November 13 – A Prescription for Pain (Romans 12:9-13)

“Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.”
(Romans 12:12)

IN WORD:
When clouds gather, we get discouraged. It’s a natural reaction. Our eyes tell us to run for cover, to hang on for survival, or to prepare to die. And we believe our eyes. We put an awful lot of faith in what they tell us. We let their information sink into our hearts and thrive there — no matter how painful that is.
Paul gives us a prescription for our pain. He tells us how to have joy, patience, and faith. We are to place our hope not on what our eyes tell us — that is too often hopeless — and we are to place our faith in God. When the clouds gather, we are to gather to Him. When faced with a choice between letting the clouds obscure Him or letting Him obscure the clouds, we are to choose the latter. Not to do so is to overestimate our problems and to underestimate our God.
Our perspectives are distorted so easily. We are habitual twisters, making dark things our surest truth and God’s light our most uncertain refuge. Such a distortion is a sure recipe for despair. Instead, we are to believe what the Word and the Spirit tell us, regardless of the witness of the clouds. God must always loom larger. Until we’re trained in this perspective, our minds are not renewed.

IN DEED:
So what are the details of the prescription? (1) We are to fix our eyes on hope and to be joyful about it. God has given us a glimpse of reality: His strength, His Kingdom’s inevitability, His promise of intervention, His eternal rewards. Why would we let a few clouds undermine those certainties? (2) We are to be patient in affliction. Those realities are invisible for a time, but they will be clear soon enough. And, (3) We are to be faithful in prayer. Why? Not because prayer changes things, but because God changes things and we must communicate with Him. His intervention is not arbitrary; it is the result of the give-and-take relationship, and prayer is the means to that relationship. When we’ve followed this prescription, we’ll notice a remarkable change: Clouds don’t seem to matter so much anymore.

“Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.” -G. K. Chesterton-