Finding Joy in the Trial

And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full.

1 John 1:4

I used to believe that life wouldn’t have too many problems as long as I was saved and kept doing the right thing. I seriously struggled with this when I had a mental breakdown. I truly thought I must be out of God’s will because I believed as long as I stayed in it nothing too bad would happen to me.

Now, some of you are probably thinking I was stupid for believing that, but the reality is I haven’t met many Christians who don’t believe it on some level. I mean, isn’t that the lesson we are repeatedly taught from childhood. Look at Noah, Elijah, David, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshshach and Abednego, Gideon and more, who all avoided bad situations because they did the right thing. And Jonah was only swallowed by a whale because he stepped out of God’s will. It was an ingrained belief I didn’t even know I had, until I found myself sitting in a pit.

I believed it, because I was subtly taught it in sermons and in Christian songs:

“Believe him and all will be well” (H Lemmel, Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus) or,

“You must do his sweet will to be free from all ill,” (E. Hoffman, Is Your All on the Altar?)

And there are plenty more like these. The older I become, the more I notice this watered-down version of a prosperity gospel taught in some form or another: that Christianity means nothing too bad will happen to us, or a life of blessings in the here and now, or that everything will be work out in the end, or that God will rescue us if we have enough faith. And it is why when some Christian’s encounter a serious tragedy, like the death of a child, a cancer diagnosis, an abusive relationship, the loss of a limb or a mental breakdown, it’s followed by a crisis of faith, perhaps not admitted out loud, but still present.

But you know what else this “nothing too bad will happen Christianity” teaches? That good Christians don’t get anxiety. That good Christians don’t suffer depression. That good Christians don’t burn out. And that good Christians don’t have mental breakdowns. So when those things happened, I heaped guilt on myself, because I believed it must all be my own fault. And if we are all totally honest, it is often how we judge others when something bad happens to them. If you lose your job, have rebellious teenagers, have mental health issues, go bankrupt, crash your car, break a knee, or just struggle with life, you can be sure Job’s friends will be paying you a visit, or at least whispering behind your back.

So when life wasn’t amazing, I got this feeling that I was missing something. That I was promised something better. That being a Christian was meant to lead to a life I wasn’t living: one full of contentment, peace, joy, and love. A life I couldn’t attain no matter how hard I tried. I assumed that it must be me, that there was something I wasn’t grasping about Christianity, something that everyone else seemed to get.

I kept searching for this elusive state of joy I thought should be mine.

But while sitting in that pit, God showed me many truths, including, that most of the best promises to us aren’t for this life. Think about Paul, or Peter or John. Prison, beatings, hungry, homeless, shipwrecked, crucified, exiled, boiled in oil, and beheaded. They are hardly poster-boys for the version of Christianity we are so frequently sold, and early church history is likewise full of martyrs.

There are no promises of a easy life, that bad stuff won’t happen. God doesn't promise that you won’t get sick, that you won’t have accidents, that you won’t lose every physical possession you own, that the plane won’t crash, that you won’t have mental health problems, or that all your prayers will be answers. There isn’t a promise that you will one day get married, or have kids, that you will be financially blessed, that you will get your dream career, or that you will live a long life in good health.

Now, as Christians we are still to bear the fruit of the spirit, and I’ve lost count of the number of sermons I’ve heard comparing happiness and joy, always accompanied by the same definitions: happiness is an emotion and temporary, joy is an attitude and lasts. But I have often wondered where this information comes from, because the definitions are neither Biblical nor from the dictionary. (Is there a sermon on Youtube, I don’t know about?)

The word happy occurs 25 times in the Bible and means blessed in both the old and new testament. That isn’t just an emotion nor always temporary:

Yea, happy is that people, whose God is the Lord. (Psalm 144:15b)

While, joy in its various forms occurs almost 200 times and can mean pleasure, gladness, cheerful, or even happy. Joy is actually a synonym of happy, because joy is also an emotion.

And the thing about emotions is, they are sometimes involuntarily, they can be triggered without warning, they can’t always be controlled, they change throughout the day, and with different seasons of life; and people can feel multiple, often conflicting emotions at the same time. When my dad died, it was after years of dementia, so while on the one hand I felt huge grief that he was gone, I also felt glad that his suffering was over and he was finally meeting his heavenly Father. And glad is a definition of joy: I felt joy because I knew where he had gone, even as I grieved.

I think perhaps we don’t recognise the amount of joy we actually have in our own lives because we label it with a dozen different words: happy, glad, cheerful, pleasure, delight, glee, elation, merriment, exultation, felicity, jubilance, mirth, rapture, or even bliss. While 'joy' remains a state of mind we think is unattainable. When was the last time you felt happy? Laughed? Smiled? Felt excited? Felt pleasure? Made merry? Those are all expressions of joy. I feel joy multiple times a day, because I feel happy, cheerful and glad multiple times a day. That is the emotion of joy.

But where does that leave us when everything goes wrong? When we are in a bad place how do we feel joy?

I didn't find that joy by learning to love every minute of life, or by pretending I had it altogether. I found it by trusting the promises. The promises are why the apostles could always feel joy during their trials:

And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them. (Acts 16:25)

Paul and Silas sat praying and worshipping while they waited, because they had read the spoiler alert and they knew the ending. Not a ‘nothing too bad will happen’ promise, but the promise of eternal life after death! Praising God in the trials is about acknowledging the promises that are still to come. Horatio Spafford wrote It is Well with my Soul following the death of his four daughters, but think about the final verse:

And Lord, haste the day when the faith shall be sight,

The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;

The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,

Even so, it is well with my soul.

It is all about the promises. The secret to feeling joy in the midst of the tragedy is in the promises. In Psalm 23, God doesn’t promise to take the valley away, he simply promises is to be in it with us (v4). That valley might be one God will be leading you through all the way to glory. And have you ever realised that he only prepares the table (v5)? The feast doesn’t happen in this life because the wedding supper is for when we finally meet him (Revelation 19:9).

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that life will be easier as a Christian, that the dark valley won’t happen, that the valley will only be a small one, or that you will escape the valley quickly. God still does miracles and God still answers prayer. But he doesn’t promise that your life will be easy, and that bad stuff won’t happen; he doesn’t promise the miracle. And what God has shown me these last few years, is that sometimes when he lifts us up out of the pit (Psalm 40:2) it is straight into glory.

If you’ve ever read the autobiography of Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place, then you will be familar with her story. Corrie and her sister Betsie were imprisoned during the German occupation of Poland during WWII, for aiding Jews. They were truly in a horrible pit. They spent years imprisoned but smuggled a Bible into the concentration camp. They preached the gospel, read the Bible and prayed with the other women. God performed numerous miracles and many were saved. Eventually, Betsie succumbed to the dreadful living conditions and died. But miraculously, due to a clerical error Corrie was released instead of being executed. But what people often miss is that God lifted them both up out of the pit, it’s just Betsie was taken straight to glory.

This life is just the waiting room, but we all spend too much time focused on earthly things when we should be focusing on heavenly ones. Finding joy in the trial means getting your focus right, because all the best promises are waiting for us on the other side.

All Glory to God,