If You're Down With P(erseverance)...

My pastor used the word "perseverance" in his sermon a few weeks ago and I started singing this song in my head. I missed the following point he made, but in that time I began to think about the topic of this essay.

Since writing on Deuteronomy 8, I have put much thought into God's motives for trials. My initial response says God does everything to glorify Himself. Lately, I considered another motive for testing. God allows trial in our lives to produce endurance demonstrated through perseverance. According to my dictionary in MS Word, endurance is "the ability or power to bear prolonged exertion, pain, or hardship." But we can make endurance a passive action, like waiting out a storm. "Perseverance", on the other hand, describes "steady and continued action or belief, usually over a long period and especially despite difficulties or setbacks." It's not enough to sit there and take the pain. God wants us to seek Him, build His kingdom, and keep moving forward.

Trials come to our lives in many different forms. Some must wait for God to rescue them or fulfill a promise like Jonah and Joseph. Others experience loss of material possessions or loved ones like Moses and David. Then there are those who go through long periods of suffering like Job. I have talked in the past how nothing surprises God. According to John Piper, God is incapable of risk because He knows the outcome of every action.

When God put these men through their particular hardships, He did so with purpose. God put Jonah in danger to change his attitude and turn him in the right direction. Joseph may have been sold into slavery and put in prison on false charges, but scripture says he worked diligently and gained favor everywhere he went. God used all those circumstances to train him for the day he would oversee Egypt and save many lives. Moses lost all the material benefits of a prince but God used him to liberate His people. David had his own wilderness experience when Saul chased him into the desert. Cut off from his family and loved ones, David wrote many psalms rejoicing in God. The king needed to know who truly rules over men. Job's story stands as a sober reminder of God's goodness and supremacy. He suffered all kinds of loss and illness to learn these lessons before God restored everything. God could give these men responsibility because they learned to trust His character and promise. They looked to the truth above the circumstances.

Scripture talks about the benefits of perseverance. Starting with Deuteronomy 8:11-19, Moses tells the people, "Look, God needed to put you through all the hardships of the desert. You needed to learn how to depend on Him while enduring blinding heat, venomous snakes, and scorpions. He sustained you while you lived out there and you were able to see it because of your obvious need. Remember this! No matter where you live or how good your quality of life, God alone sustains you. Follow Him." The actual text tells the Israelites the trials came to do them good, even if they felt like hell sometimes. Moses explains how God used these lessons to keep them from proud and lukewarm hearts.

In Stern's translation, 1 Peter 1:5-7 speaks of another value in perseverance. "Meanwhile, through trusting, you are being protected by God's power for a deliverance ready to be revealed at the Last Time. Rejoice in this, even though for a little while you may have to experience grief in various trials. Even gold is tested for genuineness by fire. The purpose of these trials is so that your trust's genuineness, which is far more valuable than perishable gold, will be judged worthy of praise, glory and honor at the revealing of Jesus the Messiah." Stern uses the word "trust" where many translators use the word "faith". Trials test the genuineness of our faith. I have talked with some people in the church who wonder about the authenticity of their faith. How do they know that they know they are saved? According to Peter, it seems perseverance is a good indicator.

Whether to keep us from sin, prepare us for responsibility, or remind us of our faith's genuineness, we should listen to Peter, James, and Paul when they tell believers to rejoice in trials. Yes, the situations themselves might suck but we can thank God for the Holy Spirit working in our lives. Be encouraged, my friends. Jesus didn't only save us from sin, He gave us the regenerative power of the Holy Spirit to live through hardships in ways that glorify the Father and do us good.

In the Meantime, Write New Songs.

So, I realize some of you may have walked away from the last essay without much relief. In fact, my hope was to say, “Life is hard. We’re all frustrated. But God is good and He tells the truth. What can you do? Keep going.” Someone in agony just got a pat on the back. Waiting in trust can suck sometimes. I’m there with you. The question is, what do we do while we wait?

This is why I want to write an addition to Avoiding Ishmaels. Here’s the story. One day, soon after writing the endurance essay, I had a really great day of prayer. God and I talked for hours. When I got up that morning, on my break at work, hanging out at a coffee shop afterward, and in a prayer meeting at a friend’s house later that night. I loved it. I’m about to get super-vulnerable and let you in on part of this conversation. At one point, I asked Him, “Why has it been so hard to write songs lately?” By that time, I had only written four songs in the last year. For those of you who don’t know me well, this is unusual. Then a thought came to me, which is how the Holy Spirit often talks to me. “In the past, when nothing clicked, you would write something new and wait for the unfinished song to develop in its own time.”

If you don’t understand what that means, let me explain. On a few occasions in the past, I wrote a riff or a chorus that I liked, but everything I tried to put around it felt weak in comparison to the one good part. So I would write down or record the good part and move on to something else. Sometimes, it took years for that part to mature into a good song.

The thought in prayer continued, “For the last year, you have played the same riffs over and over until they develop. And so, you’ve only written four songs in the last year. These are good songs that please me, as I was pleased to give them to you. But you have ignored opportunities to discover other songs I wanted to give. This reflects your attitude spiritually. Imagine the riffs are promises. You were given several, and yet you keep pushing on the same handful, neglecting the others. When you find yourself waiting for some promises, pray and work on the others.”

He then reminded me of some specific promises and how I would in time have even bigger things to look forward to. “You focused so much on the old ones you missed asking about the new ones. Now, the promises I already gave are good and please me, but I want you to have more. So, with both songs and promises, ask for more.”

As I’ve thought of this over the past week and a half, I tried it out. I wrote a song. I had fun, recorded it, and sang it a few times to the house. It was easy. I felt like I learned how to write songs all over again and I’m excited to write more. Some of them will go on records, some will stay on Garageband. It doesn’t matter. I’m moving on to new songs while I wait for the others to grow. I have life to experience and a God to love and learn about. I have work to do.

This reminds me of the opening scene in the book of Acts. Jesus rises from the dead and presents Himself to people over the course of forty days. Beginning in Acts 1:4, “Gathering them together, He (Jesus) commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the Father had promised, ‘Which,’ He said, ‘you heard of from Me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.’”

Okay, so Jesus just made an enormous promise to his followers. Because of His death on the cross, he took away the sin separating them from God. The presence of God would soon come among them! But they were focused on another promise and kind of missed that. “So when they had come together, they were asking Him, saying, ‘Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?’” The riff they kept pushing came from the prophets that Messiah would establish the Kingdom of God on earth and rule over the world. They weren’t happy with Rome and wanted Jesus to hurry up and become king already.

“He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority; but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.’” Essentially, Jesus just told them, “Hey, don’t worry about that right now. We’ll get to that eventually. But I’m going to send the Holy Spirit to dwell in you so you can tell the world about me.” He was trying to tell them about another promise and give them work to do until He returns to set up His kingdom on earth.

They still didn’t get it. “And after He had said these things, He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight. And as they were gazing intently into the sky while He was going, behold, two men in white clothing stood beside them. They also said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into the sky? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in just the same way as you have watched Him go into heaven.’” Two men, who many believe were angels, told the disciples straight up. “Listen, you’ll just have to wait!” Only then did they go back to Jerusalem and wait for the other promise. And when it came, as you can read in Acts 2, it was awesome. They praised God and told everyone about Jesus.

Like the disciples, we’re still waiting for Jesus to return. I’m still waiting for a foxy, Bible-reading, Jesus-loving lady to date me. We’re all waiting for something that feels centuries away. But I don’t want to stand around staring at clouds while I could be interacting with the Holy Spirit and sharing the Gospel. This is the lesson I am learning. Don’t give up on the old promises. Endure. But in the meantime, write some new songs.

Encouraging Endurance - Or, avoiding Ishmaels.

A pastor I know in Michigan once told me that he sat in the front row of his own sermons. My weblog’s description says that I write about what God teaches me through prayer. Very often, I feel like I’m exposing my own life in Jesus rather than teaching others how to live. For example, Ribs, Patience, and Trust. So I’m going to get a little personal here.

I believe that God has made several promises for my life. I’ve written all of them down and regularly read through them as I pray. He has fulfilled some of them and this encourages me to keep asking for the others. Even so, I have yet to see the other promises fulfilled. Sometimes, as I wait, I become frustrated and even despair. “Will these ever happen?” When I talk about it with other believers, I feel silly because I know in my heart God is faithful. The knowledge of God’s faithfulness, though, doesn’t necessarily make me feel better.

Certainly, you all have experienced this feeling. It’s easy to forget we serve an infinite God who lives outside of time, who created time and has sovereign control over it. Spiritually, we can grow weary in trusting and waiting. In that weariness, I have looked for distractions. Then the distractions become idols as I seek comfort from the frustration. God told me those promises to give me hope for things to come and I believe this is why the writer of Hebrews encouraged believers to endure in their waiting. Hebrews 10:36, “For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised.” (NASB)

In The CJB (Complete Jewish Bible) translation, the word “trust” substitutes for the word “faith”. Trust implies that a person’s life demonstrates their belief in the truth. They have a confidence in what they know. Hebrews 11:1 describes, “Trusting is being confident of what we hope for, convinced about things we do not see.” The following verses describe how different men in the Old Testament trusted God’s promises and were called righteous. This lifestyle is so important, the writer says in verse 6, “And without trusting, it is impossible to be well pleasing to God, because whoever approaches him must trust that he does exist and that he becomes a Rewarder to those who seek him out.”

Of all the people mentioned in this passage, I like the one about Abraham best. Hebrews 11:11, “By trusting, he received potency to father a child, even when he was past the age for it, as was Sarah herself; because he regarded the One who had made the promise as trustworthy.” One could read this verse and think, “Yeah, Abraham. He must have really trusted God with the promise of a son.” But even Abraham and Sarah got tired of waiting at one point. In Genesis 16, Sarah pimps her Egyptian slave-girl out to her husband so they can have a child somehow, anyhow. Abraham doesn’t seem to put up much of a fight, which I find interesting.

So he has sex with his wife’s slave. Of course, this attempt to speed along God’s promise through their own wisdom turned ugly. Hagar, the slave-girl, becomes pregnant with a son named Ishmael. Only then does Sarah regret her actions. She complains to Abraham, who shrugs his shoulders and denies any responsibility in the matter. Sarah quickly comes to hate Hagar, treating her “so harshly that she ran away”. Craig Brown, pastor of City Church in East Nashville, noted how Exodus uses the same word for harsh treatment to describe Egypt’s cruel abuse of the Hebrew slaves. Sarah didn’t just say mean words and give cold looks. This wasn’t mere gossip with the other slaves to vilify Hagar. She beat the shit out of this poor woman, possibly to a point near death.

Looking at the story of Hagar this way, we might think differently of this righteous man of faith who’s trust stood as a testament in Hebrews 11. Instead of judging Abraham, though, we need to recognize this as a cautionary tale of what can happen when we fail to endure. It would do me well to remember what can happen when I try to take matters in my own hands because I’m frustrated and impatient.

When God appears to Abraham in chapter 17, he falls on his face in repentance. In no passage do I see where God punished Abraham for his sin (unless you consider adult circumcision punishment). What does God do? He repeats His promises. He encouraged Abraham to trust His promise and wait for the miracle.

In light of this, we can read that famous passage in Hebrews 12:1-4 with some new perspective. “So then, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses (referring to the people spoken of in chapter 11), let us, too, put aside every impediment – that is, the sin which easily hampers our forward movement – and keep running with endurance in the contest set before us, looking away to the Initiator and Completer of that trusting, Jesus – who in exchange for obtaining the joy set before him (or promised to Him), endured execution on a cross as a criminal, scorning the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Yes, think about him who endured such hostility against himself from sinners, so that you won’t grow tired or become despondent. You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in the contest against sin.”

Jesus, as our example, endured death on the cross because of God’s promises. He knew of the promises in the Old Testament where God would bring salvation through His Son, the Messiah. He repeatedly told His disciples that He had to suffer and die so God might fulfill these promises. During the beatings, mockery, unjust trials, shame, and crucifixion, Jesus could have called down angels and had them slaughter every offender. Yet He obediently endured and continued to trust the Father through it all.

Among the many things I believe God wants to give me, He has promised me a wife and children. A few years ago, I “grew tired and became despondent”. It pains me to say it, but I picked someone who I figured would say yes. We dated, got engaged, and I went on my merry way toward sinful misery. God, in His mercy, convicted me and I ended the relationship. Since then, I’ve continued on in trust, allowing Him to direct my steps toward a wife. But the path doesn’t always make sense and I must admit that I find myself again growing tired. I’m saying this partially to let you know of my own journey in trusting God. I’m also saying this because I need to sit in the front row of my own sermon. Abraham was 100 years old when God gave him Isaac as a son. I don’t think I’ll have to wait that long for God’s promise in my life, but shouldn’t I trust Him as if I did? Do I ever have a right to let doubt and weariness justify my own Ishmaels?

As an encouragement, I’ll end with James 1:2-4. “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” (NASB) God uses hard times like these because it produces endurance. It makes us stronger, more able to handle bigger promises and the challenges involved. James tells us that endurance through these struggles will come to our good. In them, we will lack nothing.