How to Weather Hardship

Challenges of being a father

Today is Father day - a day we can celebrate what it means to be a father. I’ve now been a father for a bit over 10 years and so in that time I’ve experienced many of the joys and struggles that go with it. Admittedly, I haven’t yet arrived at the teenage years but I have no doubt that this too will come with both the joys and struggles even if slightly different in nature.

But it is the struggles that I want to speak about today. Now I’m going to give examples of the struggles of fatherhood. The reality is that what I’ll talk about today actually applies to everyone regardless of your situation.

But as I focus in on dad’s I want to go back to when they first become parents.

Now for the vast majority of new dads, this is a time of great joy and happiness. I can still remember when I first got to hold Elise when she was first born. It is one of those cherished memories that I hold dearly.

But during this period there can also be struggles for the new dad. Now obviously during the early period, it is the mum that the biggest challenge occurs. And I hope as I describe the challenges of the father I don’t diminish in any way the enormity of what the mother goes through.

Now of course, Father’s will normally help the mum during this time, and there are challenges with this, but the challenge that many fathers experience is stress related.

Beyond Blue commissioned a study in 2015 looking at new fathers and found that the idea of the father being the “rock” of the family caused 47% of dads a lot of stress ad anxiety.

The study also found that 39% of first time fathers experienced high levels of psychological distress in the first year of their child’s life.

Unfortunately what I think happens is that we have these really high expectations as fathers. We want to be able to provide. We want to be the best father we possibly can be. But the reality is, we’re not able to.

This study was just for new dads. The reality is, as your children get older, while we might not feel it as acutely, but the same thing happens. The children get to an age where we need to apply discipline. But we go too hard. Or too soft. Their behaviour doesn’t improve and we feel we’ve failed.

Well, this is father’s day and I’ve started on a bit of a downer. Thankfully as we start a new series in the book of James, we find that James has some advice for us that can really help us think about this in quite a different way.

James’ letter

But before we do that, let’s try and sort out some of the basic parts of the letter.

We can start with the first verse to point us in the right direction.

Author

From this verse we learn that the author is James. But even this isn’t quite as straight forward as you might think. You see, there are a number of people in the bible called James, including James son of Zebedee which was one of the disciples who were in Jesus’ inner circle of three. However, it was unlikely to him give that we read about him being martyred in Acts 12.

While there is much that has been written on this, for most of church history it has been assumed that this book was written by James the brother of Jesus who was one of the early church fathers. While some people might doubt that today, as the evidence to doubt it is not altogether convincing, I’m going to assume the traditional authorship as James, the brother of Jesus.

Recipients

Verse 1 also tells us who the letter is intended for, but unlike many of Paul’s letters, the designation is rather broad. He addresses it to the “twelve tribes scattered among the nations”.

Basically, this broad address indicates that it was intended for all Christians, noting that they are everywhere.

Date of letter

Unfortunately we don’t know exactly when the letter was written. It has been suggested by some that of all the letters we have in the New Testament, this is one of the first, dating it only a bit more than a decade after the death of Jesus. The reality is, that any date we place on it is going to involve some big assumptions, so I’m not going to waste any more time speculating now.

Purpose

More importantly, it is the purpose of the letter that is more relevant to us.

If we look at the overall letter we see that there are actually quite a number of different issues that James addresses, but what is very clear is that it is highly practical. He’s concerned with what it means to live a Christian life in the real world. And so while he jumps around in the specifics, there is an overarching theme of Christian living in a non-Christian world.

With this in mind, James dives straight int a problem that they would have keenly felt - the trials and temptations of living in a world that does not acknowledge God.

Admittedly this theme is much bigger than the issue I started with, namely, the struggles that father’s face, but as I mentioned, we could essentially insert any struggle that the Christian faces living in the world.

Joy in suffering

So let’s look at James’ word to us regarding the trials we face.

Well, he doesn’t beat around the bush at all, rather giving us some words which when we’re in the middle of a big trial sound rather strange.

He says: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds”.

Now I don’t know about you, but when I face various trials, I face a range of emotions, but joy is not usually one of them, so what’s the go?

Or to put it in the context of what I’ve been speaking about - imagine if we said to the father who is feeling high levels of anxiety because he feels inadequate as a father, if we just say ‘hey don’t worry, consider it joy my friend’. How do you think he would react?

Well as strange as it might sound, when we begin to understand the joy that comes from a Christian faith, we can begin to understand that there is wisdom in this - although point of warning, when said in a glib, uncaring manner, trust me, telling someone to just cheer up is not good advice.

You see, the joy of a Christian is a deep seated joy. It is not a superficial happiness, the type that everyone feels from time to time. Rather it is the joy of knowing that you have been redeemed. That nothing can separate you from the love of God. That you have been chosen and are being transformed into the likeness of Christ. A lot of bad things can happen. Some of our own making. Some from circumstances not of our making. But regardless, for the Christian, those deep truths remain. And for this reason we can have a lasting joy.

The reason for joy

But James explores another reason for joy in suffering. We don’t just have the joy because we know there is something bigger than the trial we are facing. Rather as James explains, the suffering itself can produce something amazing.

James talks about our trials as testing of our faith, and that when we are tested, it produces perseverance. A perseverance that results in maturity and completeness.

If you were here last week when I concluded the series on Abraham we looked at a very big test of faith that Abraham went through, and without repeating it all now, we saw that his passing through this test strengthened the whole situation.

For father’s who are struggling one of the first things we need to recognise is that the reason we struggle is because we care. And because we care, we can know that we will become better fathers because of these struggles.

It is the refining fire, and the end result is going to be beautiful.

The need for wisdom

But to go through tough times, whatever the nature of it, we need wisdom.

And this is exactly where James takes us in verse 5. He tells that if we lack wisdom that we should ask God who will give it to us.

Now it is important to note that wisdom is different from knowledge.

There’s a little saying I’ve heard a few times now - ‘knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad!’

You see, wisdom involves putting knowledge into practice.

And here is the thing. We can know on a theoretical level that the struggle we are going through will make us better people. We can know that we should be joyful because of what God has done (and is doing) in our lives. But we need wisdom to apply this to our lives.

The wisdom to make that happen, won’t come from just listening to this message, rather it is going to come through the generous giving of God.

You need to ask, and he will give.

Why we don’t get wisdom

Now, I suspect many here would have heard this idea from the Bible that we can just ask for wisdom and get it, and have probably thought - but I have asked and I don’t feel any wiser.

Certainly I know that I have felt this frustration from time to time. But I think there is an important clarification here. Because usually when I’m frustrated in such a way, it’s because I’ve got a decision to make, and after I’ve prayed for wisdom I’m still none the wiser as to what decision I should make.

Now I think this is because it confuses wisdom for a detailed plan. When it says that we can ask for wisdom and we will get it, that is different from asking for a detailed plan and getting one. Wisdom is not having the plan, rather it is having the ability to work through what we need to to get the plan.

And I believe this fits this context better. You see, in the context of what James is saying, we need wisdom, not to get us out of the various struggles we face, but rather to navigate our way through them.

This is particularly important for us as fathers. We pray and hope that as a result we will know exactly how we should parent. But through the wisdom we get, we don’t get a detailed plan, but rather the wisdom to know how to rely fully on God for everything. It’s about changing our mindset rather than knowing step by sp everything to do.

Avoiding other solutions

So let’s stop and see what James is talking about. He’s saying that we need to change the way we think about the struggles we face, and to do this, we need to ask God for wisdom.

It’s great advice, but unfortunately rather than falling back onto God, we instead fall back on other things or ideas.

As we look through the remainder of the passage I want to explore some of these ideas we fall back on, and look at how James addresses them.

Hedging your bets

Now when we do get into various struggles, our great temptation is to essentially hedge our bets. Where we should be putting our trust in God and him alone, instead we trust in things not of God.

Now just to be clear, trusting in things not of God doesn’t mean that we can’t take advice from non-Christians. Certainly God has given us lots of smart people, such as doctors, engineers, economists and the like. Listening to their advice is usually a good idea.

Rather, trusting in things not of God is when we trust in things that take us away from the nature of God. We trust in ourselves. We trust in our greed, and our lusts. We trust in revenge.

The problem is, when we allow these trusts in, we become inherently unstable. Jesus himself taught us that you cannot serve two masters.

You see, the struggles come. We turn to God. But we also turn to our own selfish desires. When we do, rather than the struggles working for our good, they bring us down, because we don’t seek after God.

What James says

Now James addresses this for us in verses six to eight. He tells us that when we ask for wisdom we should believe and not doubt.

Now I think that we again often misunderstand what James is saying here. You see, I mentioned about how we often perceive that God hasn’t given us wisdom. And so it is easy to conclude from verse 6 that we don’t receive because we have doubt.

But I’d suggest that we should be careful in how we understand doubt. I don’t think that James is talking about doubts as in having simple questions. You see, doubts can actually be a good thing. Doubts can help us discern good advice from bad advice.

Rather I suggest that when James uses the word doubt here, he is actually talking about trusting in something else. You see the essence of doubt is tossing up two ideas. In this context, I believe James is talking about tossing around the two ideas in the sense of hedging your bets between the way of God, and the way of the world.

James makes that fairly clear as verse 6 continues and he says that the doubter is like a wave on the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. He goes on to call them double-minded and unstable.

What we need to take from this is that when we go through our struggles, if you want to experience the type of joy that James starts with and you want these struggles to work for your benefit, you need to be fully for God. Stop hedging your bets. Hedging your bets will only result in things going off track.

Now just to clarify, this does not mean we can’t ask questions. Certainly we can. We do need to be discerning. But be discerning in a way that keeps your trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Trusting wealth

The second bad approach we can take is some ways can be seen as a subset of the problem I’ve just raised. That is that we can trust in wealth and the riches of this world.

It’s worth drawing this out just briefly because money is such a big thing in our world. Certainly money is central to our society, and so it’s not surprising that we easily fall back on this.

Interestingly, it is often due to money issues that fathers feel stress. As father would often think of themselves as the bread winners, when things get tough, they often take on the stress the hardest. And so we can think that money will be the answer.

This is an example of trusting in something that is not of God.

But James spells out for us what we should already know - that is that money is just temporary. Using the illustration that James himself provides, it will pass away like a wild flower. As the sun rises, the scorching heat with wither the plant.

Money is not the answer to our suffering.

Blaming God and others

So the first mistake is that we hedge our bets between God and things of the world. The second is that we trust in wealth. The third and final mistake that I want to explore is when we start blaming God or others.

You see, it is so easy when things go wrong to point the finger at someone else. We like it because it takes some of the pressure off ourselves.

James speaks of a specific form of blame that we put on God. You see, when we stuff up, we can look at our surrounding circumstances and say that it is God’s fault because we were tempted.

I wouldn’t be suffering if God didn’t put in such a difficult circumstance.

But James puts an end to such an idea pretty quickly. In fact he states quite matter of factly that God does not tempt anyone.

Sure, we can deduce that God allows temptations to take place, but he is not there pulling us away - that would be contrary to his nature.

Rather, James tells us what actually happens. He tells us that this is birthed from our own evil desires. And James doesn’t stop there. In verse 15 he spells out that when our evil desires gives birth to sin, and grows until it gives birth to sin.

This imagery of birth and re-birth is confronting, but that is what it is. The reality is however that we can’t blame this on anyone else. This starts with our own sin.

The problem is that this completely distracts us from the real problem. When we start blaming others we lose sight of what God is doing.

In verse 16 he tells us not to be deceived.

And so we can see James destroying the ideas that we so often fall back on.

He tells us that when we suffer, don’t hedge your bets on things of the world, don’t fall back on the allure of wealth, and don’t start blaming others.

The true blessing

You see, when we seek after God through the trial and struggles of life, and avoid the traps I’ve just discussed, then the end product is something amazing.

Let me just read verse 12 for you:

James 1:12 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him.

We saw this with Abraham. He was admittedly one of the heroes of the faith - but the amazing thing is that we too can receive the same crown of life.

The struggles we face are hard. Whether they be the struggles of fatherhood or the myriad other struggles that exist throughout our lives. But there is an end point to this. There is a point at which we come to the judgement seat of Christ, and if we have stuck true to God, he will give us a great reward.

I’ve been using the example of fatherhood, and I believe the blessing we receive as parents is actually a foretaste to the full blessing we receive with Christ.

You see, though parenting is difficult, it is one of the most rewarding things we ever have in this life. I’ve heard a lot of people complain about parenting, but almost always they say they would not change it. Because there is something so special about it.

Conclusion

As I come to the end of the passage, James reminds us just how much God wants to bless us. This can be hard to see when we are in the depth of a hard time, but when we look back in hindsight we can see the truth to it.

In verse 17 he tells us:

James 1:17 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.

This is a really good place to end, because it keeps in perspective who God is. We do have struggles - struggles which have many causes, but God is working in the midst of this.

We can react in many ways, but if we just allow God to give us the wisdom that we need, then we can experience the joy of trials. A joy that is a blessing like no other.

Let me pray...