Malachi 3:1-5; Luke 22: 24-34
Very soon, on Tuesday in fact, millions of students are heading back to school. It’s a new start, a new year of learning and growing. What did you enjoy the most about school, either junior or high school, or even college or university? If I was a betting man, and I’m not, I’d bet that tests were not necessarily at the top of your list of things you enjoyed about school.
I always thought of tests as annoying evils, designed to take the steam out of my self-esteem, designed to show me how much I hadn’t been paying attention, or hadn’t absorbed what I’d learned. Even after high school, I would often choose courses based on their not being a final exam. Usually meant a lot of writing papers and such, but at least I didn’t have too many final exams to dread.
So tests are not what I live for. Tests are not something most of us are excited about. The real point of tests, though, when you think about it, is not to make us feel bad. In school settings, it’s actually to help us, and those responsible for teaching us, figure out how well we’re doing with the things we’re learning. Are we learning?
I remember after I finished high school I learned that school was not about learning stuff, like history and math etc. It’s about learning how to think. How to evaluate. How to remember important things. So school is really about learning how to think. Learning how to live.
Actually, I think we all know the fewer students per teacher, the better the overall learning. When you have a ratio of 1:6, or 1:8 or even 1:12, the teacher is pretty close to the student and knows how the student is doing, knows how the student is understanding and applying what he or she is learning. A test, in that instance, is not for the teacher to find out how much the student knows, for the teacher already knows what he knows. The test or exam is for the students, so they can gauge their own growth toward a goal...be it understanding math or science or literature or art or shop.
Now that I’m not in school anymore, I appreciate having been there a lot more. I spent 26 years of my life in school. Now, like all of us, I’m in the school of life, majoring, I hope, in being a student of Jesus. Learning His ways, His attitudes, His approach to life. Amen? Amen.I’m not in school, but you know, the tests don’t end when school ends. Actually, they come more often and the stakes are much higher than any school. The fact is that you and I face tests all the time.
Life is full of challenges. Being a Christian is full of challenges. If anyone ever told you that following Jesus was easy, or that serving the living God was a piece of cake, they had no idea what they were talking about.
You know, if the goal of following Jesus was learning things about Him, having our head filled with knowledge of the Bible and becoming an expert in “what the Bible says”, that would be relatively easy. But that’s not the goal..
The purpose of following Jesus is to become like Jesus. The goal for the Christian is to be what the word actually means - ‘little Christs’ or people who faithfully reflect the character and identity of Jesus.
THAT’S why it’s such a challenge, an awesome challenge to be a follower of Christ.
Now, one of the biggest challenges you and I face in the day-to-day is following Jesus in a broken world and as broken people. You and I face hardship. It is a very real part of living.
Even as we allow the Holy Spirit to move in us and change us to be like Jesus, so that we care about what He cares about, so that we seek His Kingdom, we know that hardship presses in on us.
I want to suggest that how we deal with hardship, our attitude toward it means everything. In fact, I want to suggest that far from being pointless or meaningless distractions, hardship is a key way that God refines us.
It is not an evil to ignore on the way to a higher goal. They are what God uses to make us more like Jesus, to refine us, to test us - yes - not so that God can evaluate how we’re doing.
Remember God is closer than our breath and way closer than any other teacher - He knows how we’re doing), but so that we can know how we’re doing, and so that we can be challenged and encouraged as we grow to be more like Jesus.
Now because there’s a chance you might misunderstand what I’m saying, I want to be super-clear from the onset. God does not manufacture hardship for us. He does not put things in our way that can make us fall. Please hear that.
God does not tempt us, either. But...life does. Satan does. Our own hearts have a way of tripping us up. What God does is USE the things that happen to ultimately strengthen us.
Romans 8:26-28 “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God. And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose”.
That’s important to understand.
So...how do you deal with hardship? When unpleasant things happen, when unexpected things occur, what do you do? Some of you know that in the past year and a bit, I’ve been struggling with rheumatoid arthritis.
Arthritis is a pretty common thing. Osteoarthritis, a type that many folks have, comes from wear and tear of joints and muscles. It’s a ‘sign of maturity’ [spoken with irony]. It’s no fun and can range from a mild annoyance to being quite debilitating.
I’ve got the other kind of arthritis. It’s called rheumatoid arthritis, like I said, and it’s an auto-immune disease in the same category as lupus and sarcoidosis and other such wonderful-sounding diseases.
What THAT means is that my body has decided that...my body...is a foreign invader and is trying to do what it does with all foreign invaders like viruses and such. Pretty dumb, eh?
So my body builds up white cells, trying to ‘kill’ the ‘invader’, white cells that cause pretty substantial swelling and a great deal of pain and some considerable weakness in the limbs.
It’s not a lot of fun. I’m grateful for medicine and I’m grateful for prayer, since the combination of both is working wonders and I’m much better off that I was even 3 or 4 months ago.
That’s an example from my life, but you can think of examples from your own life. And the challenge I faced and face is the same as the challenge you face. What will I do with this hardship? Will I allow it to make me angry, or bitter?
Will I draw near to God? Will I see this hardship as a sign of God’s disfavour or judgement?
I have a friend who is a prominent Christian leader in Canada who many years ago got the same illness that I have. Among Christians he generally found wisdom and understanding and compassion.
A few, well-intentioned believers took it upon themselves to tell my friend that God was punishing him for this or that, or that his hardship was a sign of God removing His blessing. My friend found that advice less than helpful.
Anyhow, the challenge we face is simply this: what do we do when hardship comes? I had perhaps an odd reaction. My main thought was that I was grateful that for 50 years of my life, I had no such trouble, no such pain. I found myself thanking God for that. I found myself spending more time with God and going deeper into His presence. I found myself actively giving my life, my well-being, my whole world to God and trusting myself to His care.
That was very intentional on my part, because without consciously doing so, without being careful to give God thanks and to give Him the glory, it’s possible to just become bitter, to become resentful, or almost worse, to drift into a kind of neutrality with God and become pretty passionless, lukewarm about Him.
Instead, I’ve come to see this challenge as a blessing. I’m far more aware of how fragile the human body-my body-is. I’m more aware of my dependence on God. I’m even more thankful than before that God is entirely dependable and faithful and loving.
So I’m trying to say that it needs to be a conscious thing. We need to intentionally grapple with hardship and, truly, how well we do this has a big influence in carving out our future...both with God and with just dealing with life in general. Whatever it is that tests us, challenges us...God uses it.
And one of the ways He uses it is to help us to know where we stand. God knows where we stand in our relationship with Him. Sometimes it takes rough circumstances for us ourselves to really know.
The Apostle Paul was very intentional and ‘on-purpose’ in giving God glory in the thick if his hardships and as he reflected on his experiences afterward.
As he recounted his sufferings, he spoke honestly about the degree of hardship he had faced as he sought to fulfill God’s calling on his life to take the gospel to all people.
2 Cor 11:24 “Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. 25 Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, 26 I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my fellow Jews, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false believers. 27 I have laboured and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. 28 Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches”.
A little earlier in 2 Corinthians he talks about how he processed his own suffering:
2 Cor 1:8 We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. 9 Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. 10 He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us again. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us.
I think verse 9 there is a great, concise statement of the benefit of hardship, of trials, of tests in our faith. We all want to rely on ourselves. We all like to think that we’re quite capable on our own, thank you very much. We don’t need help. We don’t need another to come by our side to make it possible to cross the divide or challenge that we face.
But Paul, while using the strongest image possible of his suffering, feeling that he had received ‘the sentence of death’, he understood that God took the bad things that happened and use it together for good.
How did God use Paul’s experience and his despair? Again, God didn’t cause it, but God used it to teach Paul to depend on God, and not upon himself. And ultimately Paul looks to Jesus, whom God raised from the dead as the most concrete example of God’s power and might and will to overcome the most tragic of hardships.
Paul’s confidence looks back to what God has done - the ways He has shown His faithfulness in the past - in ‘raising us from such deadly peril’, and he approaches the future knowing that God, who delivered him in the past, would do so again in the future.
When hardship occurs it’s an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to move closer to or farther from God. To run from God or to run into the arms of God. We have reason to have confidence in God. And we have reason to stand in awe of God.
The Bible talks about the fear of the Lord: Proverbs 9:10 “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding”.
The word ‘fear’ here means: respect, reverence, piety AND fear. I’ve heard people over the years try to define the ‘fear’ of God as respect and reverence and piety...everything but it’s core meaning: ‘fear’. That makes it easier perhaps for the modern ear, but it’s also untrue.
There is a sense in which God is to be feared. According to Proverbs 9:10, when we have a proper fear of God we get a start on wisdom. Without the fear of God, we bypass wisdom. I don’t want to do that. I hope you don’t want to do that.
One way perhaps we can understand the fear of God is as we take in what the Scripture says about God as the Refiner’s Fire:
Isaiah 48:10 Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction.
1 Peter 1:6b-7 “...Now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith – of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire – may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed.
Proverbs 17:3 The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, and the Lord tests hearts.
Hebrews 12:29 For our God is a consuming fire.
1 Peter 5:10 And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.
These passages show us that God is involved in our hardship and suffering. He refines us.
He, as it were, tries us in the midst of our hardship, he allows the hard things we go through to not be pointless or meaningless suffering. He helps us to know ourselves.
He helps us to understand where we are and our relationship to Him. Is there is an ultimate purpose to the trials that we face? Yes.
Our faith in God is proven true, and ultimately Jesus Christ is glorified. Jesus Christ, the suffering servant, meets us in our distress, in even the place of our wounding. And we know we belong to Him, and that even further deepens our devotion to Him.
God tests our hearts...again, not for Him to learn what’s up with us - He knows everything - but so that we know ourselves.
God is a consuming fire.
His presence does not make us content to live in our sin, to ignore His precepts. If we think that our relationship with God allows us liberty to sin, freedom to do things that offend Him, our relationship with God needs work. His holy presence actually melts away everything that is not holy. It destroys in us, by His mercy, every seed of rebellion, every tendency to take for granted His great mercy and love. That’s part of what understanding God as a consuming fire leads to. It’s heavy stuff.
But I think Peter puts it well in 1 Peter 5:10 “And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you”.
Peter knew this to be true very personally. Our gospel reading today from Luke 22 is an intense movement between Jesus and Peter. Jesus predicts Peter’s betrayal of him, Peter’s denial of Jesus that was to happen after Jesus was arrested.
Luke 22:31“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has demanded permission to sift you like wheat;32 but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.”33But he said to Him, “Lord, with You I am ready to go both to prison and to death!”34And He said, “I say to you, Peter, the rooster will not crow today until you have denied three times that you know Me.”
I should note that the ‘sifting’ discussed here is not like the sifting of flour that we think of nowadays [PPT-Sifter].
Sifting flour, the soft fluffy substance used in baking is not the right image.
When Jesus is talking about sifting wheat he was referring to a very violent action used to separate the grain (wheat berry) from the stalk and the chaff. It meant literally tearing the wheat apart.
It’s worth saying that that is what the enemy of our souls wants to do. Satan’s hope for our suffering and hardship is that it destroys us.
The devil’s purpose is that life’s troubles cause us to abandon all hope, to embrace despair and hopelessness.
God, of course, is the opposite. God wants the tough things we go through to strengthen us, to build our resolve.
Jesus here says that although the enemy’s plan is for Peter’s destruction, He has prayed, He has interceded to the Father so that Peter’s faith ultimately would not fail and that after Peter was to deny Jesus, he would return to Him, and that he would be a source of strength to the other disciples.
So Peter has been there, and as someone who had been there, as someone who had failed Jesus and had suffered incredible shame and regret as a result, he could say from personal experience: 1 Peter 5:10 “And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you”.
Hardship is a very real part of living. Is there any point to it? Is hardship a sign of God’s disfavour? No. For the Christian, it is something that God redeems, something He uses to refine us so that we become more like Jesus.
How we deal with hardship, if we let it push us away from God or let it draw us closer to Him..that forms who we become; it is a predictor of our future.
Will we continue to live in the blessing of God’s love, or will we walk away and live in the shadow of God’s love at work in others? Those are our choices. I pray we all choose to live in the blessing of God’s love.
I pray that the hardships we face draw us near to God. I pray that the tests we endure reveal our own hearts to us, and help us to see how incredibly wise it is to live dependant on the living God.
Through the tough stuff of life God prepares us to be more like Jesus. He prepares us as His Kingdom people to live on mission for Him.
May we embrace the God who loves us with an everlasting love, and may we cleave to Him in hardship and good times, in times of plenty and times of want. Amen.
