July 9

Day 117: Looking Forward Through the Rear View Mirror

I read yesterday how US States with a big uptick in Covid positive tests are being encouraged to start over again. To return to shelter-in-place. Phase 1. One article I read said, "The past 3 months mean nothing; this is a do over."

Discouraging, for sure. Hopelessness can grow in this environment.

I'm well aware of what we don't have. What we do have is challenges; financial, our church's present homelessness, people seemingly drifting away from us and even from their faith, a growing sense of collective depression, and now no guarantees of an end in sight.

Makes me wonder how to encourage others to cope, myself included. How do we each live, in light of so much continuing bad news?

Perhaps our answer is found in looking backward. Maybe more like, looking forward through the rear view mirror.

Romans 5 encourages just this. Look to what God has already done.

"Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ."

Meaning, our debt for sin has already been paid, resulting in a "peaceful" relationship with God the Father. All through Jesus, and certainly not based on anything we did or didn't do.

"Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God."

This is like saying (as Eugene Peterson said), "We throw open our doors to God, because He has already thrown open His door to us!" We can stand out in the open, no longer hiding, now shouting praise to Him instead of rebellion against Him.

But then it says, "Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings."

What? We "rejoice" in our sufferings? Like we actually like suffering?

We can only appreciate our sufferings' potential for our good when we look back, to see God's grace to us in salvation. And when we look back to remember how God has been faithful to us every single day, in the past. Younger people may look back as far as last week. Older saints can look back on decades.

"Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope."

The object of our faith produces an other-worldly capacity to be patient (waiting to see what God will do next.) This then produces "character," meaning "virtue," that sanctifying act of the Spirit that produces more trust to reflect Jesus in spite of circumstances or alternative narratives. (We grow more when it's harder.)

And this then produces and results in hope. Because "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."

The ongoing challenge for believers is to trust in the love of God, especially when circumstances would say otherwise. Especially when we don't see the end in sight.

Trusting that God is faithful now, because He's been so faithful in the past. Trusting that nothing can separate us from His love for us. Trusting that our present sufferings are producing good things in us.

God didn't stop doing miraculous things in people's lives when the Bible was completed. He continues to do the miraculous today.

And maybe the most miraculous thing He could be doing  today is for us to grow and be encouraged in hope. In Him.

-Mike Rydman, Lead Pastor, Radiant Church | Juneau