Introduction:
Gordon MacDonald, who is a well-known Christian speaker and writer tells this story from his days running track:
When I first ran track in prep school, my coach invited me to his home for dinner one night. After the meal, he pulled out a notebook with my name on the front cover. He turned to the back page, which bore the heading "June 1957"—three and a half years away.
"Gordon," he said. "These are the races I’m going to schedule you to run almost four years from now. Here are the times you will achieve."
McDonald says, “I looked at those times & thought: ‘Impossible!’ They were light years away from where I was at that moment as a runner.”
But then his Coach began turning back the pages of that book, page by page, showing the 42 months he had scheduled for workouts. These were the graduated, accelerated plans for my increasing skill on the track as the months and years would go by. He had a sense of direction and development when it came to my athletic growth. (Gordon McDonald, Promise Keepers "Go the Distance" conference, 8-11-00, from PreachingToday.com)
Did you know that God has a goal for you?
Maybe you’ve heard the phrase taken from a popular evangelistic tract, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”
But have you ever thought about what that plan may be?
I know whenever I thought and prayed about what that plan was, I was always trying to figure out what God wanted for me in terms of my vocation, or where I lived or my relationships
And when we pray for God to reveal His plan to us, that’s probably what most of us pray for:
“Lord, what college should I go to?”
“What should be my major?”
“Lord, should I marry this person?”
“Lord, did you REALLY want me to marry that person???”
Should I buy this house?
“Should I take this job?”
I spent years struggling with what I was supposed to do with my life.
I wanted so much to know what that “wonderful plan” was for my life.
I stumbled around in some jobs I really didn’t like a whole lot.
I prayed a lot – begging God to guide me.
It was during one of those times that someone I greatly respected, a man who was the leader of a ministry I volunteered for said something that just threw me off my feet.
We had been talking about God’s plan for us and guidance and that kind of thing.
And George summed up his knowledge on the subject by saying, in his Scottish brogue, “I don’t think God gives a rip what we do.”
It was as if someone punched me in the stomach.
“What do you mean, ‘God doesn’t give a rip what we do?’
“Here I am agonizing over what to do with my life and you’re telling me God doesn’t give a rip?”
Well, of course God DOES “give a rip” what we do with our lives – even George admitted that!
But his POINT was this:
God is less concerned with what we DO than with what we BECOME
God has a goal for us that is bigger than just “being saved.”
Like Gordon McDonald’s track coach, God has a plan for us
And that plan has less to do with what school we go to or what job we take or even who we marry.
God has a goal for us to be transformed from broken, sinful, hurting people, to healed, mature, whole people.
And God has a plan for how to get us there.
In some ways, it’s not that much different from the plan Gordon MacDonald’s track coach had for him.
In these verses we see the goal that God has for us, that we would be “mature and complete, lacking in nothing.”
But unlike MacDonald, maybe the goal seems more realistic than the path to get there:
“Consider it pure joy … when you encounter various trials…”
Doesn’t that sound absolutely crazy? How can we consider trials and problems “pure joy”?
Does God expect us to be the kind of people who say, “I just got hit by a bus! Praise the Lord!!
The word for “Consider” means “to make a decision after weighing the facts”
We need to use our heads to give us perspective instead of just allowing our emotions to rule how we think about things
For many of us, if something is comfortable and convenient for us, it’s good
If we’re having a picnic and it rains, it’s awful
But if our garden is dying for lack of water and it rains, it’s good
To “Consider it pure joy when we encounter various trials” means that we take a step back and look at our experiences – even our negative ones – and say, “God has used this to grow me up, to make me more like Jesus.
This difficult experience has made me more like Jesus
And for that I’m thankful.
A couple observations:
One: we don’t go looking for trouble!
It says, “Consider it pure joy when you ENCOUNTER various trials.”
that means, the kinds of things that come our way over which we have no control
It is not encouraging us to go out and do dumb things so that God can then use them to mature us.
The second observation is that James says, “when YOU encounter various trials.”
Sometimes Christians respond to the trials and the sufferings of others with a glib attitude.
Armed with verses like this one, we tell OTHERS about how THEY should rejoice in their troubles.
In so doing, we can be insensitive to their hurts and needs.
You don’t need to apply this verse to anybody else.
You need to apply it to YOU!
These verses are telling us the attitudes we need to take as a response to the everyday trials and difficulties we all experience.
Too often, our faith is something that is seen on Sunday mornings, but it’s invisible in the nitty gritty of our daily lives
If our faith doesn’t impact the every day realities of life, what good is it?
James talks about how the “Testing of our Faith” produces endurance. What are the things that test our faith?
It’s not whether we go to church on Sunday
It’s not whether we give generously or serve on a board
The things that test our faith are those things that cause our world to screech to a gut-wrenching halt
Eleven years ago I had one of those things happen.
It was just a phone call from my Mom on a Sunday afternoon
My Mom used to call me a lot on Sunday afternoons.
But as soon as I heard her voice, I knew this wasn’t one of those calls
This was something else.
This was something I never could have predicted
And at that moment my personal planet went spinning out of its neat little orbit.
My 37-year old sister had been found dead in her apartment
It’s amazing how something like that changes everything in an instant.
I fumbled to put some things together and head over to my parents’ house.
I can still picture sitting in the car at a traffic light and the thought popped into my head, “God is still good.”
My next thought was, “I guess I really believe this stuff.”
It seemed kind of funny that I would think that.
I had given my life to Christ almost 20 years before.
I had been a leader in my church and been involved in all kinds of ministry.
If you had asked me a day earlier if I believed God was good, I would’ve said, “Of course!” and not given it a second thought.
But that was before my faith was tested.
I’ll be honest and tell you there were a lot of days after that when I wasn’t so sure God was good.
There were a lot of tears and a lot of grief and a lot of asking “Why!?!?”
But in the end, by God’s grace, I was able to come back to the place where I could believe God was good – all the time.
I remember a conversation I had with my pastor at the time
He said something I’ll never forget.
At first it seemed too blunt, too hard
But because he had gone through a very similar experience, and because I knew him to be a very caring person, I was able to hear it.
He said, “Be sure that you learn as much from this experience as you can, because somebody died so you could go through it.”
What he did NOT mean was that God let my sister die so I could grow spiritually!!
What he meant was, “This is so painful, and so difficult – make sure that you let God use it for good in your life.”
What he meant was, “Don’t suffer for nothing. Let God use your suffering to transform you.”
I certainly don’t rejoice that my sister died prematurely, but I do rejoice that God used that tragedy to make me more like Jesus
I do rejoice that God could take something so devastating and use it to make me stronger, not weaker.
Do you see the difference?
I don’t rejoice FOR the tragedy, but I rejoice that God worked THROUGH the tragedy
And if it is OUR goal to achieve GOD’s Goal for us, then we can rejoice that the trials and sufferings of this life can be used to make us more like Jesus.
Many of you have been through those kinds of tragedies and those kinds of tests. It’s at those times we either hold on tighter to God, or we walk away altogether.
Thankfully, most of us don’t spend our lives in constant tragedy. But I don’t think James was only talking about the big things that happen in our lives.
If our faith doesn’t impact the every day realities of life, what good is it?
I used to have a little wooden plaque that said, “It’s not the mountains ahead that wear you down, it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.”
Friday I was having “one of those days.”
Now Friday is usually my day off, so it’s usually a pretty good, pretty relaxed day.
But on Friday I finally got word that my laptop computer, which has been dead since sometime before Christmas, was going to cost a lot more than I had hoped to get fixed
Not only that, but this is the THIRD time I’ve had the same problem in just over a year and they gave me no assurance that it wouldn’t happen again.
Then I was bringing a box of stuff back to my car, lost my grip and dropped it, flinging cassette tapes and boxes and CD’s and CD cases, along with a few other things, flying everywhere… in the dark.
When I was pulling something OUT of the car, I smacked my hand so hard I thought for a second I might’ve broken it.
Then I realized that I had left my dog’s leash at someone’s house, that was too far for me to go retrieve it and while we took our walk the next day, both of us were getting tangled around in her long tie-out lead I used instead
None of these things – or even 50 more things just like them – can compare with the loss of a loved one or finding out you have cancer!
Nothing that happened to me was really all that bad.
They were all just annoyances.
And then I thought about these verses I needed to preach on, and I started to laugh!
“Consider it pure joy … when you encounter various trials…”
I thought, “That’ll teach me! Don’t pray for patience and Don’t preach about rejoicing in trials!”
But do you see that I had a choice at that point?
I could’ve just gotten ornery and upset
And sometimes, I’m afraid, that’s what I do.
That’s what a lot of us do when things don’t go our way.
But James tells us to back up and rethink our situation and say, “Hey! These little things are a great way for me to show that I’m still trusting God!”
Christians aren’t to be people who are easily irritated, easily offended, easily angered.
But some of us are.
Some of us lose our tempers when the smallest thing goes out of our control
Maybe God is trying to remind us that we’re NOT in control
He’s God; you’re not
Some of us have a really hard time remembering that!
What does it say about our faith if we respond to the bumps and bruises of ordinary life in the same way that an unbeliever does?
They can rightfully say, “What good is it?
Does your faith affect the way you respond to the every day realities of life?
When things go haywire, whether it’s little things or big things, we need to be able to step back and say, “It’s OK. God is still in this. And I can not only ‘handle’ it, I can CHOOSE to have an attitude of rejoicing.”
This may be a set-back to MY agenda, but it is actually ACHIEVING God’s agenda.
And God’s agenda is to produce ENDURANCE
Endurance
“Patient endurance” = “It is the spirit that can bear things not simply with resignation but with blazing hope; it is not the spirit that sits statically enduring in one place, but the spirit that bears all things because it knows that these things are leading to a goal of glory.” (Linguistic & Exegetical Key to Greek NT, Heb 10:36, p. 541)
Conclusion
There’s another story Gordon McDonald tells about his days running track.
It was at the Pennsylvania Relays, a famous Eastern track meet, and his relay team was going to run in the championship race.
He says,
“I was the lead-off man and in the second lane. The man in the first lane held the 100-meter dash record for prep school runners at that time. He also held a record for arrogance & I soon learned why. When I got to the line and we were putting our starting blocks down, he said, ‘May the best man win. I’ll be waiting for you at the finish line.’
We went into the blocks. The gun sounded. He took off, and the other seven of us settled in behind him. We went around the first turn and down the back stretch. About 180 meters into the race, I suddenly saw the record holder in front of me, holding his side, bent over, and groaning as he jogged along. We all passed him like he was standing still, and because I’m such a gentleman, I waited for him at the finish line.
At the end of the race my coach took me aside and said, "I hope you’ve learned a lesson today. It makes little difference whether you hold the record for the 100-meter dash if the race is 400-meters long." (Gordon McDonald, Promise Keepers "Go the Distance" conference, 8-11-00, from PreachingToday.com)
James reminds us that the race is longer than we think it is. We are not simply trying to make it to the end of our earthly lives. Rather, this life is meant to prepare us for the next one. It is only as we allow God to test and refine and perfect our faith that we will make it to the end.
