When your back is against the wall

Have you ever felt a situation was so desperate that it was crushing you? That you had your back to the wall? That everything was closing in on you?

There is a narrow pass in the mountains of present-day Turkey near Paul’s home town of Tarsus. It is so narrow that, travelling by foot, there are places you can barely squeeze through. This is thought by Bible scholars to be the source of Paul’s statement to the Corinthians, “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed.” The last word refers to being caught in a place so narrow you can barely get through. It’s a place Paul would have had to traverse many times as he made his way in and out of Tarsus.

There are massive crevasses in the rock of the Niagara Escarpment not far from our house. I don’t look down them when I jump over them, because I am somewhat claustrophobic (and I don’t like heights either). But with many of them, if you did fall down, you’d just get stuck.

Have you ever been in such a place?

Last week there was a social media opportunity in Canada for people to publicize their issues with mental illness or stress. I noticed a number of comments from pastors’ wives concerning the struggles their husbands have as pastors.

Whether it’s because I’m a Christian leader or not, I can certainly and openly testify to many battles I have fought with fear, stress and feelings of giving up. In fact, a recent survey noted that at any given time, 75% of pastors in the United States are considering doing just that.

Part of the reason for this is that pastors are dealing all the time with people in their churches from every walk of life who are themselves in the same boat, and at some point it all gets too much.

Someone once said to me, “When you’re at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on.” It’s funny, but also very descriptive of where we occasionally find ourselves.

Can I suggest there’s no shame in that?

I am quitting a perfectly good job and losing my lifeline to financial security to step out in faith (again). As of yet, we have nowhere definite to relocate to, and by no means are our finances in place. Many mornings I wake up with anxiety. My cure is to do 100 push-ups and follow that up with chin-ups and sit-ups and generally exert myself to the point my anxiety gets knocked out of my head. Until the next morning when it comes back…

Yes, I am stupid. Yes, Jesus keeps yelling in my ears, as he did this morning: “Your father knows what you need before you ask him.” That’s Matthew 6:8, by the way, not some prophetic pronouncement. And there’s lots more in that chapter about money, fear and God’s provision. You should read it regularly.

I was sitting in my car by the bay a while ago watching the seagulls, when I felt the Lord spoke to me to read out loud to myself the last half of Matthew 6. It’s all about the birds and the grass and the stupidity of being anxious, and how our mandate is actually very simple. It’s to seek his kingdom and let him do the rest.

It’s a good word for those days when I feel my back is against the wall.

When I was 19 and had no money to go to university, I asked God to help me. He gave me an all-expenses paid scholarship to one of the finest universities in the world.

When I started my first church, I had no money and no backers. I asked God to help me and he did.

When we went to Canada as newly-weds with no money, no job and nothing but a word from God, I asked God to help me. And he did.

When I started my second church, I had no money and no backers. I asked God to help me and he did.

Twice, when it looked like our church would fall apart and we would be left with nothing, I asked him to help me and he did.

When your back is against the wall, ask God to help you.

And he will.

Pressure is my friend

It must have been one of those kinds of summers. Here is my second post on pressure in one month.

Every so often I have one of those awful days when one crisis seems to land on top of another, and I reach that point where I think that if one more thing happens, I am going to crack up, explode, implode or just simply drop dead, which would resolve all my problems quite nicely.

It’s at those very moments that a phrase spoken many years ago by my spiritual mentor, Duane Harder, always surfaces in my mind. I hate those words he spoke, mostly because I knew they were true. So here it goes: “Pressure is my friend.”

No, no, I protest, you made a mistake there, Duane. Pressure is not my friend at all. It is destructive, it is soul-destroying, it makes my life miserable.

But here’s the thing. Pressure does produce all sort of undesirable feelings and emotions, and it can absolutely ruin your day, week or month, no doubt about it. I’ve been there.

But the question to be asked is this: Is God really sovereign? Is he truly sitting on the throne of heaven? Is his absolute sovereignty just an item of theological truth we believe in our mind, or is it a lived reality in our experience?

If God is sovereign, then he has allowed that pressure to come upon us. That is not to say he is the author of some of the bad or wrong things that caused the pressure. It is just to say that he sovereignly and purposefully allowed the crisis to come upon us.

We complain about pressure because it doesn’t feel good. But what we should be doing is asking what God’s purpose is in the pressure.

And here’s an answer which is as good as any: pressure is meant to propel us into the presence of God.

When do we grow in God? Not when times are good, but when things are hard. The impact of our still very imperfect nature ensures that we usually don’t seek God seriously until we have to.

When the pressure mounts, can I encourage you to do one simple thing? Go somewhere where you have some privacy, throw yourself on God’s mercy, submit to God’s ways and cry out to him for help.

I have a good friend called Mike Monson who owns a couple of meat-packing factories, one in Michigan and the other in Indiana. If you tour the premises, you will see how the beef or pork is ground up and squeezed into packages fit for sale. That’s what pressure does. In this case, it produces some of the tastiest pork patties you will find anywhere in the United States.

I have days when I feel like the poor cow or pig entering Mike’s killing floor. But the truth is that pressure has the effect of killing my pride, my independence and my rebellion. It may not make me fit to eat, but it does make me fit to live more effectively as a son of God.

I love men and women of faith. But faith is not the ability to shield ourselves from pain and pressure. Faith is the ability to stand in the midst of anything hell can throw against us. The power of faith is not in our confession, but in the God whose promise and Word we confess.

When the pressure becomes unbearable, all you can do is hold on to the sovereignty and the love of God. But that is all you need to do, for in fact his love is holding on to you.

And what the enemy intended for evil will be turned to good in his amazing hands.

If you’re in Michigan, try one of Mike’s pork patties, and be grateful to God that the result of his pressure process leaves you in much better condition than Mike’s poor pigs.

But here’s one last tip: don’t ask Mike for the recipe. He won’t give it to you.

And you don’t need it, because what works for Mike or his pigs may not work for you. God’s recipe for producing character in each person is different. Just embrace what he is doing in you.

Pressure is your friend. Let it do its work.

The bottom line

I remember the day, many years ago now, when I watched my neighbour backing out of his driveway to go to work, and wishing it were me. He had a great job as a stock broker, few if any financial worries, and for the most part worked with numbers, not people. I am not going to illustrate the differences between him and me, but you can fill in the blanks.

Have you ever day-dreamed about a life where there was no stress, no anxiety and no pressure? Have you ever looked around you and felt you were the only person in the room facing all those things? Have you ever wished you had the peaceful, happy and prosperous life of all those people around you?

Admit it. You have. I don’t think you’re any better than me.

There are several problems with this. First, you will never get a life that is so completely filled with endless positives. Nobody lives like that, not even the most enthusiastic prosperity preacher. Second, remember all those other people you are envying? Guess what? They all have problems too. Half of them are probably looking at you, wishing they had what they think you have.

I like to make a distinction between happiness and joy. I get this from C.S. Lewis as well as the Bible. Happiness is the delusion that we can find total serenity based on outwardly positive circumstances. Apart from the fact that nobody lives in such circumstances, it makes us hostage to every wind and gust of adversity that might threaten all the nice but flimsy supports we are relying on. Remember the house built on sand?

So are we, as Christians, to live in continuous gloom and despair? Not at all. Joy is the gift we receive as we realize we can find an inner peace and contentment in our relationship with Christ that is not dependent on outward circumstances but on the God who rules the universe.

Think of the most beautiful stained-glass window you can imagine. There’s an amazing rose window in Durham Cathedral that will take your breath away. Stained glass only comes to life when the light shines through it. God has created a magnificent stained-glass window. The window is his dominion over the created world around us -- people and circumstances as well as geography. The Holy Spirit is the light. When he enters your life and fills you, you see the window you never saw before.

It doesn’t mean everything suddenly becomes easy, but it gives us a very precious and vastly under-rated gift: perspective. Not just any perspective, but God’s perspective. It’s the gift of seeing as he sees.

Paul was writing to his friends about the reality of evil and the hardship of spiritual attack. Then he says this: “But the Lord is faithful” (2 Thessalonians 3:3). The small word “but” overrides everything that has gone before. And there’s something else. Normally the Greek verb “is” would be left out and the meaning understood without it, but it isn’t. That means the sentence should read: “The Lord IS faithful,” as if Paul is screaming the word “is.”

Seeing the stained-glass window puts everything in a different light. You start to see how what you wanted would not have helped you, and how what you didn’t want did help you. You remember that God works all things together for good. You start to become grateful. You begin to ditch the self-pity. And bit by bit, you stop looking out your window wishing you were your neighbour.

My neighbour’s literal bottom line was undoubtedly better than mine.

But after a while, I began to see the stained-glass again. And I reminded myself of the real bottom line:

“But the Lord IS faithful.”

Facing the flood

Do you ever feel overwhelmed?

We had that feeling last week. Our eldest son Michael was married to his fiancee Samantha on Saturday afternoon in our back yard. As the week progressed, our house filled up with people. Children and grandchildren appeared from every direction. Fridges and freezer were stuffed with wedding food. A marquee was erected. A stack of chairs materialized. Odd jobs put off for months were finished off in rapid order. And to top it all, the weather network decreed a sudden end to our three-month drought, predicting heavy rain, high winds and thunderstorms just in time for the outdoor ceremony.

And in the meantime, all the other challenges and circumstances of life and work continued. People did not stop have crises or needing help.

We were stretched, but in this case only by what I call the volume of circumstances.

What happens when it’s not just the volume, but the nature of the circumstances that becomes overwhelming? What happens when you’re not just physically exhausted, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually worn out?

I have found there are two possible options. One is to try to control everything myself. That means doing everything I can to change the circumstances around me. My end goal is self-protection. I want all the nasty things to go away and leave me in peace.

There’s only one problem with this. God’s end goal is not to protect me from everything that stresses me out. His goal is to draw me into a deeper dependency on himself. It won’t take you long to figure out how those two goals could easily be at cross-purposes.

So the smart thing to do is to take the second option. That is to throw myself on the mercy of God and ask him to keep me in the midst of whatever it is he is doing in me. In the end, it will work out far better for me to let God’s purposes take their course.

This is why Psalm 55:22 has always meant so much to me: “Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.”

To cast your burden on the Lord means this: give the control over to him. Stop trying to interfere, manipulate and self-protect. It never works, and will only wear you out.

Your act of faith in casting your burden forms the bridge to his promise: “He will never permit the righteous to be moved.” To go over that bridge can seem like the scariest thing you’ve ever done. It’s that moment when fear and darkness will do their best to paralyze you and keep you back.

It is at that instant that an unshakeable belief in the sovereignty of God is so critical. That conviction involves two things: an assurance that God is all-loving and the knowledge that he is all-powerful.

Faith is neither intellectual certainty nor emotional serenity. Faith is a gift, a conviction that we are to step out in obedience, born at the place where God’s Spirit encounters our spirit. It stares down all that opposes the will of God. In utter human weakness it reaches out for divine strength, and in that strength it conquers. “And this is the victory that has overcome the world - our faith” (1 John 5:4).

If you have that faith, it will come up under your feet like a solid rock. It will enable you to run boldly across that bridge. You can be sure of one thing: Jesus is standing on the other side to welcome you.

And what about our wedding? For twelve hours it had rained and rained, and at 1 pm, the appointed hour, it was still raining. But God’s timing is perfect. The bride was 25 minutes late. At the very moment she stepped out of the car in our driveway, the rain stopped. And it stayed dry all day. To the south of us, storms, winds, torrential rains and even a tornado raged all afternoon and evening across large parts of the province. But in our back yard, we had a great wedding, meteorological serenity, and a wonderful start to what we trust will be a great marriage.

Thanks be to God.

Life in the pressure cooker

We had a big pressure-cooker in the house I shared with 11 other guys as an undergraduate. It was always threatening to blow up if you didn’t treat it well, and take a load of potatoes along with it.

I spent a day recently trying to help three different people whose life is in the pressure cooker. All three situations were very serious and bringing almost unbearable stress and pain.

Life in the pressure cooker is not easy. We manage to fall into it different ways. Sometimes it’s our own stupidity. Sometimes it’s a complicated mixture. Sometimes it’s just stuff that happens totally out of our control.

The only thing we can manage is our response. And even that can be very hard when our resources have been so depleted. But there are two keys to surviving.

One is the lifeline of our relationship with God. I never fail to be amazed at how God hears my desperate and despairing cries at those low moments. One thing about God -- he is always there. That is one of his names -- Yahweh shammah, which means “the Lord is there.”

It doesn’t matter where “there” is. That’s where you’ll find him.

No matter how deep your darkness, God always has a light to turn on. But you have to ask.

The second key is friends and family you can count on. We all need friends who will also be “there” when trouble strikes. Cultivate friendships in the good times. Be there for others. Cast your bread on the waters and it will return. I can guarantee it.

And remember if you need to ask God for help, you also need to ask your friends. It never ceases to amaze me how we fail to reach out for the support we need. Sometimes we feel too ashamed, sometimes we’re too proud. Get over it. Let your friends help you. Tell them how bad things are. Their job is to help you: “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).

And so the question arises: “Where is God in all this?”

The answer is obvious. God is in the pressure cooker. Even though it may not be accurate to say he created it (after all, he is not the author of sin, sickness or any other earthly disaster or misfortune), he still is watching over it and using it.

The pressure cooker has a more Biblical name: the refiner’s fire. It’s where James tells us to count it all joy. It’s where Peter tells us our faith is being refined to bring forth gold.

Of course you can’t see any of that when you’re in the middle of it. That’s where it’s up to God and friends to carry you through. But when you look back, the gold is there.

And if there’s someone you know in extreme need, go just sit with them. A friend of mine was executive assistant to Margaret Thatcher. One day the great lady found a staff member in tears. Her husband had recently died. Mrs. Thatcher stopped her activities at once and focussed all her attention on this lady. She went and made a cup of tea, and then sat with her until she felt better. That was the best use the Prime Minister of Great Britain had for her time that day.

The God of all creation is there to sit with you until you’re through your crisis. Just ask him.

Your faith is proven real in the pressure cooker. You have faith even when you think you don’t. When all you can do is cry out to God in utter desperation, that’s all the faith you need. And out of that faith he will bring his gold.

When things look hopeless, just remember they’re not.

And that old pressure cooker never did blow up. It kept turning raw potatoes into something as reasonably edible as 12 young men who were more interested in either studying or partying could produce!