While preparing the sermon for tomorrow, I had this realization: many of us have had the experience of following a GPS and, after numerous recalculations, thinking, "Maybe this thing has lost its mind." It tells us to turn down a road we've never seen, sends us away from the direction that we thought we should be going and then, for the next several miles or so we wondered whether or not we should trust it or just turn around.
We often treat God the same way.
We might trust that we will reach the destination that He has promised and yet we struggle to trust the road that He has chosen. We want to grow in Christ, but we also want nothing more than to allleviate the growing pains. That is to say, we want growth in Christ without discomfort. All to often we want to skip the hard part, maturity without correction, glory without suffering. We want Christ to lead us, but only if He takes us down the route that we have preapproved.
The Apostle Peter understood that struggle. Yes, Peter confessed that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God but when Christ explained that He would go to to Jerusalem to suffer and die, the apostle immediately objected right? Peter believed in Christ and yet he was fully unable to imagine that God's plan could possibly include a cross!
And more often than not, neither can we.
When life becomes hard, when it becomes painful, we immediately begin searching for an explanation don't we? Did we make a wrong decision? Has God stopped listening? Are we being punished? Now, sometimes it is true that suffering does come from our own foolish decisions or from our sin. And sometimes yes, we do need to repent. But difficult circumstances are not always evidence that we have wandered outside of the will of God. Sometimes, obedience to God leads to suffering.
The cross proves that.
To everyone who was watching, the journey to Calvary appeared to be the bitter defeat of Christ's mission. The Messiah was rejected by the very people He came to save, His followers were scattered and His body was entombed by a stranger. But yet, what appeared to be defeat was actually the Lord accomplishing redemption for His people. Sin was being atoned for, God's justice was satisfied and death, the greatest enemy of temporal man was being decisively defeated.
Now that does not mean that suffering is good in and of itself. Heartbreak will still hurt, betrayal is indeed still evil and death is still our enemy. Trusting God does not mean that we must smile through every tragedy or hard moment and it certainly does not make pain pleasant. Instead, it means believing that evil does not win, evil will never right the end of the story. Our God is mighty to save and He is able to redeem those painful moments and seasons to use them for purposes that we cannot see and certainly cannot understand.
Following Jesus Christ means surrendering more than just our sins. It means surrendering our desire to know the entire route before we move. Yes, we still pray for healing, we pray for deliverance and relief, that doesn't change. But we also pray "Thy will be done." In other words, "Lord, if You insist that I walk this path, give me the faith to walk down this road faithfully.
That's the kind of trust that we are called to have in our sovereign God. This isn't a passive fatalism that says "I can't do anything about it anyway." No, it is an act of obedience even when we can't flip to the last page and see if there's a happy ending. But what does this look like in our lives? We choose honesty over bitterness: yes, this hurts, but God I know You are with me. It means prayer instead of panic and faithfulness instead of looking for a temporary shortcut that we think is going to bring us some relief. Faith is walking down the road not because it makes sense but because we know that the One who leads us is good.
Indeed, we an only see the next turn ahead but the Lord knows the destination so when we cannot understand the road He is leading us down, we can still trust the Savior who walks ahead of us.