Carrying On
I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance.
– Revelation 2:2
When I was in that first six-week period after giving birth to one of our kids (I forget which; I think the third or fourth), my sister mailed me a card that I kept propped up on the folding table next to our bed. It was red and sparkly, incongruous with the bottles, rags, breast pads, diapers and tubes of Desitin surrounding it. On it were the words “keep calm and carry on.” I remember staring at it through a sleep-deprived haze, through the repetitive, three-hours cycles of feeding that every postpartum mother is familiar with. There are some things that just have to be gotten through in life.
Steadfastness is not a quality our culture particularly values. When we face something difficult, we try to get out of it. When we don’t yet have what we want, we figure out how to get it faster. When we’re bored, we find escape or distraction. When we don’t feel satisfied, we look around for something better. And around here, people are always looking for something better: better technology, better real estate, better job, better church. Not that that’s wrong, but we tend to look to circumstances, to changing or improving our circumstances, rather than to what God may want to work on within us.
In the book of James, the author writes a letter to people in difficult circumstances: that is clear as soon as he addresses his missive to “the twelve tribes in the Dispersion.” These are compulsory migrants, people who have fled home to escape persecution, and their struggles are foremost in James’ mind, for he skips the usual epistolatory expressions of gratitude to launch immediately in verse two into the first of many imperatives: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.”
He doesn’t say, “feel joyful, my brothers . . .” He’s not talking about a feeling. He’s talking about a reckoning. In the great ledger of life, trials should be counted not as bad, or even as good, but as joyful, if only for one reason: they produce steadfastness. That is how valuable, how eternally profitable, steadfastness is. Why? James continues, “And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”
The fact is, we may say we believe something, but in reality, our beliefs are much more mixed than even we ourselves realize. They are not perfect in the sense of being complete, of being whole and pure. We say we trust in God, while relying on our own methods. We say we believe in God’s goodness, while resenting him for not giving us what we want, when we want it. If so, then in reality, we do not fully have faith in God’s sovereignty or goodness after all.
Suffering reveals these discrepancies as nothing else can. The word James uses for “testing” here is the same used for that of purifying a precious metal: you heat it up until the dross rises to the surface. You dredge off the impurities, and repeat the whole process again and again, until the remaining metal is purer and purer, until you can see the reflection of your face on its surface. That’s what trials do for us: they reveal, again and again, areas where our beliefs are alloyed and impure.
Steadfastness is what happens when we let that process keep happening in us. When we choose to continue bearing difficulty without distraction or escape, when we see and allow all the dross of our functional beliefs to rise to the surface. Steadfastness is how we become whole and complete.
“Every time we’re given a command, it tells us something about the God from whom that command originated.”
Hebrews 12 says, “. . . let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross.” There it all is again! Endurance, perfection, faith, and joy. There is nothing we are urged to do that Christ did not first do for us. He endured the trial of the cross, because he counted it as joy for our sake. Our steadfastness is not some white-knuckled, stoic forbearance: it is a love letter to Jesus, the one who did it all first for us. It is only as we look to him that we care more about wholeness than comfort, more about our inner state than our outer circumstances, more about the purity of what we do and say. It is only as we look to him that we see the value of steadfastness.
