Joy in Suffering - What did James mean?

I remember when we had Chad Burdon a couple months ago, and he talked about the phrase of,

I wouldn't trade it for the world. Well, certainly, I bet I could go to any cancer survivor and say, hey, if you could not have cancer, would you want that?

I'm sure all of them would say, yeah, I would want to forego the months of chemo and the different therapies that I had to go through.

Again, we want to count it joy when we face trials because it bolsters our faith, not in ourselves and the way we handle them, but in God who sustains us, but we don't want to celebrate the trial itself in almost a masochistic sense.

John Calvin's Calvary in Romans 5, he made a statement that stunned me, and I sat back and literally had to contemplate for about an hour.

I think he's right, and he says this, all sorrows we endure contribute to our salvation and final good, which immediately people are up in arms about the concept of contribute.

But if you understand what James and Paul in Romans 5 are saying, that trials and struggles expose our sin and our frailty.

The confession, even when he was quoting chapter five, even in point three, it's in the providence of God, it says that he allows us to linger at time in ongoing sin so that we will have a greater dependence upon God.

What passage do they reference? They reference Romans 5. I think that's a fair example that when we head into a trial, we find ourselves in the midst of a trial, and he's not speaking of sinful trials.

I think there's spiritual trials and there's physical trials, and then there's sinful trials. Peter says, don't find yourself in, you're going to suffer, don't suffer for the sake of your own sin.

So let's be clear here. Not all trials are because you've done something sinful, but it's exposing the weakness of your flesh and the weakness of your heart.

This is how I understand them, that we are so easily enthralled by the comforts of this life and by the ease of life that when we face a trial, trials are testing our comfortability.

It's the only way, otherwise it wouldn't be a trial. Why else would you call it a trial? So when you're talking about a spiritual trial, you're probably being persecuted for your faith.

You're being attacked for standing up for your view of marriage or the Bible or sexuality.

And then when it comes to a physical trial where you have some kind of a sickness or pain or suffering, or for instance, coronavirus, what it's attacking is our comfortability of life.

And it reminds us that this life is not what brings us hope. This life is not the end of all means.

It reminds us that this place is broken. It's destroyed by sin.

And the only thing that makes it right is what is to come, which is our hope. This is why in Romans 5, he starts with, our hope is the faith in Jesus Christ.

And then he ends with the glorious hope to come. So I couldn't agree with John Calvin more when he says that the trials contribute in that it bolsters our faith, it strengthens it.

Of course, trials can't make you saved, but they definitely can strengthen you in the one who's saving you.

One way I might articulate that, John, in agreeing with you and agreeing with Calvin is if we think about ourselves, we've all gone through trials before.

If we've been in the faith for long at all, we've been through a period of trials and suffering.

And because we're still sitting here, people listening to this show and the three of us today still trusting

Christ, we can give this testimony. And this is a lot of the utility of trial,

I think. We go into something that's hard. And in particular right now, in thinking about the

COVID -19 pandemic, we're talking about something that has happened to us. This is not, like you're saying,

John, this is not something brought upon us by our own sin directly. This is, to use

Paul's language, in 2 Corinthians 12, it's a result of sin in terms of the curse.

This is an Ecclesiastes, Genesis 3 world kind of reality. And so to use the language of 2

Corinthians 12, Paul's thorn in the flesh, he'll talk about boasting all the more, not only in weaknesses and insults and persecutions, but even calamities.

I mean, the calamity word is really what we're going through right now. It's happening to us.

And if we could change it, we would. And it's hard. And so as we go into this, we're going to experience a season of time where we will suffer in various ways.

And the kind of left to ourselves reasonable conclusion is to doubt

God and to struggle and to not trust him and to question everything with respect to what he's revealed about himself and about his son and the way of redemption.

Well, when we make it through this trial, which we will by God's grace, on the other side, we will look back and we will see, man, if I could have left

Christ, I would have. If left to myself, I would have punted the faith. And here

I am today still trusting the Lord and casting my hope upon Christ. How in the world did that happen?

And we conclude my faith is not my own. God is the one who gave it to me.

God is the one who is sustaining it. God is the one who is even strengthening and confirming it in the midst of and through horrible circumstances, not apart from them.

And so it's a powerful testimony to the faithfulness of God to keep us in the faith.

And so I think that is a lot of the value of trial, is that it refines our faith in that sense.

And we realize all the more, like our confession says, chapter 11 .1, the very end of that first paragraph on justification, talking about faith, it says, and this faith is not their own, it is the gift of God.

We learn that all the more through trial. And it strengthens us and it bolsters our assurance.