God's Refusal to Leave Us Alone: Affliction

I must say that I thought of the following things while meditating on the Scriptures and following sermon excerpts from John Piper:

Until you believe that life is war - that the stakes are your soul - you will probably just play at Christianity with no bloodearnestness and no vigilance and no passion and no wartime mindset. If that is where you are this morning, your position is very precarious. The enemy has lulled you into sleep or into a peacetime mentality, as if nothing serious is at stake. And God, in his mercy, has you here this morning, and had this sermon appointed to wake you up, and put you on a wartime footing.... There is a mean, violent streak in the true Christian life! But violence against whom, or what? Not other people. It's a violence against all the impulses in us that would be violent to other people. It's a violence against all the impulses in our own selves that would make peace with our own sin and settle in with a peacetime mentality. It's a violence against all lust in ourselves, and enslaving desires for food or caffeine or sugar or chocolate or alcohol or pornography or money or the praise of men and the approval of others or power or fame. It's violence against the impulses in our own soul toward racism and sluggish indifference to injustice and poverty and abortion. Christianity is not a settle-in-and-live-at-peace-with-this-world-the-way-it-is kind of religion. If by the Spirit you kill the deeds of your own body, you will live. Christianity is war. On our own sinful impulses.

"Many are the afflictions of the righteous..." Psalm 34:19a

Different environments produce different afflictions. Dangerous places yield the earnest affliction of physical threat. Safe places yield the subtle affliction of complacency. Easy and comfortable places yield the creeping affliction of intellectual numbness. Oppressive climates yield the overbearing affliction of spiritual, social, emotional, or physical torment. The place of erudition yields the tempting affliction of academic pride. Countless and varied are the afflictions that assail the Christian soul. In such a twisted and broken world, our enemy never rests, using all manner of weapon to nullify the work of the Redeemer in our hearts and weaken the work of the Holy Spirit in our daily lives. Not only that, but a constant torment of a battle within rages ceaselessly. That which is divine seeks to conquer the worldly desires of man, while that which is fleshly desires to take back its original possession.

Oh, for grace to endure such endless battle! The promised, precious land of the soul is at stake, no less, to be won by the victor! Yet the victory is already assigned to Almighty God, else there would be no use for affliction whatsoever. The affliction would be no torment to the wicked, but a delight and pleasure to him. His folly is for him his wage and eternal destruction his recompense from an all-conquering God, sufficient in His justice among men. However peculiar it may be, these various afflictions are reserved, according to God's perfect measure, for those who are righteous. If it were to be any other way, the fool would be always left to his own pleasures, at home in this world and satisfied by his own wickedness, which is, no doubt, not an affliction at all to him. Sin becomes exceedingly sinful only when it is seen to be sin! It is not until the repentant man meet his Savior that his wicked comforts turn to affliction.

It would be, as the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes, "like a chasing after the wind" to attempt to fully understand the mystery of the Providence of God in afflicting the most righteous of men. But in His goodness, the Ruler of the Universe sees fit to chastise his chosen ones in every season of life, that they may be refined into His own redeemed image from one degree of glory to another. It is only left up to them to recognize and acknowledge the affliction as His divine, sovereign, loving care for us as our Father.

Upon re-reading these thoughts, I am compelled to remember my friends in Morocco, who have recently suffered God-ordained affliction that will work for their eternal good. We here in the safe arms of American freedoms are unable to grasp the reality of many persecutions and injustices that happen worldwide, like this one. Yet this is not a surprise to the Almighty, Omniscient God of the Universe who orchestrates all things according to His perfect purposes.

"For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known"
(1 Corinthians 13:12).

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