to hear His Word and put it to full use in our lives, so we need another way to learn how to be humble to God. That way is to be taught. And, that is the reason we have trials in our lives – to teach us how to become more reliant upon Him in all things. And, if we are able to rely upon Him during the bad times, we will be able to do it in the good times, too.
We all have problems, and I have some good news and some bad news for you. The bad news is you are going to have more! The good news is, we can start putting our trust and faith in God now, and He will get us through them with far less damage than we have ever incurred before.
2. HOW WE REACT TO TROUBLES IS OUR CHOICE
Now, you might be thinking that we are supposed to be elated whenever we have a problem, but that is not what James meant. James meant that when we have a problem, we can react to that problem in only one of two ways.
We can choose to act like humans and try to figure out how to jump on that problem so we can solve it, or we can choose to immediately go to God and ask for His help and then put our hearts in “trust mode” so we can build our knowledge that He will get us through this situation.
A moment ago, I said one of our biggest problems is that our “I’s” are too close together to be able to focus on the truth of God. When something bad happens to us, we always cry out and say, ‘Why me, Lord?’ Do you see what that does? That puts us at the very center of everything, and takes God out of it.
Many churches today want you to feel very comfortable and enjoy their services very much. Now, there is nothing wrong with feeling comfortable in a church, as a matter of fact, you should feel very comfortable in church, and you should enjoy their services, but not at the exclusion of teaching and preaching the Scripture. By focusing more on what the individual people want, they are inadvertently placing them above what God wants.
And, any time a person relies on himself or herself for a solution, we end up with matters only becoming worse. So, I think that instead of crying out, “Why me, Lord!”, I think we should be shouting out, “It’s You, Lord!” God must be our highest focus – at all times.
Think about this: Usually, in our times of troubles, we treat God the worst by taking our focus off Him and putting it on what we are going through. Any time you take your focus off the Lord, you instantly start losing faith and having doubts.
When a problem comes up, our first instinct is to always try and figure out how we are going to fix a problem, and our last instinct always seems to be going to God to let Him fix it. What do we normally do? A problem comes up, we try to fix it, and then when that doesn’t work, we try something else. We keep repeating this until we finally realize that we have worn ourselves out and we still have not solved the problem. Then, it finally dawns on us to go to God.
That is because we depend on us to muddle through and do not depend on God to carry us through. All of us are going to go through our personal valley of despair, aren’t we? Most of us have already gone through quite a few in our lives. I want you to focus on this very important fact – even when we lash out at God by being self-dependant, He still blesses us with His loving grace by giving us His promises to hold onto.
Picture yourself standing on a high hilltop. As you look down on the valley below, it is dark and troublesome. You see violence, hatred, and all things vile and wicked. You are scared to go down there, but you know you have to. So you start walking. The further down you get into the valley, the darker it gets and the scarier it gets.
Bad things are starting to surround you now. Every step you take is a step into the total unknown, and you know the unknown is an evil place to be in that valley. What do you do?
Most of us just continue to trod along, being upset and just wishing we would hurry and get to the other side. But, what are we supposed to do? We are supposed to keep our eyes on the Lord and He will keep us safe.
Remember when Peter got out of the boat on a stormy lake in the middle of the night and walked towards Jesus? What happened? He made it most of the way, but at the very end when he got near Jesus, he began to sink. Why did he do so well at first, and then start to sink the nearer he got to Jesus. It seems that the nearer he got to Jesus, the better he would do.
In MATTHEW 14:30, 31 we read,
’30- But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!” 31- Immediately, Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”’
Peter was all excited and acted out of instinct when he got out of that boat. He was thinking with his heart, not his mind. But, after he had a chance to see the situation he was in, all that simply evaporated and the fear and doubt caused him to start sinking.
Do we do that? Do we find ourselves all pumped up and excited for God, and then pretty soon a big problem comes in our lives. Maybe it is an untimely death of a loved one, the attitude of a child that seems to throw us totally off the track, or maybe we go into work and the boss tells us they are going to down size the company and they are going to start with you.
Before that problem, we seem very focused on the Lord, but after the problem appears, we all too often change our focus from God to our problem.
That is what Peter did, and the result was that he started sinking. When we take our eyes of Jesus, don’t we also start to sink? We need to start walking around like we are holding a miniature Jesus in our hands. And, we should never take our eyes off of His eyes.
Now picture yourself walking around with your hand out in front of you, holding Jesus, and you are looking right into His eyes. Someone you know walks by and says “Hello” to you. What do you do? What should you do? You normally turn your head and look at your friend and answer back, don’t you? We should just keep our eyes riveted on Jesus, while we acknowledge our friends’ greeting. Never turn your eyes away from Christ, because the very instant you do, the only other place they will be focused is on the world.
So, Peter started sinking. What did he do? He realized he was in some big trouble, and he did the only right thing. He cried out for the Lord’s help. And, what happened? The Bible says that Jesus reached down “immediately” to save Peter. It doesn’t say that Jesus let Peter worry for a while. It says that as soon as Peter fully depended upon Him, He saved Peter. Have we taught our hearts to fully depend on Jesus? We cannot do so unless we have true faith.
Now, getting back to our journey through that dark valley. I said most of us tend to just trod along trying to hurry up and get through with as few bruises as we can.
We should do exactly as Peter did. When we are in our valleys of darkness, and we cry out for Jesus, what will happen? Jesus will reach down and keep us from drowning.
And, we cannot cry out like that, until we learn to have faith that He will do that for us. We need to build our faith and our trust in Him. Remember a few moments ago when I said that we don’t seem to be able to read God’s Word, or even hear His Words and learn what we need to learn? That leaves the only way for us to learn, is to act it out. When we go through troubles, when we go through our valleys of despair, it is only in them that we make the solid choice to learn how to have faith, or to focus only on our own abilities.
As an added remark, let me tell you that when you depend on yourself, the only thing you will ever get is more trouble. I promise you that as surely as you hear me this morning. By going through a situation, we do our best learning. And what we learn can end up saving up later on when things go from bad to worse.
Have you ever seen, read about or heard about how a baby giraffe is born and what happens to it? First of all, a giraffe is a pretty tall animal, isn’t it? When the baby giraffe starts its journey down the birth canal, the mother goes to a spot where there are no bushes, just flat dirt.
As the baby comes out, it actually falls to that dirt. That fall is normally ten or twelve feet, and that dirt is not soft, but very hard. When the baby hits the ground, very hard I might add, it rolls over and just lies there with legs all curled up under it.
The mother positions herself over the baby to protect it from predators, and seeing none, she takes on her very strong legs and kicks the baby. It flies across the dirt head over heels. Now, I have no comprehension of what that baby giraffe is thinking at this point, but as a human, I tend to see the mother’s actions as a negative, don’t you?
If the baby does not stand up, the mother will go over and kick it again, sending it sprawling across the hard ground. This will happen over and over again until the baby finally stands up. And then what happens? The mother goes over and sends it flying again! Why would she do that after her baby finally stood up?
She knows that the baby needs to learn, AND REMEMBER, how to stand so it can save itself later in a time of danger. She kicks it again, not because she is having a bad hair day, but because she wants her baby to remember.
I have heard many people question how a God who supposedly loves us could let us go through terrible times. That is very simple. God does love us. He loves us enough to want us to learn dependence only upon Him. As I said before, we don’t learn from reading our listening, so we have to learn by experience. Have you ever heard the expression, “experience is the best teacher?” Whoever coined that phrase sure knew humans, didn’t he? And, being humans, we tend to forget easily, so we keep going through these trials so we can remember how we put our faith in God and thus, grow it stronger in each storm we encounter.
Larry Crabb wrote the book “Shattered Dreams” and in that book, he says that Satan’s masterpiece is no the skid-row bum or the prostitute. He says that Satan’s masterpiece is the self-sufficient person who is entrenched solely in their comfort zone and the person who denies God so they can focus only on what they want at the moment.
If Satan’s masterpiece is one who focuses only on their own self, then I would think that God’s masterpiece is one who depends on God in all things. These people know that they cannot depend upon themselves because they have nothing outside of God that is worth having. These people yearn for a closer relationship with Jesus. They actually see troubles, not as happy times, but as opportunities to realize God’s presence in their lives again.
Now, to have such an intense dependence on the Lord, we need to have something called wisdom. Many people think wisdom is knowledge. These two words have very different meanings. Knowledge means knowing something. Wisdom means knowing what to do, or more specifically, on how to live your life.
I can open a book on any subject and learn new things, but that will not necessarily give me any information on how I should live or pattern my life. When Peter speaks of having joy as we go through troubles, many people equate that with happiness. I don’t think God wants us to be happy that we have troubles, but I do think God wants us to have joy that we have another opportunity to realize God’s presence in our lives.
3. A RIGHT PERSPECTIVE WILL LIGHTEN YOUR BURDEN
As Christians, we need to be careful to have the right perspective. Wrong perspectives can often derail you into its own valley of despair. This is made clear in the letter a college girl wrote to her mother.
“Dear Mom,
I wanted you to know I am okay – now. When my dorm caught fire in the middle of the night, there was no way downstairs so I had to jump out the second floor window. I am out of the hospital now, but still have some scratches on my face and arms where I went through the window.
I was caught by a firefighter named Joe. He saved my life, Mom. He came to see me every day in the hospital, too. When I got out of the hospital, the dorm was still not rebuilt, and I had nowhere to stay, so Joe let me stay with him at his apartment.
Mom, even though he doesn’t believe in going to church, he is so wonderful. He says he is going to marry me just as soon as he tells his wife that he wants a divorce.
Now, Mom, before you start having a coronary, let me tell you that none of this is true. What is true, however, is that I just flunked English and Math, and I just wanted you to keep a proper perspective on its importance in my life.”
I would say this young lady understands the need to have a proper perspective in life, wouldn’t you?
Christians also need to have a different perspective than what the world has. And it must be a stronger and clearer perspective, being careful not to let it slip back over time as perspectives will. Having the proper perspective will certainly lighten your burdens.
In the 1940’s, a woman by the name of Ruth Gruber was working with the Department of the Interior, helping to promote the Alaskan territory to homesteaders. Many times she traveled by dog sled, and at other times, she was blessed to travel by truck or plan.
In 1942, she was about to board a small plane to Nome, when she was handed an urgent telegraph from the Secretary of the Interior. This was before the days of email and instant messaging, and she had to wait for the telegraph operator to decode it for her.
The pilot became impatient and took of without her. She later said that she needed that plan so badly that she almost walked away from that emergency telegraph. She said the thought of missing that plane to Nome was at first, an unbearable pressure she could not deal with. That is the perspective she had at the time the pilot took off.
Her perspective changed about ten minutes later when the plane circled back over the runway, then veered off into the ice and crashed, killing all aboard. The point is this: If ten minutes can change our perspective so drastically, what does eternity do to it?
In PROVERBS 9:6, it tells us what to do –
“Leave your simple ways and you will live; walk in the way of understanding.”
The simple way is how we think we should live, but in order to spiritually live, we need to live the way God knows we should live. Another way of saying it is found in ROMANS 12:2 – when we are told to
“ …stop conforming to this world and be transformed by the renewing of our minds in Christ Jesus.”
All of the things we find so necessary and important in this life utterly pales when viewed from the perspective of God’s eternal Heaven, doesn’t it? What does that say about our perspective? And if it shows a weakness in our perspective, what does that say about our faith and trust?
Most of us have some area where we need to grow in the Lord. And God will use hard times to help us attain that growth. The trick on our part is to always be aware of that so we can keep the proper perspective, for having a wrong perspective can dishearten us and make us want to quit.
The worst college football game I ever heard of was in 1916 Georgia Tech played Cumberland of Kentucky. They beat Kentucky 222 to 0. It said that Kentucky never even made a first down. See, the Georgia Tech players were much bigger and more experienced than Cumberland and they were hurting and mauling all the Kentucky players. They hurt them so bad that they lost heart and became fearful that they would just get hurt.
That was shown when halfway through the first half, one of the Cumberland players fumbled the ball and it rolled over to one of his teammates. He yelled for his teammate to pick it up and the teammate yelled back, “You dropped it, you pick it up!”
This man was afraid to pick up the ball because he thought he would only get hurt if he did, so he was willing to quit trying. That is what happens to Christians when they have a wrong perspective. They focus on the hardship, not the growth.
Over and over again, the Bible tells us that hard times will have a redeeming value for those who walk in faith. We must continually focus on the Lord and trust in Him. Then, and only then, will the Lord start to offer us solutions, and I think they will be directly in accordance to our growth and reliance upon Him.
Let me share some personal examples of what happened to Diana and me just during this time of moving up here.
Diana applied for a transfer as a letter carrier because we were told that it was against Postal policy to change crafts during a transfer, that she would have to get here and then try to switch over to being a clerk. And, we were told that it might take up to six to nine months before she heard a reply.
Well, I knew that we had to be here, and I was trying my best to get everything done as quickly as possible, but it all seemed to just stop. Nothing was being done and there was no way I could hurry it. I got very antsy and began to find myself getting impatient and aggravated. That sure never helped anything, and it sure didn’t hurry anybody else up!
Finally, I realized what I was doing and I immediately started praying – continually. I prayed as specifically as I could, telling God what we needed and when we needed it, but always telling Him that His will is greater than ours.
In what seemed like an eternity, we finally got a letter back on her transfer. It had only been 13 days! And in that letter, the postmaster of Claremore told us that she had no openings at all for a letter carrier but she did have one for a clerk if Diana would be interested in it. (That is what Diana wanted but was told could not happen!)
She told us later that she had that clerk opening for two years, but Tulsa would not give her permission to fill it, until a month before receiving Diana’s letter. She said not only did they tell her to fill it, but that she had to fill it with a transfer.
Every time I started getting impatience and trying to find ways I could get things moving, things came to a complete standstill. And they stayed that way until I finally humbled myself and submitted to His will over mind. Every time I did that, things picked up quickly and went better than we could have hoped for.
The point I am trying to make is that all of us have things that come into our lives that upset our comfort zones and times when we will most often begin to walk away from Him. It is precisely these times when we must keep a proper perspective and force ourselves to depend on Him.
What we should do is best said in JOB 34:32,
“Teach me what I cannot see; if I have done wrong I shall not do so again.”
Are you having troubles in your life this morning? Does it seem as if they have been going on forever? Maybe it is time that you just took a step back to letting God rule over your life in entirety. Maybe its time you gave God back the reins and you became the passenger. Can you do that?
Even if you are not experiencing a problem now, you will be facing one again someday. By preparing for it now, your burden will be much lighter when you face your valley of despair.
You will then be able to see the valley for what it is, but you will also be able to see God walking through the valley with you, not just waiting for you on the other side.
Will you let God know this morning that you want to become more dependent upon Him? Will you let Him know that you are tired of trying to always be in control and still having everything get harder on you?
Will you make a decision right now to give yourself to Jesus Christ? He loves you enough to have waited for you, and He will accept you with open arms and a loving heart. ROMANS 1l:6 says,
“And you also are among those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.”
Is He calling you right now? Do you want to belong to Jesus Christ? As we go into our time of invitation, I encourage you to listen to the Lord as He whispers His desires to you.
