8. Hard Gaining: The Discipline of Endurance
Hard Gaining:
The Discipline of Endurance
When all kinds of trials and temptations crowd into your lives, my brothers, don’t resent them as intruders, but welcome them as friends! Realize that they come to test your faith and to produce in you the quality of endurance. But let the process go on until that endurance is fully developed, and you will find you have become men of mature character with the right sort of independence.
JAMES 1:2-4, PHILLIPS
Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons.
HEBREWS 12:7
Running the Race with Eyes Fixed on Jesus
Do you know the phrase “hard gaining”? I did not until my son took up bodybuilding and brought home one of the magazines that cater to this interest. Then I found that “hard gaining” is virtually a technical phrase in the bodybuilders’ world, covering all of the muscle-developing and chest-expanding routines that those desiring Samonic stature must buckle down to as means to the hoped-for effect—the impressive physique that will be the end product.
Following the routines is hardly fun, and it cannot be classified as no sweat, but I observe that it pays off. My son, who works in the prison system, is shorter than I am, but now he weighs more. Even the most casual observer can see that his extra bulk is mostly muscle. Through hard discipline (“no pain, no gain,” they say) he has gained; there are no two ways about that.
Christian maturity, which is holiness full-grown, is the promised end product of another hard-gaining discipline, namely endurance—both passive (patience) and active (perseverance). The New Testament uses two pairs of Greek words, each consisting of a noun and a related verb, to express this idea. The two pairs are virtually synonymous, though the verbal form of the one (hupomonē, hupomeno) gives the thought of standing firm under pressure while the verbal form of the other (makrothumia, makrothumeo) suggests rather staying cool under provocation and not quickly cracking. In fact, the two ideas shade into each other, and the habit of endurance calls for both. The colloquial English word for endurance is “stickability.” Its North American counterpart is “stick-to-it-iveness.” The notion is summed up by the motto of the first Christian institution in which I taught: “Be right and persist.”
The four Greek words occur all told over seventy times, for endurance is a major New Testament theme. And patience (the passive mode of endurance, whereby pain, grief, suffering, and disappointment are handled without inner collapse) is named as one facet, if we may so speak, of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23). This means that it is not a natural endowment but a supernatural gift, a grace of character that God imparts to those whom He is transforming into the likeness of Christ.
To say this is not, however, to contradict our statement above—that endurance is wrought in us through a discipline of hard gaining. Each aspect of the fruit of the Spirit that Paul mentions is, in fact, a matter of divine command, as well as of divine gift. Each is a habit of reaction that is most strikingly seen in situations where, humanly speaking, a different reaction would have been expected. Thus, love shines brightest when exercised for Jesus’ sake toward the unlovely and seemingly unlovable; joy, when we rejoice in our salvation and our Savior even though sad things surround us; peace, when, sure of God’s sovereign providence, we stay calm instead of panicking or getting frazzled.
In the same way, patient endurance is most apparent when we stand steady under pain and pressure instead of cutting and running, or crumpling and collapsing. But hanging tough in this way is a habit that takes some learning. The hardness of the gaining that produces Christian character must not be minimized: to endure Christianly (which means, in fruit-of-the-Spirit terms, lovingly, joyfully, peacefully, kindly, without loss of goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control) is no casual agenda. Many of us have hardly begun to tackle it as yet. Integral to our holiness, our maturity and our Christlikeness, however, is this habit of enduring. Forming the habit, and making sure we never lose it, is a necessary discipline for those who are Christ’s.
The letter to the Hebrews is evidently addressed to a Jewish Christian church that was undergoing ill-treatment from fellow Jews who resented its Christian faith. The believers were thinking that a return to official Judaism might be a smart move, losing them nothing and gaining them an end to persecution. The letter was written to urge them to stand firm in their Christianity. To make his point, the writer expounds systematically and in detail the way in which the Old Testament order of grace—such as it was, under the Mosaic version of God’s covenant—has been superseded and cancelled through the high priestly mediation and atoning death of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. His argument thus demonstrates that if they relapsed into the Judaism from which they came, they would gain nothing of significance, and lose everything that mattered, since they would forfeit their salvation and expose themselves to horrific judgment for their unfaithfulness. So they must at all costs stand firm.
Hebrews is the classic New Testament treatment of endurance, and the weightiest of its many weighty words on the subject is as follows, at the opening of chapter 12:
Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses [i.e., the Old Testament heroes of faith described in chapter 11, all of whom grasped the rightness and worthwhileness of standing firm], let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles [clearly, the desire for ease that was tempting them to apostasy], and let us run with perseverance [hupomonē] the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured [hupomeno] the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured [hupomeno] such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart (Heb. 12:1-3).
From this passage two truths about endurance jump out at us.
1. The Life of Christian Endurance Is Like a Long-distance Race The race picture, here as elsewhere in the New Testament (see 1 Cor. 9:24-27; Gal. 5:7; Phil. 2:16; 2 Tim. 4:7), is telling us two things: first, that perseverance is the only path to the prize of final glory and, second, that what perseverance requires is a sustained exertion of concentrated effort day in and day out—a single-minded, whole-hearted, self-denying, flat-out commitment to praising and pleasing the Father through the Son as long as life lasts. As successful competitors in cross-countries, marathons, and triathlons pace themselves into a winning rhythm, so it is meant to be with Christians. As some athletes were, as we say, born to run, so all who are born again are called to run, in the sense of putting all their energy into steady godliness as their life strategy. Keeping up the winning rhythm in the Christian life, as in the Boston Marathon, is constantly demanding and sometimes agonizing. But the very meaning of perseverance and patient endurance is that you do it anyway, because you are God’s child running on what, in the profoundest sense, is for you the home stretch.
This sustained inward effort, raised to the limit of what you can do with the brains, gifts and energy God has given you, is one central aspect of Christian holiness, one without which a person’s supposed holiness would degenerate into self-indulgent softness. But true holiness is neither self-indulgent nor soft. It is tough. It is virile. It has backbone and guts, and a face set like flint. It is fueled by a heart of joy as the winning post appears ahead. Real Jesus-likeness, as the writer points out, means this—nothing less—and real holiness means real Jesus-likeness, as we have said before.
2. The Life of Christian Endurance Is Lived by Fixing Our Eyes on Jesus “Fixing our eyes” is a good translation. The Greek word implies that one looks away from everything else in order to concentrate on one’s object of attention. The imperative need to do this in relation to Jesus is central to what the text tells us. Christians are surrounded, sometimes almost deafened, by the siren songs of those who want them to stop being awkward customers who behave Christianly and become worldly wimps who only do what those around them are already doing. Christians must learn to disregard these distracting noises. We cannot follow Christ in holiness unless we are willing to stand out from the crowd and swim against the stream.
The secret of endurance, says the writer, is to concentrate on Jesus Himself: “look to” Him, as the older translations put it; “gaze steadily at Him” is the thought that is being expressed. What the letter has said already gives the phrase its meaning. To start with, we are to gaze at Jesus as our model and standard of godliness. “Consider him who endured such opposition” (v. 3), who “learned obedience from what he suffered” (5:8)—who was, and is, “faithful to the one who appointed him . . . as a son over God’s house” (3:2,6); who “has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin” (4:15); who “suffered when he was tempted” (2:18). He is the great exemplar of saying “no” to sin at all costs, even at the cost of life itself. His example is there for us to follow (cf. 12:4).
The most vital truth for the life of holy endurance is not, however, that Jesus is our standard, momentous as that truth is. The most vital truth is, rather, that Jesus is our sustainer, our source of strength to action, our sovereign grace giver (see 2:18; 4:16), “the author and perfecter of our faith” (v. 2). As the writer’s just-completed tour through the Old Testament heroes’ gallery, filling chapter 11, has shown, faith for Him (“being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see,” as he defines it in 11:1) is a compound of knowing, trusting, hoping, and stubbornly persisting in trustful hope against all odds. Faith can do this, the writer implies throughout, because the One who has graciously brought us to faith, and whom we now trust, helps us to do it. “God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you’ [Deut. 31:6-7]. So we say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper . . .’ [Ps. 118:6],” (13:5-6). “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (4:16).
This confident, expectant approach is faith in action. It is precisely the glorified Lord Jesus, who by His Word and Spirit brought our faith into being and keeps it in being (that is the meaning of “author and perfecter”), who now helps us to stand steady as we gaze on Him and cling to Him by means of our focused, intentional, heartfelt prayer. It is often said that “help!” is the best prayer anyone ever makes. When directed to the Lord Jesus, it is certainly the most effective. And that last statement (be it said) remains as true for us now as ever it was for anyone, since, as the writer goes on to say, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (13:8).
Two further truths about Christian endurance now become plain. First, the fact that Jesus is our model shows that the resolute perseverance to which we are called is not the practice of stoicism. Our word, “stoicism,” refers to the moral ideal of the Stoics, an influential school of Greek philosophers in New Testament times. The Stoic ideal was self-sufficiency and the stiff upper lip. Stoicism saw it as beneath human dignity to give way to feelings of sorrow, pain, grief, regret, or any kind of hurt. In any rough situation, said the Stoics, proper pride should lead you to grin and bear it, and not let it get you down. Turn your mind inward and bite the bullet. Draw on the resources of your humanity to take life as it comes and to keep yourself from lapsing into tears, complaints, moans, groans, or any other expressions of weakness. To show distress is shameful and contemptible. Big boys must learn not to cry. If, however, you regularly act as if you did not feel distress, you will progressively become the sort of person who does not feel it. That will be an aspect of virtue as well as an achieving of strength.
Certainly, there is a sort of heroism in this ideal. But it is the perverse heroism of self-sufficient, self-glorifying pride, the sick heroism of Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost. And it is at the opposite extreme from the obedient, dependent heroism of Jesus, the perfect man, who “offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and . . . was heard because of his reverent submission” (5:7). Yet He ended His prayer facing the fact that He was not to be saved from death and accepting that fact as the good will of His Father. (The reference is to Gethsemane.) Accordingly, strengthened through His prayer, Jesus walked straight into the jaws of death, and “learned obedience”—that is, learned both the practice and the cost of it—“from what he suffered” (5:8). He was shamed, and scourged, and He died on the cross, in an agony that felt like agony every moment until the ordeal was over.
Holy endurance of this Christlike sort is an expression, not of pride, but of humility; not of defiant self-reliance, but of ready obedience; not of tight-lipped fatalism in a bleak, uncaring universe, but of resolute, though often pained and aching, submission to a loving Lord, of whom it has been truly said, “Christ leads me through no darker rooms/Than he went through before.” Our crucified Savior’s promise of “grace to help us in our time of need” (4:16) stands forever. How thankful we should be for that!
Second, the fact that Jesus is our model in holy endurance shows that the channel through which power to endure flows, subjectively speaking, is hope, which as we saw is faith’s forward look (11:1). Reviewing the appalling and glorious twenty-four hours from the upper room through Gethsemane and the show trials to the degradation and torment of Golgotha, the writer proclaims that Jesus “for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame,” after which, He triumphantly rose and ascended, sitting down (as executive ruler of everything) “at the right hand of the throne of God” (v. 2). What we are being told here is that Jesus was sustained by hope. His sure and certain hope of glory led Him to the cross, and through the cross, to the triumph beyond.
We too, as the writer has already said, are to be upheld by our hope, the sure and certain hope of glory promised to us in the gospel—the glory to which a life of faithful endurance is guaranteed to lead us. “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure” (6:19). Anchored ships stay steady. Anchored Christians do the same. And the anchor that can and does hold us steady is the hope that is ours in Christ.
Endurance Inspired by Hope
Here we touch on a truth on which modern theology dwells much. God made us hoping creatures, creatures who live very much in their own future, creatures whose nature it is to look forward, and to get excited about good things that we foresee, and to draw joy and strength to cope with the present from our expectations of future fulfillment and delight. Life is always richer when you have something to look forward to. We say, “While there’s life, there’s hope.” But the deeper truth is that while there is hope, there is life, because in the absence of anything exciting to look forward to, existence itself becomes a burden and life no longer feels worth living.
One of the saddest things today is the number of elderly people who, not being believers, have nothing to look forward to. Their life is fading away. Their bodies are getting feeble and breaking down. They cannot do what they used to do, and will never be able to do it again. They feel they are moving deeper and deeper into a dark cave, with the darkness thickening around them, and no light, or way out, for them at the end. They find living without hope to be an unrelieved burden. They get bitter in heart, and sunk in self-pity and nostalgia. If they become (as, alas, they sometimes do) a misery to others, it is because they first became in this way a misery to themselves. Hopelessness wastes the spirit.
I remember inquiring of someone who had recently visited my one-time headmaster, a brilliant scholar then aged ninety-one, how the old man was. “Terribly gloomy,” was the reply; “I asked him what he was doing these days, and all he would say was, ‘Waiting for the end.’ ” As I knew, he had rejected Christianity in his youth and embraced a sort of Buddhism. This was the result. To be without hope is a tragic thing, the more so because it is needless. God never intended humankind to live without hope, and He has, in fact, given Christians the most magnificent hope that ever was.
The New Testament presents this hope in various ways, but the basic assertion is that which breaks surface when Paul announces himself an apostle by the command “of Christ Jesus, our hope” (1 Tim. 1:1), and when he identifies the “glorious riches” of the “mystery” (his gospel message) as “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). Jesus Christ Himself, to whom we who believe are united even now, is the Christian’s hope. Our union with Him is not an absorbing and abolishing of our personhood, like the union with the divine that Hinduism envisages (escape from pain, no doubt, but no joy otherwise). It is, rather, a love-relationship analogous to that of spouses, whose love for each other, and union in that love, makes each one more alive and more joyful than before. Yes, Christ Himself is our hope. Each of us is traveling along a path that He has appointed for us to an eternity of joy in which He will be the center, the focus, and the source of our endless delight.
This is the “living hope” for which Peter gives praise in 1 Peter 1:3, the “grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed” (v. 13). It generates present joy in anticipation and present patience under pressure. Paul scores a beautiful verbal bull’s-eye when, writing to the Thessalonians, he celebrates “your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess. 1:3, emphasis added). This trio of responsive energies, or should I say, this threefoldness of energetic response, should be visible in every Christian’s life: faith, love, hope; work, exertion, endurance—all together. (What God has joined, let not man separate!) This is Christlike living. This is holiness in the round.
At the end of 1 Thessalonians, Paul, having earlier declared: “It is God’s will that you should be sanctified” (4:3), prays: “May God himself . . . sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:23). He means, let it be faith, love, hope, work, exertion, endurance—all to the very end.
His form of words confirms for us three truths that should now be evident to us. First, it is always right for Christians to focus on their future hope, never mind how much mockery they incur for looking beyond this world to “pie in the sky when you die.” Second, it is always right for Christians to center their hoping on Jesus’ promised return (which will certainly occur, though we cannot now date it or imagine it), never mind how satirically the world may deride our expectation. Third, we must always be ready for Christ’s appearing, which means that we must always be actively cooperating with God’s work of sanctifying us and actively resisting all persuasions and pressures to use our energy doing something else.
All of this, too, belongs to holiness in the round: hope and holiness go together. “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure” (1 John 3:2-3). Christians who are not pursuing holiness are suspect with regard to their hope. Pastorally the question of what they are hoping for may well be the best entry-point to help them to a better mind regarding their way of life. Hope and holiness truly form a pair.
Modern Unreality About Suffering
Christian endurance, as we have seen, means living lovingly, joyfully, peacefully, and patiently under conditions that we wish were different There is an umbrella word that we use to cover the countless variety of situations that have this character, namely the word suffering. Suffering is in the mind of the sufferer, and may conveniently be defined as getting what you do not want while wanting what you do not get. This definition covers all forms of loss, hurt, pain, grief, and weakness—all experiences of rejection, injustice, disappointment, discouragement, frustration, and being the butt of others’ hatred, ridicule, cruelty, callousness, anger, and ill-treatment—plus all exposure to foul, sickening, and nightmarish things that make you want to scream, run, or even die. Suffering in some shape or form is everyone’s lot from earliest days, though some know far more of it than others. I shall try to be explicit now about how suffering and holiness relate to each other.
How much credibility can, at this point, attach to the words of one who has lived so comfortable and straightforward a life, with such good health and so many good friends, as I have, I do not know. Suffering is one of the many things I feel I know very little about. But here anyway are the truths to which I hope to hold, with God’s help, through whatever sufferings—trivial discomforts or major distresses—my “golden years,” as old age is now called, may bring me.1 They are the truths about suffering that every Christian needs, and none of us dare forget.
First, I remind myself that ours is not a good time for any sort of realism about suffering—indeed, any sort of realism about God,2 about Christianity, about virtue, about relationships, about death and dying, or about anything else except matters of technology. In our Western world fantastic technical skills are wedded to an extreme emotional childishness and immaturity, which bogs us all down deeper in sin’s legacy of self-centeredness, self-absorption, and self-pity than any generation has ever sunk since Christianity entered the world.
Moreover, this is a post-Christian age intellectually, in which little sense of God’s greatness and holiness remains, while unworthy fancies concerning Him abound. We think of Him as everyone’s heavenly grandfather, there to lavish gifts upon us and enjoy us the way we are. In the absence of any sense of the sinfulness of our sins, we expect VIP treatment from Him all the time. It is our everyday habit to manipulate the idea of equality or fairness to ensure that we get as much of what we want as the next person does. We cherish a sense of cosmic unfairness whenever one person suffers as others do not—especially if we are that person. Sacrifice for the good of others—parents for children, husbands and wives for each other, business managers for their employees and shareholders, political leaders for the community they claim to serve—is almost unheard of nowadays. Society has largely become a jungle in which we are all out hunting for pleasure, profit, and power, and are happy to shoot others if that is the way to get what we want.
Meantime, as compared with all Christians of up to about a generation ago, we have shockingly little sense of the reality, pervasiveness, shame, and guilt of sin. We cherish shockingly strong illusions about having a right to expect from God health, wealth, ease, excitement, and sexual gratification. We are shockingly unaware that suffering Christianly is an integral aspect of biblical holiness, and a regular part of business as usual for the believer.
When I seek sanity about suffering, I am heavily handicapped by these cultural crosscurrents. They infect the air I breathe, and work in my spiritual system as a potent low-level poison. They are certainly part of the reason why I find it so hard to control my thoughts and feelings, and experience so much childish fury, when minor discomforts and wrist slappings come my way.
Suffering Must Be Expected
Second, I remind myself that suffering as defined (getting what one does not want while wanting what one does not get) is specified in Scripture as part of every Christian’s calling, and therefore of mine as much as of anyone else’s. (Authors who write about life are not therefore excused from the task of actually living it!) Suffering must be expected, and even valued, by all believers without exception.
God does not shield Christians from the world’s ill will. Just by living as they do, finding their dignity and delight in pleasing God and dissociating themselves from the self-serving rat race which the devotees of pleasure, profit, and power spend their whole life running, Christians condemn the world (see Eph. 5:8-14; Heb. 11:7). The world, stung, retaliates with anti-Christian anger. “The world cannot hate you,” Jesus told His unbelieving siblings, “but it hates me because I testify that what it does is evil” (John 7:7). So to His disciples He says: “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you . . . but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you” (John 15:18-19; see 1 Pet. 4:4; 1 John 3:13). Whether the world’s hostility is casual or focused, whether it is contemptuous and cool or flaming and ferocious, whether it is expressed in official persecution or informal cold-shouldering and social ostracism, it is always there as a more or less resentful reaction to people who—because of their prior loyalty—decline, albeit peacefully, to fit into the conventions, lifestyle, and value system that are felt in some way to hold the community together.
“For example,” writes Thomas Schmidt, “a businessman is attempting to follow Jesus in the way he conducts himself at work. His superiors ask him to falsify data for the sake of a client. He is cajoled, harassed, and finally insulted, but he refuses. . . . He accepts abuse in quiet confidence that he answers to Someone much higher on the Organizational Chart. The result? Admiration? Remorse on the part of his superiors, a new moral climate in the office? Hardly. Instead, he is passed over for promotion for not being a ‘team player.’ ”3 Ideologically based persecution may not overtake us as it overtook Christians in the first four centuries and as it has overtaken so many Third World and Iron Curtain Christians in our own time, but the kind of thing Schmidt describes happens in the West every day. “Everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted,” says Paul (2 Tim. 3:12). This is one of the forms that persecution takes.
Nor is it only the secular world that sticks a knife into the Christian’s ribs. It is startling to see how malice and arrogance within the Church conspire to make Christians suffer. People who know they are called to live in love with their neighbor, doubly so when he or she is a fellow believer, make exceptions of those with whom they disagree. Seeing themselves as fighting the Lord’s battle for truth and wisdom, they display their dislike of untruth and unwisdom by personal attacks on those whose ideas seem to them untrue and unwise. “Even my close friend, whom I trusted, he who shared my bread, has lifted up his heel against me,” complains the psalmist (Ps. 41:9), and his experience was far from unique. In May 1991, I read the following news item:
LONDON—The new Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, faced an extraordinary attack Sunday from a priest who called in a newspaper article for the clergy to sideline him. Headlined “Deliver us, Lord, from this man,” the article was printed opposite the editorial page in The Sunday Telegraph. The right-wing newspaper said it was “necessarily anonymous.” The national church of England . . . was in danger, the article said, and the church would be well advised “to marginalize the archbishop before he marginalizes the rest of us.” Carey, 55, is on the evangelical wing of the Church of England, mother church of the world’s 70 million Anglicans. He has vowed to try to revive the church, steadily losing members, with a decade of evangelism (Chicago Tribune Wire Service).
Thus was George Carey—a Bible-believing, Christ-loving, charismatic activist—publicly stabbed in the back four weeks after his installation in archiepiscopal office. The secular world, one feels, could scarcely be more brutal.
But this is a pattern of things that recurs again and again in the Church. Having myself known what it is to be the object of a vendetta mounted by fellow Anglicans, I felt for Dr. Carey, but I was not really surprised by the assault itself. Invoking the Lord’s support for an attack on the Lord’s servant is a frequent form of perversity that goes back to Caiaphas at least. And (my present point) it causes pain, which those attacked have to learn to endure.
Nor does God shield His children from personal traumas and troubles: losses and crosses, as the Puritans used to call them. On the contrary! In this fallen world, where the entry of sin has put everything out of joint, Jesus the Redeemer experienced trouble—an uncomprehending family, a hostile civil authority, friends who failed Him—and the redeemed who follow Him now find themselves in the same boat. Christians, like Jesus, get betrayed and victimized, as we have seen already. Christians get swindled and forced into bankruptcy, like others. Christians have family troubles, as others do. All seems well, then suddenly someone has cancer, someone is jailed, someone has become permanently and agonizingly dependent, someone who should not be pregnant is pregnant, someone has AIDS, one’s child dies, one’s spouse walks out on one. That is just a sample list of things that happen. One is left feeling that the roof has fallen in, and one is utterly alone and ruined, much as Job must have felt on his ash-heap. (And Christians, too, find themselves, like Job, having to endure at such times the censures of self-righteous know-alls, which make the pain worse.)
Other burrs under our saddle come, not from our relational involvements, but from our lack of a healthy body or a healthy mind. There are, for instance, Christians who battle throughout their adult lives with homosexual cravings, which they know it is wrong to indulge, but which nag incessantly. The three great lies of our culture are that self-gratification is life’s true goal—that it is very bad for you to thwart your own strong desires—and that any behavior you feel comfortable with is all right. Christian homosexuals who reject these lies feel as isolated from other gays who have swallowed them as they do from even celibate heterosexuals, and find their sense of isolation permanently painful. In the same way, constant struggling with any other obsessive urge that others do not share (sadism, for instance, or the passion to pilfer) is painful. But we were never promised that living uprightly would be an easy business. Ease is for heaven, not earth. Life on earth is fundamentally out of shape and out of order by reason of sin. The God who loves and saves sinners has chosen to let life go on that way most of the time. So strains, pains, disappointments, traumas, and frustrations of all sorts await us in the future, just as they have overtaken us already in the past. Suffering is to be expected, and we must prepare for it. It is a biblically predicted fact of every Christian’s life that our joys will be punctuated with bad experiences to the very end.
Suffering Must Be Valued
Does that thought startle you? It should not. The world, of course, does not find value in suffering. It has no reason to. But Christians are in a different position, for the Bible assures us that God sanctifies our suffering to good ends. We are not to pretend, out of stoical pride, that we feel no pain or distress. Equally, however, we are not to spend all our time brooding on how we suffer, for that is sinful self-absorption, In any case, there are more important things to do. Our task is to take suffering in stride, not as if it is a pleasure (it isn’t), but in the knowledge that God will not let it overwhelm us and that He will use it, by His own supernatural alchemy, to three good ends, at least.
1. Our Suffering Produces Character
God makes our hurts a means of our moral transformation into the image of our Savior. “We can be full of joy here and now even in our trials and troubles,” writes Paul. “Taken in the right spirit these very things will give us patient endurance; this in turn will develop as mature character, and a character of this sort produces a steady hope” (Rom. 5:3ff; cf. Jas. 1:2-4). How this works is explained in Hebrews 12:5-11, a passage we glanced at before. The writer, having urged his readers to run life’s race with eyes fixed on Jesus and no yielding to sin, goes on to tell them that their pains and griefs are their heavenly Father’s moral training, inflicted not out of brutal indifference but in order to lick them into a holy shape. “Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? . . . God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in His holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it” (Heb. 12:7,10-11). Scars tie in with sanctity. Pain has an educational effect.
Educational pain? How savage it sounds! But how realistic the point really is! “What son is not disciplined by his father?” Parents who love their children take time out to discipline them when young, so that they may one day be adults that the parents can be proud of. This is simply true. What is the alternative? “If you are not disciplined . . . then you are illegitimate children and not true sons” (v. 8). The unhappy scenario in which the biological father will not take responsibility for the welfare of his illegitimate offspring (and his legitimate offspring too, sometimes) was as familiar in the ancient world as it is today. The fact is that without the holiness that comes through God’s discipline, “no one will see the Lord” (v. 14). But if God is taking the trouble to train us up in righteousness here and now, that shows that He is preparing us for an eternity of joy with our Lord Jesus at His right hand. This is how our holy Father in heaven works for our good.
The divine education that is in view here has two sides. One was expressed by George Whitefield, the eighteenth-century evangelist, who spoke somewhere of our kindly Lord putting thorns in all our beds lest, like the disciples in Gethsemane, we be found sleeping when we need to be watching and praying. As bodily discomfort keeps us awake physically, so lack of situational ease and contentment will keep us awake spiritually.
The other side is revealed by Jesus’ summons to every would-be disciple to “deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23, cf. 14:27). The only persons in Jesus’ day who carried their own crosses were condemned criminals from the slave and non-Roman-citizen classes who had to walk to the place of their crucifixion. These were persons who had lost their civil rights, whom society had decreed that it wanted dead, and at whose imminent sufferings—and crucifixion, remember, was the cruelest form of execution ever devised—no one was going to turn a hair. Jesus, at the end of His life, literally joined that category. But what He was saying in the words quoted was that morally He was in it already, by virtue of people’s negative attitude of heart toward Him. His followers, then, must clearheadedly accept a similar outcast relationship to the community around them, because that is all they can expect if they are loyal to Him.
This is what self-denial really means—not a mere cutting back on some bit of private self-indulgence, but totally surrendering one’s natural wish for acceptance and status and respect. It means preparing to be rejected as worthless and dispensable, and to find oneself robbed of one’s rights.
Schmidt hammers this home, and rightly so. I quote:
In his first epistle Peter writes, “If you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God” (2:20). He begins the next verse by saying, “For you have been called for this purpose” (NASB), and he goes on to describe Christ’s example. Constructive suffering, or educational pain, is central to a life of faith.
The idea is expressed strongly by Paul as well. In Romans 8:17, he makes suffering the condition of eternal inheritance, calling believers “co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.” In Philippians 1:29 Paul writes that “it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him.”4
Suffering is thus seen as a vocation, one that prepares us for glory with Christ by drawing us deeper into the sanctity of being like Christ in our reaction to the experience of wanting what we do not have while having what we do not want.
The Greek word that Phillips, the New International Version, and many others translate as “character” in Romans 5:4 is dokimē (
). Strictly speaking, this term expresses the complex thought of proven quality recognized and approved as such by an interested party—in this case, God Himself. The reason why dokimē brings hope (confidence that joy and glory with Christ will be one’s ultimate inheritance) is not that persons who have stood fast through thick and thin may now pass votes of confidence in themselves, but that the God whom they serve generates within them an awareness that in His strength they have passed tests that He Himself imposed. Their patience in showing loyalty to Him under the pressure they endured was His own gift to them, and it has left them stronger than they were before. Christians who have gone through hardship for their Lord’s sake are tested products of proven quality. Dokimē signifies this state of triumphant testedness, with God’s seal of approval marking it.
Now dokimē, says Paul, produces hope. Our sense of the glory of the life to come is sharpened, and our longing for it is intensified, both as a spontaneous spin-off of the knowledge of God’s present approval and as a direct fruit of knowing that the agony has actually enlarged our capacity to enjoy the final glory when it comes. Paul is explicit about this in 2 Corinthians 4:17-18, where writing out of a spell of life-threatening experiences (see 1:8-10), he says, not in irony, but expressing his honest retrospective assessment of what he had been through: “Our light [!] and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” Paul does not, of course, mean that suffering earns glory in the way that work earns wages, nor that it creates glory in the way that chiseling creates a statue. He means only to imply that suffering makes one more able to enjoy the coming glory than one was before, just as one enjoys renewed bodily health more when it has been preceded by much sickness and pain. Romans 8 contains a similar assessment and a similar testimony: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. . . . we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies . . . if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently” (vv. 18,23,25). Integral to the Christlikeness of character that the refiner’s fire of suffering induces is a deepening passion of joyful hope, and hopeful joy.
This passion, which was in Christ and in Paul so strongly, was in Moses too. “By faith Moses . . . refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward” (Heb. 11:24-26; emphasis added). Let Moses be an example to us of living in terms of our hope, of finding, as did Paul, that as absence makes one’s heart grow fonder, so pressure makes one’s hope glow brighter. When Christians endure hardship in the power of the Holy Spirit, brighter hope is one regular result.
2. Our Suffering Glorifies God
He sanctifies it to this end in two ways, corresponding to the double sense of “glory” and “glorify God” in the Bible. The double sense is as follows. First, “glory” means God’s display to His creatures of the perfections that are His—the wisdom, power, uprightness, and love that, singly and combined, make Him praiseworthy. Further, He is “glorified” when by word and deed He shows these qualities to His rational creatures. Second, “glory” also means the praise that our thanks, trust, adoration, submission, and devotion give to God, for the praiseworthiness we have now seen in Him. He is “glorified” when we exalt Him responsively in these ways. In Ephesians 1:3 Paul plays on the similar two senses of “bless,” “Blessed be the God . . . who has blessed us. . . .” (NRSV). God is blessed by our words of praise. God blesses us by His word of power. The thought would have been essentially the same if Paul had said: “Give glory to God for showing his glory in the blessings he has now given us in Christ.”
In times of weakness and woe, Christianly handled, God is glorified in both senses. On the one hand, He reveals the glorious riches of His resources in Christ by keeping us going, so that overwhelming pressures do not overwhelm us, even when they look like doing so. Paul celebrates the fact that he and his apostolic associates are “hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor. 4:8-9; 6:9-10). And he explains that God’s purpose in these pressures is to make apparent to all the supernatural power of Christ’s risen life and gracious enabling, whereby saints are kept going in situations where it seemed impossible that anyone could keep going. A British brand of light bulb has long been advertised by the slogan “still keeps going when the rest have stopped.” Paul is telling us that one way God glorifies Himself in His saints is by keeping them going when anyone else would have had to stop.
Of God’s self-glorifying action in saints who suffer, Paul writes: “We have this treasure (knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ) in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us . . . we always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that His life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us . . .” (4:7,10-12). Similarly, with reference to the mysterious “thorn in my flesh” he writes, as we saw: “He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (12:9-10, emphasis added). When natural resources fail God’s servants, supernatural support comes into play.
Nor is this a special experience reserved for special people in the family of God. On the contrary, it is a matter of promise to all God’s people. That is implied by Paul’s earlier word to the Corinthians: “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it” (1 Cor. 10:13). Temptations are places and times of decision in which Satan works to bring us down in an experience of defeat while God acts to build us up through an experience of overcoming. The pain, grief, self-hatred, disappointment, fear, and inner exhaustion that are so often part of the temptation experience isolate us from the seemingly untroubled. They make us feel that what we face and experience is worse than what has ever confronted anyone else before. But it never is so; and there will always be “grace to help us in our time of need” whenever we seek it (Heb. 4:16). Whatever the burden, the power is there to keep the Christian from crumpling. Through God’s faithfulness in supplying supernatural strength to those who are in Christ, they endure hardship, overcome temptation, and keep going as before, and in them God glorifies Himself mightily.
The other side of the matter is modeled by psalm after psalm (look at 4, 5, 6, 7, 22, 34, 38, 40, 41, 42 and 43 for starters) and by Paul and Barnabas singing hymns in their cell with their feet in the stocks after their flogging at Philippi (Acts 16:23-25). The proper response to pressure is praise plus prayer. The fiercer the opposition, the stronger the praise should be. It is through praise no less than through petition that help comes. It is by praise over and above petition that we most directly honor and glorify God, out of the depths and in the fire no less than at quieter times. Praise brings strength to endure, even as it gives glory to God our strengthener. Well does Richard Baxter’s hortatory poem (now a familiar hymn) say:
Ye saints, who toil below,
Adore your heavenly King,
And onward as ye go
Some joyful anthem sing.
Take what he gives
And praise him still,
Through good and ill,
Who ever lives!
Triumph in God above,
And with a well-tuned heart
Sing thou the songs of love!
Let all thy days
Till life shall end,
Whate’er he send,
Be filled with praise!
Baxter was an English Puritan, and like most of the English Puritans, he suffered for much of his life through bad housing and bad health, community hostility, social ostracism, political, ecclesiastical, and economic upsets, and actual persecution. The Puritans grasped (as many of us today do not) that Christians are not called to be the nicest people in the world according to the world’s idea of what a nice person is like. Instead, they are to be the Lord’s counterculture, living with different motives, purposes, and values from those of the world because of their loyalty to God. When Christians behave in a way that society finds odd and judgmental (and Christians do not have to be actually judgmental before they are felt to be such), society will soon gang up against them in one way or another. The Puritans experienced this—hence the malicious stereotypes of Puritans that still go the rounds among people who ought to know better—and consistent Christians experience it still. We saw how John Geree, describing the character of an old English Puritan in 1646, pictured this model man as having for his motto Vincit qui patitur, “he who suffers conquers.”5 It really does seem that of all Protestants since the Reformation the Puritans had as hard a furrow to plough as any. But Baxter was not the only Puritan who, following the lead of David in Psalm 34:1, praised the Lord at all times, and who by this discipline (which was also, for the Puritans, a delight, as it can be for us too) persistently glorified God. In doing so he found strength to stand fast in his service.
3. Suffering Fulfills the Law of Harvest
That law can be stated thus: before there is blessing anywhere, there will first be suffering somewhere. Scripture does not explain this, but simply sets it before us as a fact Jesus first announced the law when He declared, speaking of His own ministry, “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24). The many seeds in His case were the many millions for whom His cross would mean new life. Then, having said that following Him requires willingness to lay down one’s life (v. 25), He declares: “Whoever serves me must follow me” (v. 26). The natural implication is that He requires all who are His to live by the same law of harvest that He lived by Himself, becoming the seed that dies to bring forth fruit. Every experience of pain, grief, frustration, disappointment, and being hurt by others is a little death. When we serve the Savior in our worldly world, there are many such deaths to be died. But the call to us is to endure, since God sanctifies our endurance for fruitfulness in the lives of others.
Paul’s grasp of this principle is reflected in several of his remarks about his own ministry. “I rejoice in what was suffered for you” (“my sufferings for your sake,” RSV). Also, he says, “I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church” (Col. 1:24). That these afflictions are edificatory rather than propitiatory in effect will not, I think, be disputed. Paul is affirming a link between his troubles (he was writing from prison) and the furtherance of Christ’s work of building His Church. In a parallel letter, also from prison, Paul calls himself “the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles” (Eph. 3:1). To the Corinthians he writes: “Death is at work in us, but life is at work in you” (2 Cor. 4:12). To Timothy he writes: “I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory” (2 Tim. 2:10). In each of these texts, the reality of a connection between His own suffering and others being blessed is made clear, though the nature of the connection is not precisely defined.
Part of the meaning of the principle, surely—even if not all—is that through the pounding we experience we are, so to speak, broken up small so that each bit of what we are may become food for some hungry soul: food, that is, in the sense of empathetic insight and supportive wisdom. In ministry to others it is often decisively helpful when we can say: “I know how you are feeling. I’ve been there myself. And God met me there and taught me lessons and saw me through—let me tell you about it.” As Jesus once explained that the reason a man was born blind was not punishment for anyone’s past sin, but God’s present purpose of displaying divine power by healing him (John 9:1-3), so the true answer to the question, “Why is this happening to me?” will often be: It is not chastening or correction for yesterday’s moral lapses. It has nothing to do with the past at all. It has to do only with the use God plans to make of you tomorrow, and how you need to be prepared for that. The hard and bitter experiences that now ravage you, like the death of a loved one (one example), are fitting you to be a channel of God’s life to someone else. So you should expect hardship in some form to continue all your days, according to Jesus’ own declaration: “Every branch [in me, the vine] that does bear fruit he [the Father] prunes so that it will be even more fruitful” (John 15:2). That is how the law of harvest works.
We see that law further illustrated in Isaiah 50:4-9, one of the servant-songs that point prophetically ahead to the suffering and glory of Jesus. This song is in the first instance Isaiah’s own testimony. It begins: “The sovereign LORD has given me an instructed tongue, to know the word that sustains the weary.” It continues: “I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard; I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting. . . . It is the sovereign LORD who helps me. . . .” The implication is that the word that sustains the weary only comes to be known through the experience of others’ hatred and brutality. Isaiah juxtaposes these two things because they are parts of a single package.
Even more clearly is the fruitfulness of suffering for ministry illustrated by the experience of our Lord Jesus Himself. Jesus “has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin” (Heb. 4:15), and now as a result “is able to help those who are being tempted” (2:18). Over and above the saving significance of His perfect obedience to the Father as the second head of our race, the strain He underwent in enduring temptation (think of His days in the desert at the start of His ministry, and His hours in Gethsemane at its end) has fitted Him to minister help to our harried souls in a way that would not otherwise be a reality. If this was the way the master went, it is less wonder that His servants should find themselves treading it too.
William Booth, founder and General of the Salvation Army, once gave the Army as a motto for the year the one word, “Others.” No one could ever devise a more Christian, indeed Christlike, motto than that. But serving the Lord by being there to seek the good of others, and to help them where they need help, will involve us in being ground up small in the mill of God’s providence for others’ sake. Augustine expressed this by saying that God’s servants have to be “broken and distributed” to feed the hungry; a thought that Oswald Chambers somewhere elaborated by declaring that God turns His agents into broken bread and poured-out wine. Thus it goes, and we must be ready to endure it. True holiness, which is Christ-centered and others-oriented, accepts this without demur.
Paul was a holy man, and so, far from resenting his many hardships (see 2 Cor. 11:23-33), he rejoiced publicly that he could see this principle actually being worked out in his own life. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . the God of all consolation who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God. . . . If we are being afflicted, it is for your consolation . . . if we are being consoled, it is for your consolation . . .” (1:3-6, NRSV). Paul was content to be ground up small in the mill for others.
The way to deal with suffering in any form—from the mildest irritation to the mental and physical agony that so absorbs and overwhelms you that you groan and scream—is to offer it to the God who has permitted it, telling Him to make what He wills of it, and of us through it. Contemplative prayer is often pictured as the loving look Godward, without at that moment either spoken words or active thoughts. It is contemplative prayer also when the Godward look is submissive, at a time when all power of thought and speech has been swamped by pain. Jesus on the cross is the model for this. The Father, we learn, sanctified Jesus’ suffering as a ransom-price for us (Matt. 20:28; 1 Cor. 6:20), as our example of innocence victimized (1 Pet. 2:20-23), and as the experience of our forerunner learning in practice what obedience costs (Heb. 5:8). In a similar way the Father now sanctifies our suffering, as we have seen, for the ripening and refining of our Christian character, for a demonstration in us of the reality of supernatural empowering, and for our actual fruitfulness in serving others. One facet of Jesus’ holiness was His willingness to suffer all kinds of pain for His Father’s glory and others’ good. One facet of holiness in Jesus’ disciples is willingness to be led along a parallel path.
Fortitude: Courage with Endurance
Poor Rocky. He has lost his nerve.
You might think from his name that Rocky is a strong man—a boxer or a bodyguard or a member of some other tough-guy profession. But no; he is a small black dog, barrel-shaped, low-slung, and slightly shaggy, with a rolling gait, a narrow nose, and a great fan tail almost as big as himself. My son, who brought him home from school when he was about four inches long, identifies him as a Norwegian Barge Dog. The rest of us think he is a mixture of—well, this and that. In a manner reminiscent of Christopher Robin’s Pooh Bear, he is a dog of very little brain. Not that one holds that against him, but it needs to be borne in mind. He was a spirited small creature, until the time when he walked on water or, more precisely, failed to walk on water. But then his morale collapsed, and he has run scared ever since, with swiveling frightened eyes betokening a fear-filled heart. Poor Rocky.
The first time, he had his head in the air. He was chasing a bird. The lakeside was a few inches above water level. Clearly he had not noticed how the land lay, and he ran full tilt off the edge. For a moment, so the watchers told me, his front legs went wild, and there was a look of surprise on his face such as you do not often see. Then, like Piglet in the story, he found himself entirely surrounded by water, and scrambled out shaken to the core. The second time he was busily moving across the seaside rocks, and walked out on the green weed between two of them supposing it to be solid ground. But it wasn’t, so down he went once again. Now he suspects the universe, and thinks of water as perilous stuff, not to be trusted in any form. This goes far beyond hating to be bathed, though indeed he does hate to be bathed, and always did. But today, when a storm rages outside the house, particularly a thunderstorm, he has to huddle, quivering, at someone’s feet. When he is in the car and it is raining, or when the car splashes through puddles, he shivers, shakes, and whimpers like a soul in torment. It is clear that his nerve is gone. He lacks fortitude. Again I have to say, poor Rocky.
Fortitude, the fourth of the four cardinal virtues in medieval moral theology, is bravery and more. Bravery can be fitful and can fade, but fortitude is a compound of courage and endurance. It lasts. Faith fosters fortitude by holding before us our promised hope, of which we were thinking a few pages back (see 1 Cor. 15:58; Heb. 3:6; 6:19-20; 10:23-25; 12:1-13). The idea of fortitude comes from Aristotle, but power to practice it comes only from the gospel, through the exercise of faith and hope in Jesus Christ.
Faith also fosters fortitude by realistically receiving God’s assurances that pain and strife must be expected in our pilgrimage, and then by inducing purity of heart in those who are actually under pressure and suffering distress. As Kierkegaard declared in a book title, “purity of heart is to will one thing”—that thing being the command and glory of God. This purity, which is also referred to in Scripture as the simplicity of a united heart and a single eye, is advanced by the experience of affliction. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth century wiseacre of England, once observed that when a man knows he is going to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully. For Christians, an awareness that the life God is leading them into is the spiritual counterpart of Winston Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” has a similar effect. The world’s allurements become much less alluring, and they know with great clarity of mind that a close walk with the Father and the Son, leaning hard on them and drawing strength from them through the Holy Spirit, is both what they need and what they want. Thus in situations of suffering faith purifies the heart.
Three verses from Psalm 119 testify to this. “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word” (v. 67). Rough experiences, which could in themselves indicate divine displeasure, challenge us to repent of past thoughtlessness and carelessness and to become more conscientious in doing our Father’s will. “It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees” (v. 71). As if to say: I did not see clearly what you want for my life, nor what the behavioral model that the Bible spells out for me really involves, until trouble struck me. But I understand it better now. And finally: “I know, O LORD, that . . . in faithfulness you have afflicted me” (v. 75). God’s faithfulness consists in His unwillingness that His children should lose any of the depths of fellowship with Himself that He has in store for them. So He afflicts us to make us lean harder on Him, in order that His purpose of drawing us into closest fellowship with Himself may be fulfilled.
John Newton expressed this side of sanctification unforgettably:
I asked the Lord that I might grow
In faith, and love, and every grace,
Might more of his salvation know
And seek more earnestly his face.
’Twas he who taught me thus to pray,
And he, I trust, has answered prayer;
But it has been in such a way
As almost drove me to despair.
I hoped that in some favoured hour
At once he’d answer my request,
And by his love’s constraining power
Subdue my sins, and give me rest.
Instead of this, he made me feel
The hidden evil of my heart,
And let the angry powers of hell
Assault my soul in every part.
Yea, more, with his own hand he seemed
Intent to aggravate my woe,
Crossed all the fair designs I schemed,
Blasted my gourds, and laid me low.
“Lord, why is this?” I trembling cried,
“Wilt thou pursue thy worm to death?”
“ ’Tis in this way,” the Lord replied,
“I answer prayer for grace and faith.
“These inward trials I employ
From self and pride to set thee free,
And break thy schemes of earthly joy,
That thou mayest seek thy all in me.”
Two examples of the fortitude that is integral to holiness may be given as I close. The first is Mabel, a blind, deaf, disease-ridden, and cancerous old lady of eighty-nine whom Tom Schmidt met in a convalescent home where she had been bedridden for twenty-five years. He asked her what she thought about as she passed her lonely days and nights. “She said, I think about Jesus. . . . I asked, What do you think about Jesus? She replied slowly and deliberately as I wrote. And this is what she said: ‘I think about how good he’s been to me. He’s been awfully good to me in my life, you know. . . . I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied. . . . Lots of folks wouldn’t care much for what I think. Lots of folks would think I’m kind of old-fashioned. But I don’t care. I’d rather have Jesus. He’s all the world to me.’ ”6 Schmidt affirms, and truly, that Mabel had power—the kind of power Paul prayed that the Ephesians might have, power to “grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ” (Eph. 3:18). I cite Mabel, equally truly I think, as an example of fortitude—courage with endurance. Power and fortitude are two main ingredients in authentic Christian holiness. “No pain, no gain,” but through pain, great gain.
My second example is Terry Waite, the British hostage released at the end of 1991 after nearly five years of solitary confinement in Lebanon, chained to the wall of his room for almost twenty-four hours daily. In an interview he said: “I have been determined in captivity, and still am determined, to convert this experience into something that will be useful and good for other people. I think that’s the way to approach suffering. It seems to me that Christianity doesn’t in any way lessen suffering. What it does is enable you to take it, to face it, to work through it, and eventually to convert it.”7 Here, too, is a clear testimony to that gain through pain that belongs to authentic holiness.
This is a soft age in the West, an age in which ease and comfort are seen by the world as life’s supreme values. Affluence and medical resources have brought secular people to the point of feeling they have a right to a long life, and a right to be free of poverty and pain for the whole of that life. Many even cherish a grudge against God and society if these hopes do not materialize. Nothing, however, as we now see, could be further from the true, tough, hard-gaining holiness that expresses true Christianity.
Paul, as I said earlier, was a truly holy man. He shall have the last word, as he lays himself on the line with regard to the Christian way to live:
I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ. . . . I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so . . . to attain to the resurrection from the dead. . . .
I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. All of us who are mature should take such a view of things (Phil. 3:8,10-15).
Mature . . . ? Oh . . . yes, I see. And I am a silly child who stumbles and fumbles and tumbles every day. Holy Father, Holy Son, Holy Spirit, I need Your help. Lord, have mercy; hold me up, and hold me steady—please, starting now. Amen.