Weathering the Storms of Life

If you live in Texas, then you know a thing or two about Texas weather.  Even as I’m typing this, the temperatures have plummeted a good 30-40 degrees from yesterday and I’m clearly not prepared in my short-sleeve shirt.  The bottom line – Texas weather is unpredictable. 

Life seems to mirror Texas weather.  It can change in an instant leaving us unprepared and vulnerable.  If we’re not prepared, we are likely to capsize.  If we are certain that storms will come in life (which scripture makes clear if we are obedient followers), shouldn’t we try and prepare.

When I think about storms in life, the first place I go in scripture is to the book of Job.  Yet in a place where I traditionally focus in on suffering, as I was studying to teach this go around, something about the text gripped me in a new way.  The past week we camped out in chapters 1 and 2 of Job. 

I’ve struggled with the text and why God let things go down the way he did…but then it struck me.  Job’s response revealed to me the glory given to God in the fact that Job would not curse him.  First, he takes away his possessions and his family.  These are things that surround his life.  Second, he takes away his health and wellness.  These are the things he needed to carry on in life. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m sure I would have had a few words for the big man upstairs.  Job doesn’t sin (1:22) and in a profound way accepts adversity (2:10).  Accept adversity???  I’ll be honest; I’m not the best at suffering.  I seek my own personal comfort.  But there’s something so powerful about accepting adversity.  It says we trust and value God and that our adversity is short-lived, like a vapor. 

Job sums it up like this…Naked I came and naked I’ll return (1:20-21).  He stands before God naked and stripped of everything yet he lacks nothing.  If Job is as righteous as he appears, then Satan is wrong, in which case the prosperity doesn’t matter anyway.  If righteousness is all that Job ultimately values, that cannot be taken away from him. 

The aim of Satan is to destroy Job’s joy in God.  Putting Job on display, God gains an open victory over Satan and is glorified.  Job loses everything, but responds in a profound way that makes us realize he lacks nothing.  The most probing questions here really is this, “If you lost everything, would Christ be enough?”

We don’t like the story of Job because we fear we might be hit with what he was hit with and that makes us question God and makes us a little bent out of shape…but God, even more than Job, knows what deep loss really feels like. 

The superior worth of God becomes known in Job’s response.  We now become aware of what God was aiming for…the revelation of the value of God himself.  This isn’t about downplaying the storms of life.  Job grieves his loss in a gut-wrenching way.  It’s about realizing that the only way to survive the coming storms is placing supreme value in your relationship with God.

WEATHERING the storms of life really comes down to WHETHER or not you value God the way you ought to.