All Things Considered, Consider Christ
“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.” - C. S. Lewis
“Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. ”
I haven’t done a lot of writing lately, not because I don’t have anything to say or because I’m not thinking deeply about what this unprecedented pandemic is bringing to the surface in my life.
It’s just that every time I sit down to pen some thoughts, I sense that there is so much that has already been stated and so I don’t want to repeat what many others are already realizing.
For example, most of us are realizing what little control we ultimately have over the events in our lives. At one point, I had a whole lot to say about that and yet it seems irrelevant to me now. I think there is wisdom in sleeping on things, as long as it isn’t anger, to separate the incidental from the sacred.
The Truth is that on that Day, when every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord, all of our words and self-realizations will not keep us on our feet.
For a creative person, it’s almost like breathing for me to express my thoughts in some kind of way. But I sense a real pause lately in that creative process that at first scared me a little. It scared me, because I thought it was shallowness that left me without words, but instead there might be a certain kind of depth that silences the shallow things.
Another thing that I keep discovering over and over again in all of this is not to grasp at the illusion of self-sufficiency or self-help during difficult times.
I appreciate the way John Piper, founder and senior teacher of desiringgod.org expresses this idea. “God’s first great design in all our trouble is that we might let go of self-confidence. When we do that, there is a temporary sense of falling. But by faith in God’s mercy, we land, infinitely more secure, in the arms of our Father, who is utterly in control at the brink of life and death.”
There are very practical things that I can do on a daily basis that help me feel a little bit better, but those things can never offer a final solution to my suffering.
What I turn to in times of distress should be the same thing I turn to in times of joy and happiness. I lean into Christ as long as it’s called today. I lean into His Word that tells me what He has done, who I am and what will become of me.
Trials will visit every one of us and even now we are all experiencing the same storm. Although our particular situations within this storm differ greatly, for the Christian, all trials are an opportunity to evaluate our faith in Christ, not ourselves. Self-discovery is not the believers’ goal concerning trials.
We consider it joy, which is a choice and by no means an easy or natural response, to prove the purity of our faith before we face Christ Himself.
It is a gift to realize our true spiritual state, before we reach the threshold of Eternity.
Trials become refining fires that bring us to complete spiritual maturity, invoke deeper communion with God and others and cultivate trust in Christ in preparation for standing face to face with Him on that Day.
This is how we “count” it all joy.
It’s not optimism.
It’s not ignoring reality.
It’s not avoiding life.
I make a choice in this storm to consider Christ above all things.
There are no short cuts through pain. There is no fast track solution through suffering, even as the world claims to hold the answer and pass out its relief.
There IS supernatural patience available to weather the storm until its appointed time and I can ask God for His Wisdom as I stand on His promises. After which, I can look back and sincerely praise Him for His faithfulness and the way I unexpectedly benefited from it in the most impossible ways.
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