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Sabrina,
rejoice with everything within you when you face trials. When you are blessed
beyond measure, lift your heart in praise. When you are broken by the loss of
what you love, lift your hands and sing. Through all of these testings, God is
proving that your faith is steadfast. He is fulfilling His promise to shape you
in his strong hands, to change you into the image of His Son, to perfect you
day by day until one day you are fully glorified.
When
you are overwhelmed by your daily lack of wisdom to handle these trials, when
you don’t know how to respond to them, run to your Father God, Sabrina. Beg him
for wisdom. He is generously focused on you when you ask him for wisdom.
Nothing delights his heart more than pouring wisdom on his children—he will never
reproach you for your weakness. But don’t ask him one moment and then run to
other sources for wisdom the next. Choose to wait for God’s wisdom. Don’t look
to yourself; don’t listen to the world. In the moment you decide you no longer
need God’s wisdom – in the moment you decide to keep all your options open –
you are unstable, like a wave in the ocean driven back and forth without
purpose. Pray as the Psalmist, “Unite my heart to fear your name.” Beg God for
a pure heart and focused purpose.
When
God gives you extravagant gifts beyond what you deserve, rejoice; and when
every gift you loved is stripped away, rejoice—knowing this, that both fullness
and emptiness pass away. Like a flower withers under the scorching summer sun,
every moment of delight and every moment of disappointment will come and go.
Anyone who pursues those moments of delight is a fool, chasing after the wind.
Don’t be a fool, Sabrina. Remain steadfastly focused on God through every
delight and every tear, every life addition and every life subtraction. Let
your heart be constantly characterized by one love, and your life characterized
by one pursuit. Understand this: everlasting life only lies in one place: the love
of God. Everlasting life is only given to one person: the one who loves God. So
don’t be distracted, Sabrina.
Now,
don’t get me wrong: God does not lead you into times of trial to tempt you to
distraction. Don’t even allow yourself to think such a thing, Sabrina. You know
your God: he is too pure to be associated with temptation. He himself can never
be tempted, and he will most certainly never tempt you. No, when times of trial
come, admit that it is your own selfish heart that will try to lead you astray.
Your own idolatrous, adulterous heart will make an idol out of any gift from
God in a moment. And your own foolish and prideful heart will throw a temper
tantrum in the next moment when God takes away that gift. You know this is
true. So don’t listen to your heart, Sabrina. Don’t give your heart the time of
day. When you flirt with your desires, invite your lusts into your bedroom,
they will conceive sin in you. It’s inevitable. And sin, when it has developed,
will be born as death. There is no stopping it. Your own heart, your own lying
thoughts, will kill you, Sabrina.
But
when your own self will kill you, God desires nothing less than to make your
life more abundant. He is the farthest thing from your tempter. Rather, he is
your Father who delights to give you good and beautiful gifts, just because he
delights to see the smile on your face when you open them. Every trial he gives
you is one of these gifts, Sabrina. When he gives them to you, he anticipates
your remembrance that his purposes for your sanctification and his glory never
change. When you are blessed, when you
are broken, he anticipates the joyful anthem of praise that will erupt from
your lips. You know this is the kind of God he is, Sabrina. Don’t forget. He
saved you, purely because he wanted to, remember? He opened your ears and heart
to the truth because he wanted to set you apart as a beautiful recreation.
So
when trials come, Sabrina, remember the God who has given them to you. Close
your tempter mouth and quiet your lustful heart. Listen. Don’t erupt with anger
against God for this trial: anger will never produce what God wants to work in you
now. Put away the selfish responses you want to make—the contamination of
idolatry and the wickedness of rampant anger—and listen. Receive with meekness
the word God wants to implant into your heart through this trial. Don’t forget,
he is sanctifying you—saving you—through whatever is happening. Listen.
Listen,
and then obey. If you hear God’s words and choose not to obey them, choose not
to let him change you through this trial, you are just like someone who examines
herself closely in a mirror and sees faults, but then walks away, deliberately
choosing not to fix them. This person must either be highly arrogant, believing
that the world will be blessed to see her disheveled hair and snotty nose; or she
is pitifully deceived, hoping that perhaps no one will notice her smeared
makeup. Don’t be so arrogant, don’t be so naïve, Sabrina, as to walk away from
a trial thinking you are above change. Don’t be so deaf as to disregard the
words of your loving Father, or so blind as to ignore the faults he has
graciously pointed out. Act upon what you learn in a trial, grasping hold of
the freedom there is when God shapes you and molds you into the beautiful image
of Christ by his grace. When you boldly act upon what God has shown you, not
only hearing but doing, God will surely bless that action, that doing.
Sabrina,
if you think you are beautifully religious while you walk about with disheveled
pride, snotty blindness, and smeared arrogance, all you’ll have to back up your
claim is your own words. Everyone, especially God, will know you are a fake.
Your “beautiful religion” will in fact be utterly worthless, hideously ugly. This
is what you were before God intervened in your life: a fake. But he knows that
religion that is beautiful, pure, and without fault is always bursting with
action. This is what God is accomplishing in you, Sabrina! He is shaping in you
the kind of life that is beautiful enough to speak for itself. So close your
mouth, and live it! Walk humbly and mercifully with others. Meet needs when you
see them. Walk purely with your God. This is what real Christianity is,
Sabrina! As God shapes you to understand it, obey him! Live it boldly!
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