No Pain no Gain
Trials and challenging times. These are quite simply a part of life. There’s no getting around them. No matter how much time, money, or resources you spend – challenges are going to come. The question then becomes – what are you going to do when they do?
See, hard times are “rubber meeting the road” sort of moments. If you’ve spent much time around Life Roots, you’ll be familiar with the idea of suffering revealing that which we believe. In actuality, the challenges of life are incredibly beneficial for the maturing of our beings.
There’s a line in Hebrews I came across this morning that I want to share. Talking about Jesus, the author says, “Although He was a Son, He learned obedience through what He suffered” (Hebrews 5:8). What an informative insight into the life of Jesus.
It wasn’t His heritage that taught Him, nor was it His Godly power. Suffering, hard times, it was those moments that taught even the Son of God what true obedience is. Friend, let’s think about this for a second. How well does this line up with the rest of Scripture.
It makes James’ words about enduring make so much sense. There is something about persevering through trials that grows our endurance and when our endurance is fully developed, James says, we will be perfect and complete (James 1:2-4).
Let me try and boil this down to some practical language. When things get hard, we have a choice. Think about lifting weights. If every time you respond to the smallest bit of discomfort by dropping the weights, you’ll sacrifice the greatest “gains” in your development. Your body gets stronger by literally breaking itself down and then building back up.
Our belief is the same. If every time life gets hard, we throw in the towel, reach for distraction, and neglect the Lord – friends, we will not grow. Those same trials will take us out over and over again.
But, we will grow by clinging to what we know to be true about God in how He has revealed Himself to us through the Scriptures. Just like Jesus, when the hard times come, we can recognize them as hard and then choose to follow God through it.
For example, your lack in an area may be tempting you to think that God is no longer faithful, but push through by declaring what the Word says, “the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22-23). And we continue on, clinging to the truth.
What’s been the challenge for you lately? Friend, lets reframe our perspective and fight against the culture of today that tries to tell us that hard things are bad. And lets practice viewing the struggles like a set of weights at the gym – pushing through the hard, knowing that in the end it’s the pushing through that leads us into greater strength.
