Responding To Adversity
Art Debernarde
Riverview Evangelical Free Church
January 2006
Some years back I, like a lot of you I'm sure, read Bruce Wilkenson's The Prayer of Jabez. One of the statements that stuck with me from his book was that "the only way to live an undefeated life is to live looking to God."
I'm sure it comes as no great revelation that our lives as believers are punctuated by peaks and valleys. Occasionally we are blessed by incredible peaks, but other times we seem to sink deep into the valley.
But I believe these times are what really make us what we are. For it is during these times when we must realize that faith is not shelter against difficulties, but belief in the face of all contradictions. G. Campbell Morgan said "what we do in the crisis always depends on whether we see the difficulties in the light of God, or God in the shadow of the difficulties." He's absolutely right.
As a pilot, it was always my hope to provide my passengers with a safe passage, culminating with a great, smooth landing. God, however, while He does promise a safe landing, does not promise a smooth, calm passage. I know from experience that a good pilot is best tried in adverse conditions. Adversity introduces a man to himself. Adversity can either destroy or build up, depending on our chosen response. Adversities do not make a man frail; they show what sort of man he is. It is useful to remember that as Charles Spurgeon rightly observed, "As sure as ever God puts His children in the furnace, He will be in the furnace with them."
Do you believe that God often puts us in situations that are too much for us so that we will learn that no situation is too much for Him? I know I do. God could have kept Daniel out of the lions' den . . . He could have kept Paul and Silas out of jail... He could have kept the three Hebrews out of the fiery furnace. . . and as hard as this may be to grasp, He could have thwarted those 19 hijackers on September 11, 2001. But God has never promised to keep us out of hard places . . . what He has promised is to go with us through every hard place, and to bring us through victoriously.
God is trying to get a message through to you and me, and the message is: "Stop depending on inadequate human resources. Let ME handle the matter." There is no situation so chaotic that God cannot create something that is surpassingly good from that situation. He did it at the creation. He did it at the cross. He is doing it today. Can you say "Amen" to that?
Unfortunately, however, we frequently see these circumstances in a distorted way. In fact it often seems that firmly entrenched within every human being lies a most deceptive presupposition, namely, that circumstances and other people are responsible for our responses in life. And the longer we dwell on our misfortunes, no matter how horrific, the greater is their power to harm us.
We contradict the Lord to His face when we say: "It's too hard, it's too difficult; we cannot, we're only human; mere flesh and blood." Outrageous! We charge the God of all knowledge with a twofold ignorance; first, that He doesn't seem to know what He has made, and second, what He has commanded, as though, forgetting the human weakness of which He is Himself the author, He has imposed laws on us which we can't endure.
Let's not minimize adversity either. Pain is pain and sorrow is sorrow. Events can truly push the envelope. It hurts. It limits. It impoverishes. It isolates. It restrains. It works devastation deep within the personality. It circumscribes in a thousand different ways. There is nothing good about it. But the gifts God can give with it are the richest the human spirit can know. And the intensity of the pressure doesn't matter as much as its location. The question becomes, "does it come between you and God, or does it press you closer to him?"
Oswald Chambers wrote, "It is not true to say that God wants to teach us something in our trials. In every cloud He brings, God wants us to unlearn something. God's purpose in the cloud is to simplify our belief until our relationship to Him is exactly that of a child. God uses every cloud which comes in our physical life, in our moral or spiritual life, or in our circumstances, to bring us nearer to Him, until we come to the place where our Lord Jesus Christ lived, and we do not allow our hearts to be troubled."
As you respond to the trials that come your way, may you draw ever closer to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.