1 Peter 5:10 “And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself . . . establish you.”
The word “establish” in the verse above is the same word that is translated as “founded” in Matthew 7:25. There, in the closing words of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.” And so we get great insight as to how, exactly, Christ “establishes” a person who has put their faith in Him.
In the passage in 1 Peter 5 we are told that the process of being established in our faith, i.e., to be enabled to weather the storms of life when they come to us, is, in part, by way of suffering. Suffering involves the testing that the Lord allows to touch our lives to evaluate the strength of our faith. But that evaluation is not in the sense that God is evaluating it for His own reference. No, He knows very well just how firm our faith really is. However, we typically do not. It isn’t until our faith is tested that we find out if we really believe what we say or think we believe. That’s when the rubber meets the road, so to speak.
But then, when those tests come, our responses to them are critical. It is then, as we see from Matthew 7, that the Lord himself establishes us as we take what He’s said to us and obey it – or not. You see, it’s so easy when all is right in our world to love those around us. When the sky is blue and the birds are singing sweetly, we can be sweet too. But will we love when we don’t feel so loving? Will we base our reactions to the vicissitudes in life according to how we feel or according to what God has said? For example, when we face a difficult situation in the church we attend, will we turn our back on it or obey the Lord Who has told us to “not (neglect) to meet together, as is the habit of some, but (encourage) one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near” (Hebrews 10:25)? When anxiety and depression begin to bear down upon us, will we isolate ourselves and go into our shell or will we keep reaching out the Lord in prayer and, again, keep meeting together with other Christians as the Lord has told us to do? When the money is tight and there are things that we want, will we hold on to what the Lord has given us, or will we continue to sacrificially and cheerfully give back to Him?
You see, if the tests come and we disobey our Lord, who is to blame if we crash and burn as a result of them? The Lord? Conversely, if He’s promised that if we simply obey what He’s said to us, it is THEN that we will weather the storm, doesn’t it make sense to do just that?
May God help us to obey Him, including when the clouds darken around us and when to do so just doesn’t seem to make sense. May He give us the good sense to lean hard on His wisdom which can settle us and see us through every single storm, rather than to turn from Him to our own ideas, ideas that are as fragile as the shifting sand.
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