“For when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be strong in character and ready for anything.” - James 1:3-4
Strong in character and ready for anything. Paul adds that from perseverance, a first cousin of endurance, comes not only character, but hope. These are noble aspirations, the fruits of faithfulness we all long for.
Perhaps a little too much.
Particularly in recent times, our sense that God is testing us borders more on cynicism than the kind of growth opportunity James and Paul present. When things don’t go our way or our hearts fall victim to disappointment, we are quick now to rush and blame God.
If He were listening…or if He really loved us…or if He didn’t thrive on His own power and omnipotence, then He wouldn’t toy with us like this. He wouldn’t make us suffer rejection or disappointment or diversion if He understood the depth of the yearning in our heart. We conclude that He will, eventually, relent if only we survive this test.
If we continue to stand and show our dedication and our faithfulness, our unshakeable confidence that He is doing what we figure He is doing (or want Him to be doing), then He will reward our steady eyes with the prize.
That’s got to be what’s going on here; the object of our affections fits too perfectly with our plans or our hopes or our passions. This is a test; we know God is in the business of testing people. Ever read Job?
Job was the epitome of faithfulness and righteousness, and still God used him as a pawn in the most dramatic game of chicken ever played. He passed the test and withstood the devil’s taunting, then God rewarded him with blessings too numerous to count.
We want blessings too numerous to count! We want the rewards of the faithful! We’ll stand toe-to-toe with the devil as long as it takes to prove our righteousness.
Or so we say. But in all our fervor, it is often us who initiate the challenge. And it’s not against our enemy; it is against our God. We boldly approach the throne of God and dare Him to disappoint us.
Here’s our plan, we say as if He doesn’t already know. This – this opportunity, this place, this affection, this circumstance, this victory, this whatever – is obviously Your plan for me, God. I know this even though I haven’t bothered to ask You. It feels too right to be anything different. So I know You have this for me. It may not come today. It may not come tomorrow. But I promise, Lord, to hold onto this with all my heart until it comes to pass, that I can be an example to the world of faithfulness and Your goodness will show through me.
Right. Did you catch that little phrase in there that we often omit but might stop us dead in our tracks if we ever admitted it? “I haven’t bothered to ask You,” followed immediately by “it feels too right.” We whittle God down to a feeling in our heart, an emotion, and clutch onto that with every tendon in our bony little fingers.
Worse, sometimes we pray anyway and seek God’s will only to find “signs” that He’s telling us what we already wanted to hear. An innocuous phone call, falling star, rain cloud, or song on the radio becomes the messenger of the Lord, sent to tell us that He’s heard our prayer and is answering just exactly as we planned for ourselves.
It’s not that He doesn’t use these things to answer us; He certainly does. It’s also not that He doesn’t sometimes give us precisely the desires of our hearts; He does that, as well. It’s that it is all too easy to fall into the trap of seeing what we want to see, of seemingly twisting God’s arm into responding in a time or place He’s not ready to speak yet.
We stand, defiantly, on our own promises, refusing to move until God fulfills them. Come Hell or high water, nothing will shake our faith or cause our hearts to question.
It’s usually Hell.
It is little wonder, then, that more and more people – even those who fill the pews each Sunday – are growing disillusioned with God. He is not good, they say. He can’t even deliver what He promises. He is spiteful or mean, a codgery old man sitting up in the heavens somewhere moving us around the Earth like pawns on a chess board for His amusement.
Cynicism. We have created God in our image and challenged Him directly, dared Him to deny us, and now we’re disappointed that He is Who He says He is.
What it is that comes over us in that stance? Our feet are never more solid; our hearts never more resolved. Neither the harshest winds nor the loudest noise make us flinch. We could stand there forever holding onto hope as we wait for God to do what He never promised. This is the perfect faith that produces our endurance, that forms our character, and that builds our hope.
It just has nothing at all to do with God. He is the wind, the noise, the heat. He is the small speck of light behind our eyelids when we blink that causes us to shake our head when we open our eyes. Then, we gather our focus once more and stare right through Him, our posture unchanging and always challenging His goodness.
But He is good. A truly gracious God. We just blind ourselves to His “distraction,” which is often His gift, by refusing to pray honestly, to listen earnestly, to budge or to back down.
In this posture, we are only testing our own faith and building an endurance that leads us away from strong character and away from hope. As time passes, the elements weather our bodies, but still we stand as our candle all but dies. We thought there was a God. Not just a God, but a good God who loved us and cared for us and worked in all things for our good.
He’s only a figment of our imagination, we begin to think, and wonder if there might be truth to the cultural myth that each man is his own god. That if we truly wanted whatever we’ve been counting on faith for, we should have stalked it like a hungry lion instead of waiting patiently on the Lord. The Lord. Who is that, anyway?
Certainly not the good and gracious God we heard about in the pews.
Unless we adjust our posture and seek God being God, letting go of our insistence that He work as we would choose, this cynicism takes deep root in our hearts. It eats away at everything that once spurred us toward faithfulness, even our misguided or unhearing faithfulness.
Worse, by staying in our obstinate stance, we miss out on the absolutely wonderful things God is actually doing in our lives. We want this opportunity, and in our waiting, we miss out on a dozen others where God already opened the door and let fresh winds blow.
That breeze in our faces is just a temptation, we say and continue to stand defiant.
It is only the devil who wants to deny our greatness, we tell ourselves, and reject the voice of the One whose greatness we truly desire.
We pray and never hear an answer because that clatter is just the voice of the enemy trying to get us to back down; it is obvious to us this is where God wants us.
It is a battle of wills, a glorified staring contest where we pit the resilience of our heart against the wisdom and eternal patience of the Almighty. He rises to our challenge and answers our insistent stare.
But He never blinks.
He never wavers or takes His eyes off of us. He never taunts nor teases us into submission.
He doesn’t just stand there, either. He’s not about to succumb to our level and think for one minute that there is any good way to win this death match. No, He keeps moving and working and winding His way through our world. He works diligently, not necessarily to fulfill our desires but to create and propose alternatives.
Were we listening, we might hear His voice saying, “Look over here! An open window!”
Or “Do you hear that? Opportunity knocks!”
Or “Gosh, you look thirsty just standing there like that. Would you like a drink? A little sip? Well, I’ll just leave the water here until you’re ready for it.”
Instead, we hear only the voices in our head, the ones that say, “Hold on just a little longer. Surely, God is working on this for you. It would be easy to quit now, but that is part of the test. That’s part of faithfulness. Just a little longer, and your endurance will pay off. Your hope will be fulfilled!”
God’s tireless work is His goodness. It’s more than His wanting to break our stare for just a second, to entice us with the perfectly good and wonderful things He is offering. It’s more than His silent refusal to engage in this silly showdown.
His work provides us a way out, a way to exit our stance and take a new path and a new posture without admitting defeat. He knows the longer we stand there with no encouragement, we’re going to grow weary. We’re going to feel the ache and the exhaustion. And we’re going to get hungry.
The bounty He’s busy spreading before us, to the left and the right or even opposite where we thought we were heading, is our banquet. It is a blessing that softens the blow of defeat.
We’re not going to win, not against a God whose will is always good and never-changing. He knows that; so do we. It’s just a matter of time before we come to our senses and give up, and God wants to make sure that when we decide to back down from our challenge, from our defiance and our demands and our childish insistence that borders on a temper tantrum, that we find something of Him immediately.
He knows we’re likely to blame our loss on Him and abandon any pursuit of faith or character or hope, so He wants us to know, immediately, that He’s still there and still good and still working on our behalf. He wants us to turn around and see a plethora of paths and open doors available to us, still a choice of free will to choose, but all good.
Then, it is He who stands firm, steady as a rock, watching us mindfully while we decide.
It is His goodness that gives us a better answer when our hopes do not come to fruition, when our labor seems in vain, and we find a world waiting for our response.
I thought God was leading me to go this way, we say when people inquire about our change of heart. But then, this other opportunity popped up out of nowhere, and I knew that’s where He wanted me to go.
We blink and are blinded by His bounty. Bowing out of our mock competition, we take a new posture and pursue a new path. He has redeemed our endurance and built character, indeed, for we walk away neither defeated nor disheartened but more confident than ever that God is God and God is good.
“Human plans, no matter how wise or well advised, cannot stand against the Lord.” - Proverbs 21:30
