The Silk Purse in the Sow's Ear

[1]

Thursday, August 30, 2018

This letter is from James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.  I am writing to the “twelve tribes”—Jewish believers scattered abroad.  Greetings!  Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy.  For you know that 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 perfect and complete, needing nothing.  If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you.  He will not rebuke you for asking.  But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone.  Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind.  Such people should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.  Their loyalty is divided between God and the world, and they are unstable in everything they do.  James 1:1-8^(NLT)

The followers of Jesus were chased from Jerusalem; the church was in hiding.  Persecution had scattered the believers like water poured on a grease fire spreads it everywhere.  And, James, their praying pastor, told them to look at their displacement as an opportunity for great joy; you gotta love his optimism!

It’s just like James to give us the answer before he poses the question.  The reason the disciples’ trials and hardship were to be considered great joy isn’t that we are supposed to love getting clobbered for the faith, but that suffering any kind of humiliation grows our faithful endurance.  James was comparing their experience to what a fighter goes through in rigorous, determined, physical training, pushing the development of his stamina to the limit, so that when he enters the ring, his body is conditioned, strong and resilient, ready to prevail in the fight, whatever the enemy throws at him.

To tell you the truth I have never been partial to that kind of conditioning.  In high school I decided to try out for the football team.  That first day I never saw a football stadium, or even a football; there was only pushups, wind sprints and something the coach called up/downs.  It was a grueling 15 minutes of running in place until coach blew the whistle, and you were supposed to drop to the dust, landing on all fours.  But it wasn’t nap time; you had to spring to your feet and keep running to nowhere.  Up – down – up – down…up/downs!  It didn’t take too long before I wanted to go home!

But, for three weeks we conditioned our bodies.  Then we finally got to play a little football.  For me the emphasis there was on the word “little”.  I got clobbered (in practice, of all things) and wound up on the operating table with a ruptured spleen, bleeding internally.  After the operation the surgeon (bless that man) told my parents my young body’s muscle-tone was well-developed, and that conditioning I’d received in football helped control the bleeding, so I hadn’t needed a transfusion.  This turned out to be significant, because the nearest blood bank that had my type was in New Jersey.

The point – those wind sprints, pushups, and…heaven help me…up/downs contributed to the kind of endurance I would need to survive 11^th grade.

So, this is the great benefit of accepting life’s hardships and trials with great joy – God is blessing us with a growing, faithful endurance, which conditions followers of Jesus Christ for spiritual warfare.  It may not be the kind of fun, or easy ride you envisioned when you became a disciple, but the up/downs, and running for the sake of endurance build a faith that cannot divide your loyalty from Christ; and that is the whole point of what you need…not what you wanted.

For You Today

It may look like you’ve been handed a sow’s ear with what you’re going through…but God has a way of making a silk purse out of the strangest circumstances!

So…rejoice today…greatly!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day.

Go to VIDEO

---

[1] Title Image: Photo Courtesy of Pixabay.com