The Grace of Adversity

Whoever likes adversity, please raise your hand.

No takers? I thought so.

Let's face it no one in their right mind likes adversity. Each of us does want smooth sailing and 100% cooperative relationships. But the fact remains that we human beings live in an imperfect and fallen world (although that certainly wasn't the case in the beginning), with imperfect and fallen people. Not only are people the problem, but often times it's Nature in the forms of bad weather, earthquakes, pestilence, etc. We are oftentimes surrounded by and in adversity.

And then in our desire to overcome, we fight it. Sometimes we win, sometimes we don't. Adversity (in whatever its form) will remain.

I personally don't like adversity. Not only does adversity suck, but it also sucks the life out of me. Sleep is lost. Confidence is lost. Potential good relationships are lost. Sometimes even health and wealth are lost. Over the last five years, I have been pounded by wave after wave of adversity; business shortfalls, teen issues with my children, loss of property, even severe health. And yet, here I am standing. A little battered. A little bruised. But standing none the less.

All of us want to avoid adversity and when it comes to us Christians and our Faith, our expectation is that once we personally accept Jesus into our lives, then the remainder of life will be just hunky-dory. Well, that's not the case, is it? When we actually pay attention to God's Word, the Bible, and in particular the recorded Words of Jesus, we shouldn't be surprised. Adversity will come knocking at our individual doors more often than not.

Jesus put it this way: "In this life you will have trouble." John 16:33 I know that sounds pretty pessimistic and even dour, but Jesus is very realistic.

The great thing about Jesus is that He always knows how to care for His children. As awful as that statement sounds, Jesus does tell us two things: One, He prefaces the statement with His advice that He's telling us in advance of all of the troubles of life so that "we may have peace." Jesus knows that if we know that trouble or adversity is coming or will be around, we shouldn't be surprised and that we can actually have peace knowing that the Master of Universe has forewarned us. Now, I'm not saying that we should be necessarily be joyful in that adversity, James and Peter will take care of that later with explanations, but we shouldn't turn into basket cases fretting about that which will be out of our control.

The second thing that Jesus tells us follows that statement about trouble is this, and it's powerful: "But take heart! I have overcome the world." You can almost picture Him smiling a reassuring smile as He speaks to His disciples. Jesus is saying, "don't worry! Trust me. I have this all under control." But how do we do that? How do we, particularly as individuals, deal with adversity?

Dealing with adversity

As I have thought about and dealt with my own adversity over the years, I dealt with it in a sometimes helter-skelter manner. Adversity, especially extreme adversity, can sometimes escape our reason and intellect which allows our emotions to kick in, which oftentimes do nothing for the situation except to make it worse; substantially worse. The previous post or lesson walked through the adverse time of the Crucifixion, His burial and the overwhelmingly emotional time of his disciples and the joy of His redeeming Resurrection. Imagine if Jesus didn't rise from the dead. Consider the adversity of that happening. That would be adversity followed by complete emotional and mental destruction. God's not about that. He is about teaching us and edifying us as a good Father should do.

And so I've come up with the stages if you will of dealing with adversity. Acknowledge it. Accept it (the fact that there's probably nothing you can do to completely avoid it). Go through it. Learn the good from it. Acknowledge God's Hand in it (Glory back to God).

Before looking at these stages, pay attention to what two very smart and astute men have said concerning adversity. They both knew it well.

Albert Einstein faced adversity most of his life. His childhood teachers thought he was a dunce. Later in life, his theories sounded so fantastical that many thought Einstein was crazy. I love this quote! Einstein said, "Adversity introduces a man to himself." That is truly insightful. Adversity teaches us so much about who we are and how we react to stressful or life-threatening situations. We learn who (and hopefully Whose) we are. We are forced to come face to face and face the truth about our very selves.

The great 20th century writer, professor and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis said, "Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny." Adversity often serves to reset who we are. So many of us live the lie that we are somehow failures or are unimportant. Through adversity, we hopefully find the fullness of what God designed us for. History is replete with men and women who seemed to rise from squalor or obscurity and then did something to "change" the course of history. Are you willing to allow adversity to completely beat you down or will you rise?

One last thing... just because you go through an adverse time, doesn't necessarily mean that you will live. I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In Nazi Germany, Bonhoeffer fought for the truth of the Gospel and the Christian faith in the face of a worldview that absolutely hated him. This Nazi worldview did everything it could to shut him down including finally taking his life at a firing squad. Bonhoeffer died, but not in vain. His life of standing up for his faith and his resulting death helps to give many of us spines of steel rather than spaghetti and show us what is truly important: eternity!

Acknowledge your adversity.

Bonhoeffer saw this train coming a mile away. He knew that the Gospel of Jesus Christ was anathema to the Nazi worldview. He acknowledged it and moved on.

So many times we face adversity and we just want to flee. It's too hard. There may be great financial or relational cost to the particular adversity. We believe that it would be easier to somehow avoid it or hide from it. The thing is, we ultimately can do neither. We have to face it and trust that God will bring us through it.

The Apostle James teaches us the following right off the bat in his epistle:

² Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, ³ because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. ⁴ Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. ⁵ If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. ⁶ But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. ⁷ That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. ⁸ Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do. James 1:2-8.

Whenever I used to read that as a young Christian, I would think to myself, "you've got to be kidding!" Oh come on, you think that way too sometimes! But God is always after making and molding us to be complete in Him for His sake and glory, not ours or mine.

Last summer as I lay in a hospital bed after emergency diverticulitis surgery resulting in a temporary colostomy, my daughter gave me a copy of Bill O'Reilly's book "Killing Patton". I finally picked up and am enjoying not only an interesting read, but am learning how one of history's greatest military generals faced adversity. As Patton dealt with the adversity of the Battle of the Bulge which temporarily stymied the Allied forces from crossing over into Nazi Germany and bringing the European part of World War II to an end, we find him in adversity on many fronts.

Let's face it, Patton as brilliant as he was, got along with very few people, especially his superiors. Patton was brash and unconventional and maybe rightly so. He wanted to win! At one decisive point just before the Christmas of 1944, the Germany army is simply slaughtering Allied forces left and right as it "bulged" into the Netherlands taking the Allies by surprise. But Patton was smart, he acknowledged this major set back.

Patton actually (took me by surprise!) sets off to the one thing that many of us forget to do when struck with adversity. He holed himself up in a little church and prayed. In fact I believe his prayer is so important that he wrote it out. O'Reilly quotes Patton as praying, "Sir, this is Patton talking..." In our mind's eye we just picture this very brusque general speaking this way. He continues, "the past fourteen days have been straight hell..." How often do you or I pray that earnestly about a situation that we're right in the middle of? Speaking for myself until recently, not that often.

If you haven't acknowledged your adversity, do it! If you don't, you're not going to be able to begin to move through it.

Accept your adversity.

Like it or not, you better accept your current adversity. Why? Because there's probably nothing you can do about it anyway! You and I can moan and complain about all we want, but sometimes there are circumstances that are 100% out of our control. Period.

Almost two years ago, I was facing the loss of my commercial property. I was behind in property taxes and mortgage payments. The upkeep on the building was draining me financially due to the downturn in the general economy. I couldn't do it anymore. Rather face it square on, I put off the inevitable for months.

Finally a foreclosure sign was placed in front of the property that it would be sold at auction in 30 days. I waited again. I didn't seek wise council. I didn't ask God for His wisdom. I wanted all of this to just go away. Two weeks before the foreclosure sale, an acquaintance of mine made me call a local personal bankruptcy attorney. The attorney was great, and yet God was going to use this episode to better humble me.

The day before the foreclosure sale at three o'clock in the afternoon, I sat in my attorney's office and signed off on the paperwork which would postpone the sale. After I signed the papers, Gary (my attorney) just looked at me with a combination of sternness, truth and fact, plus some compassion. I will never forget his words as I hung my head: "Ron, you are bankrupt. You are destitute." I almost sat and sobbed. But then he reassuringly said to me, "now go home, get a little rest and get back to work because you have a lot of paperwork to do before the first hearing." Shaking my hand he said, "we're here to help you get through this."

We did. I did. Three and a half months later, the bankruptcy was discharged and I was able to restart my life and my business. As I looked back, God had actually been preparing so many things in advance of the bankruptcy. I won't go into the details, but suffice to say, well, God is very good.

Pray and then Go through the adversity.

In that order! As the Nike commercial puts it, "just do it". There's no point in procrastinating. Just deal with it. Granted, some are better at doing this than others, but all the same, just go through it. There's a little Christian quip that goes like this, "if God brought you to it, He'll bring you through it."

What does James admonish us to do? We are instructed to "ask God." Sounds simple enough, but how often do we actually do that? Hopefully as we mature in Christ the act of being in continual prayer will become second nature to us.

And then we are to "believe and not doubt". That's where my activity begins. Prayer is one thing but if I'm not going to act, the power of the prayer is let out like air from a balloon. Prayer gives us God's wisdom and strength so that we can persevere through the adversity. My own strength is feeble and almost always unwise whereas God's is mighty and full of wisdom. The prayer of a righteous man does avail much! It may not make things easier but we are enabled with His power and grace.

We see that over and over again in the Bible. Noah and the Flood. The Israelites at the Red Sea with the Egyptian army behind them. Jonah and his ministry to Niniveh. Elijah dealing with Ahab and Jezebel. Daniel in the lion's den. Even Jesus. Each of these men (and there were women too...) went through their appointed adverse times with God the Father leading the way. The important thing was that regardless of the situation, God lead each of them through to victory and His glory.

Learn the Good from your adversity.

Believe it or not, good can and will come from our adverse situations. Sometimes we have to look for it. While we're in the adversity, nothing looks good. All that we feel is the hammer coming down on our heads beating us up relentlessly, mercilessly.

As I went through the bankruptcy process, I learned so much about myself. A lot of it I already knew, but didn't want to deal with. One of the great "goods" is finally really looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing the real you. The liar that had been staring you in the face for so long isn't there anymore. You may weep, but if you're like me, the weight of the burden of the particular adversity you're going through is about to be lifted.

Another Biblical character that faced adversity (for most of his life) was Moses. Whether it was being "outed" in pharaoh's court and being forced to flee from all that he knew to live in relative poverty in the desert for 40 years without God was adversity. And then God called Moses through the burning bush. Through adversity God had been training and reading Moses for something beyond great; bringing out the Israelite people from the bondage of slavery to the Egyptian pharaoh would be not only monumental, but also a pivot point in history. Remember what C. S. Lewis said before about destiny.

Over the next 40 years of shepherding God's people, Moses would learn so many things. Leadership, delegation, provision, law. Most importantly, Moses would learn of the abject goodness of God as he would speak to Him face to face. Think about that for a moment and ponder this: would you be willing to go through a tremendous time of adversity if it meant learning who you were as God saw you?

I found that going through adversity brought a new or renewed sense of confidence. Confidence in that I could do all things through Christ Who gives me strength (Philippian 4:13). Again James says, " If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. ⁶ But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind." I believed in my heart of hearts and my mind of mind that God would not only NOT abandon me, but He Himself would see me through it. So often we don't know the mind of God or how he works.

Going back to our friend George Patton, he learned what was going on... when it was almost over. In Patton's first prayer, he prayed that God would change the weather to help the Allied forces. It was a miserable and cold and snowy and rainy December as the Battle of the Bulge progressed or regressed depending on you point of view. Vehicles and armaments were affected by the cold. Troops suffered from not only fatigue and cold, but hypothermia. The Allied forces (mostly American) holed up in the little town of Bastogne were literally surrounded by German forces; they were sitting ducks. It seemed hopeless. But when Patton's forces (through Col. Abrams) finally broke through and liberated Bastogne, he learned something: God doesn't work with our limited resources, He works with His Universal, omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent resources!

After the success of Bastogne, and the breaking of Nazi forces, Patton would again enter a church, kneel and pray. This is a part of what he prayed, "Sir, this is Patton again...Sir, it seems to me that You have been much better informed about the situation than I was." How true is that? Even in our own, seemingly insignificant adverse circumstances! Which leads us to the last stage of dealing with adversity.

Acknowledge God's Hand.

As I've gone through my times of adversity, I can honestly say that looking back, God was in complete control. Nothing was about to surprise Him. In everything that we mortals go through, we are often frustrated because we want to know the end from the beginning. We hate to be kept in the dark. When we allow feelings like that to creep in, we're not acknowledging the adversity; we're not accepting it; we're not learning from it. And worst of all, we're not acknowledging God's sovereignty in and over our lives.

Our trials have been handed to us for a particular reason. True, it may be for some temporal or earthly reason such as learning to be a steward of what God has given us or maybe learning how to love another in a way that God loves that person. There could be a myriad of reasons.

Ultimately, I believe there is only one reason: because God loves you and me and because the Father loves the Son, we are all in the conforming process. We are all being conformed into the image of Jesus for His glory and His honor, not mine or yours.

As I lay in ICU prior to being moved to my regular hospital room last summer (July 2015), I was a mess. I had a tube up my nose and down my throat for some kind of drainage, oxygen, a catheter..., a larger tube down my throat which prevented me from speaking or eating (hated that thing), and a bag hanging off of my belly for my excrement to go into. But in spite of all of that, I KNEW I was sitting smack dab in the center of God's loving hand. I never felt so loved and cared for in my entire life. I knew I wasn't alone. (My family was great by the way). I was in the presence of the One who created me to bring me through this time of adversity.

During those two weeks in the hospital, as incapacitated as I was, I finally experienced God and the loving arms of Jesus as never before. My sins had been forgiven. I was finally alive, and I don't think I'll ever be the same.

As an aside, my colostomy reversal surgery although successful in January of this year, didn't go quite as planned. I struggled. I even struggled with God. Throughout this time of adversity, God lovingly continued to take care of me and my family. My small group brothers ministered to me regularly with visits, phone calls and meals. These are my brothers in adversity who all serve a loving God and acknowledge Him for His bounty and loving kindness. In Him alone was I satisfied. I pray that I continue in that satisfaction.

John Piper said it well: "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him." How true. Ponder that from time to time.

Adversity dealt with.

Hopefully, you and I desire to be "satisfied". But we need to be satisfied in God alone. Thankfully (hopefully) we draw nearer to Him in times of adversity; in fact so near that the adversity doesn't matter. All that matters is my relationship with God through the finished work of Jesus Christ.

I want to end with Patton's closing remarks as he prayed acknowledging God and His wisdom. Although somewhat pithy, his words are both sincere and insightful. Whether George Patton was a true Christian or not is not up for debate in this post, the words and sentiments of the man are recorded again so that we may learn the majesty of God.

As O'Reilly quotes Patton, he prayed, "Sir, it seems to me that You have been much better informed about the situation than I was, because it was that awful weather which I cursed you so much which made it possible for the German army to commit suicide. That, Sir, was a brilliant military move, and I bow humbly to Your supreme genius."

Even Patton learned humility! Strange things happen when God is acknowledged for Who He is. Through my times of adversity, I am learning and hopefully acknowledging that it isn't about me and my comfort, it's about the Grace of God and His sovereignty over everything. And because He has purposefully chosen me to be a part of His most excellent of plans, I will participate. I will persevere. I will do it willingly.

James sums it up best in verse 12 of chapter 1 of why each of us is to persevere through our respective times of adversity, "Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him." To that I say "AMEN!"

Let's finish in prayer. Heavenly Father, provider of all that we need, thank you for the adversity that you allow to come into our lives. May we, may I, continually learn from this adversity as I learn to more fully trust in Your Grace and Mercy. Help me to overcome doubt and fear. Help me to better praise you, even when I may be incapacitated. You alone are God. You alone are perfecting us for a most glorious eternity! Thank you for loving us first. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Music video: Natalie Grant, "In Better Hands"

 

 

 "Killing Patton" by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard. Henry Holt & Company, publisher. 2014.