A man was in the hospital for tests, and the doctor came in to see him. The doctor said he had some bad news and some really bad news for the man, and wanted to know which one he wanted to hear first.
The patience said to tell him the bad news first. The doctor said the bad news was he only had 24 hours to live. Panicked, the man asked what the really bad news was and the doctor said, “The really bad news was that I forgot, but I was supposed to tell you the bad news yesterday.”
We may not have experienced that kind of bad news, but every person in here has experienced troubles in their life. In truth, it seems like every time we turn around, we are having some kind of difficulty, doesn’t it? Have you ever wondered just why God would let His children have problems? Do you think it might have something to do with our being hard of hearing when it comes to listening to what He is telling us?
JAMES 1:2-3 talks about the troubles we have in life.
‘Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 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.
Considering that, there are certain things we must to, and the first is …
1. LEARN HOW TO DEAL WITH THE PROBLEMS
Why do you think we have so many problems in our lives? Could it be that instead of focusing on God, we focus on ourselves? It seems the most important letter in the English language is the letter “I”. If you took CLASS 101, you found out that the middle letter in sin is “I”. Sometimes we focus too much on ourselves and not enough on God.
There are some who believe that if you have problems, it is because you do not have enough faith. They say the stronger your faith, the less problems you will have. I do not believe that. Let me give you one very clear example of why I say that.
We are all given a measure of faith – not more or less than anybody else. It is our choice on what we do with that faith. We can use it, exercise it, and watch it grow, or we can ignore it and watch it wither. A case in point is the disciples. Nobody had greater faith than they did once they received the Holy Spirit, yet every one of them suffered untold calamity and persecution in their lives.
Am I to believe that the Apostle Paul had problems because his faith was not in order? I think not. One reason we have troubles is 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, 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 learn to fully rely on 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 learn to put our trust in God, and He will get us through those problems with far less damage than we ever had before.
Learning how to deal with our problems will also help us to …
2. LEARN HOW TO REACT TO OUR PROBLEMS
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 we can solve it, or we can choose to go to God and ask for His help.
Understand, though, that the Bible never says God will change our problems. What God will do, however, is change us so we can handle the problem.
Many churches today want you to feel very comfortable and enjoy their services. 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, these churches are inadvertently placing the wants of the people above what God wants.
That is evidenced by the growing numer of churches whose pastors do not carry a Bible to church or preach messages from the Bible. They end up relying on themselves to build the numbers of the church. They say that they need to do that so more people will come in to hear God’s word, but if they aren’t preaching God’s word, it doesn’t matter if anybody comes it, amen!
And, any time a person relies on himself or herself for a solution, we end up with matters only becoming worse. So the next time we are in the middle of a bad problem, instead of crying out “How can I handle this, Lord?” maybe we should start crying out, “You can handle this, Lord!”
Think about this: Usually, in our times of troubles, that we treat God the worst, because it is in our troubles that we take our focus entirely off of Him and put it on what we are going through. Any time you take your focus off the Lord, you instantly start losing faith and having doubts.
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 the bad things in this world. 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 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.
Usually, we find ourselves all pumped up and excited for God, and then an unexpected problem comes up. Maybe the plumbing goes out at the same time the car needs repairing, or maybe we go into work and the boss tells us they are going to downsize 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. But what did Peter do as he began to slide down into the waves? He quickly refocused on to the only help mankind has, the Lord Jesus Christ. 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.
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 through experience.
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. 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.
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 it needs to 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 guess you could call it, extreme tough love. But isn’t it better to learn that way than try and learn with a lion hot on your tail?
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 teach us. 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. 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 focusing only on what they want at the moment.
If Satan’s masterpiece is one who focuses only on their self, then I would think that God’s masterpiece is one who tries to focus on God in all things. These people know that they cannot depend upon themselves because they have nothing worth having outside of God. These people yearn for a closer relationship with Jesus.
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.
When James 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 chance to see God’s presence in our lives.
And with God’s presence in our lives, we find that …
3. OUR BURDENS ARE ACTUALLY LIGHTER
As Christians, we need to have the right perspective. Wrong perspectives can often make us choose a course of action that is not in our best interest. 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 text messaging, so 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 plane so much 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 live in the way of understanding, we need to live the way God wants us to 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 the things we find so necessary and important in this life 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?
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 solutions, and I think they will be directly in accordance to our reliance upon Him.
We talk about faith and trust, but faith and trust in what? Do we have faith and trust that God will just be with us during our hard times, or do we have faith and trust that He will help us in our hard times?
According to the Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., a dense fog, covering seven city blocks to a height of 100 feet, is composed of one glass of water. That small amount of water is divided into about 60 billion tiny droplets. Yet when those particles settle over a city they can almost blot out everything in sight.
Many people live their lives in such a fog. They allow a small amount of troubles to become so spread out, that it obscures their vision and dampens their spirit.
The point I am trying to make is that all of us have things that come into our lives that cause us to take our focus off God and put it on something else. It is precisely these times when we must keep a proper perspective and force ourselves to fully 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.”
There is an acrostic that I love. It is the meaning of the word FAITH.
Forgetting
All others,
I put my
Trust in
Him
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 have complete rule over your life. Maybe its time you gave God back the reins and you became the passenger. Will you do that? If you do that, God promises that He will not just wait for you on the other side, but that He will walk with you through your valley of despair.
ROMANS 1l:6 says,
“And you also are among those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.”
Will you make a decision right now to belong to Him? He loves you enough to have waited for you, and He will be so proud of you and He will accept you with open arms and a loving heart. All you have to do is walk up here and ask Him for it.
INVITATION
