Shall We Indeed Accept Good From The Lord And Not Accept Adversity

This morning we're going to be studying a short section from the beginning of the book of Job. And before we get into that text, I want to ask you a question or maybe draw to your mind arguments or disagreements between husbands and wives. We all have them. And we're all very attentive when we have those arguments, unless they get to like the nuclear level. We're always aware of who's around. And if someone comes around or knocks on the door or if... One of the kids comes by. The argument stops. The conflict stops. It's put away. There's a timeout. It gets picked up again later, and it has to be finished. Well, our text this morning is a record of a husband and wife having a pretty intense conflict. And here it is recorded in Scripture for us to learn from. Job and his wife are beside themselves with grief. They've just lost their children.

They've just lost all of their property, having some killed and others stolen. And Job also has been afflicted with a terrible illness that's caused his body to be covered with weeping sores. And so he's sitting there in the ashes, scraping himself with a piece of broken clay, wishing to die. And then his wife comes, and they have this interaction. And what we're going to do is read their interaction. Now, you might think that with that intro that this sermon's actually about husbands and wives, and it's not actually about husbands and wives and their fighting, though there's a lot to learn. from Job and his wife in this passage. Actually, what we're going to be looking for as we study this interaction between Job and his wife is their different responses to adversity. Because you and I, we have difficulties in our lives. We have unmet desires. We have things we want that we don't get. And we'd all grant that they're not as severe as losing all of our children and our property in one fell swoop and being struck with a debilitating sickness all in a matter of probably a week.

A few weeks, maybe a month, not a long time. But we do have discontentments, we do have disappointments and unmet expectations. And the question for us is, will we handle them the way Job did in this passage, or will we handle them the way that his wife did in this passage? Our difficulties don't have to be nearly the severity of what they've gone through to have our weaknesses break through as Job's wife's weaknesses break through, and even as Job's weaknesses break through later in the book. But in this passage, The things that Job says to his wife are good things and godly things and appropriate things to be said and to be done. And so for our part, we ought to seek to emulate them. And so my hope is that God will strengthen us to do just that, that he'll grow us in this area as we consider this passage. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord from Job 2, verses 8 and 9. Then his wife said to him, Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die. But he said to her,

You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity? In all this, Job did not sin with his lips. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. The first point I want to make to you this morning is that your convictions, your commitments, your priorities are not settled until they're tested in any area. When people were coming after Jesus and they were going to follow him, what did he tell them they ought to do? He tells them they ought to count the cost of following me. Because if they were to come and follow him not knowing what the cost of following him would be, then they were going to end up making shipwreck of their faith or their lives. They were going to start well and then wither away. And so he says from the very beginning of becoming a Christian, you need to count the cost. You need to weigh it out. You need to test.

what you say. Another way of saying this is words are cheap. I think of young couples when they're getting married or preparing to get married. They talk, you talk. I talked like I had a whole bunch of stuff figured out. I knew how it was all going to be and I knew how it was all supposed to be and I knew how we were going to avoid, I was going to avoid all the problems of the people that I had seen because we had learned from them until I got married. And then I started and am still learning what I didn't know or am unable to do. You think our marriage won't be like that? Okay, we'll see. Our kids won't do that in the service. Our kids won't make that kind of mess at the table. Our kids will go to sleep at night. Our kids will come when we call. We are gonna do it right. And you're gonna make a plan and you're gonna do it. And you and your husband and your wife, they're gonna be agreed about how that's gonna be accomplished. And the kids are just gonna,

Snap right to it. Because that's how life works. Or so you think until you actually have to do it. And so these are just a few examples of the gap or the space between what we say and what we think and what we're convicted of and how committed we are to it when a difficulty comes. New husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way. She's a weaker vessel, right? Right. Check. Gonna do it. For a few days or a few weeks. I mean, Once we get out of the honeymoon phase, you get pretty tired of doing that pretty quickly. Why? I'm going to submit to my husband. I'm not going to be fearful. I'm going to do all that stuff. Until you don't agree with him, or until you follow him and he makes a bad decision, and now you've got to clean up the mess of his, now that mess has to be cleaned up, and you're like, oh, we learned the lesson. We don't do what he says because he's an idiot. So God brings trials into our lives all over the place to test our faith.

Or maybe we shouldn't think about it as a test, but rather a confirmation. You ever ordered something online, you click the submit button and it says, your order's being processed. And there's this time, you're waiting for the email confirmation with the number, you know, for your records. And there's this gap and you're like, did it go through? Did it happen? Did the internet? What, you know, you were committed to something, but now is it coming? There's a time. There has to be a confirmation. For it to take place. And so our commitments to being a husband and a wife, to honoring God in those areas, to being a mother and father, to being a good employee, to being a faithful citizen, really to being Christian, they're not proven until they're tested. And those tests don't just come once and then you say, oh, you passed the test, no more hard for you. Those tests come. Like the waves on the sea, they come. Time and again, they come. They're tests. To teach us.

to persevere. And so that's the situation that you find Job and his wife. We don't know his wife's name. She's Job's wife, and she's not mentioned much in Scripture at all. But they have a test. They have a trial come into their lives, the death of all of their children, the loss of all of their property and all of their wealth, even their health, his health anyway. And so when all of this comes, Job's wife says to him, do you still hold fast your integrity? Are you still committed to these things that our lives have been revolved around? You know, it's easy in this passage to get down on Job's wife and say she was a terrible, terrible woman. Just a shrew of a wife. I don't think she was. I think actually she was a pretty godly woman. She was married to a pretty godly man. They had a pretty godly life before that.

When he was pointed out, when Satan and the Lord are talking, he says, if you consider my servant Job, how likely is it that this godly man is married to this shrew of a woman? It's more likely that she's actually a pretty good wife. Nevertheless, when adversity comes, their integrity is tested. Their faith is tested. And she falters. She fails. She asks him, is this still what we're about? Is this still what our commitments are? Wouldn't it be better for us just to die? What do we know about Job's wife so that we don't get too down on her? Well, we know that she didn't die. She remained. We know that, as I said already, she was married to a very godly man. We also have no indication that at the end of the book of Job, when his fortunes and his family is restored, that he remarried another woman. We have no indication that she ever left or was put away by him.

We also know that Job respected her even when he rebuked her. He didn't call her a foolish woman. He said, you're speaking as a foolish woman. Have you ever spoken out of turn? You ever said something you knew you shouldn't have said? You couldn't help it. I'm sure we all have. Does that make you a fool if you say something foolish? No, it makes you someone who said something foolish. Off color. Out of place. And so we ought to have some sympathy for Job's wife here. She's just lost everything that... her life in this world consisted of except her husband. And now he's on the verge of death, it appears. And she's to be left alone with no one and nothing. And so she says, do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die. Can you identify with that sort of sentiment if you were in her shoes? Have you ever been tempted to curse God and die with much less difficulty? I have. So we need to be careful when we read scripture not to just...

Find the goodies and the baddies. The ones that do all the right stuff and the ones that do all the wrong stuff. Because if we're honest, we'll find that nobody does all the right stuff except Jesus. And everybody else's life is a mix of good and bad. And this account of Job's wife, and it's all the Lord's chosen to reveal to us, was one of her weak moments. So she did not do well. She had given up her integrity. When the test came, she did not pass the test. The blessing she had, though, was that her husband did. In this moment, He did well. Here's a question for you. Some of you guys like to worry about the future. You call it planning. Sometimes it is planning. Sometimes it's just worrying. Because there's nothing to be done about it. You're just churning about the futures and the what-ifs. And we play out these scenarios in our head. Well, if this happens, then I'm going to do that. And if this happens, then I'm going to do that. And we come up with all of these contingencies.

Eric has a funny story. I'm going to tell your funny story of when he was in a Christmas pageant or something. You were the angel Gabriel. And he had to do this thing that was scary to him. He had to walk along the baptismal, the cover over the baptismal at his church. And he was afraid that he was going to fall through it or fall into the baptismal. And so his plan as a six, seven-year-old little kid, he had a contingency plan. He was going to bring his goggles with him because he didn't want to get water in his eyes. And he was going to, if the thing that he was standing on gave way, in the time that it took him to fall, whip out his goggles, put them on, and keep the water out of his eyes. Now, we all laugh because we're like, well, that's a stupid plan. And what's the big deal about water? And there's not going to be any time. There's not going to be any time. I used to paint.

for a living. And I remember one time I was painting on the outside of a car dealership and I was in a scissor lift and I was probably 20 feet or so up in the air. And it was like 12 or 14 feet long. I had the extension out and the controls at one end and then you go back and you paint and you work your way forward. So I'd run the control out and then I'd, when I left the, I was standing up way at the front and I was on, like, I was just on a parking lot, flat, right? And then I stopped and I walked to the back of the thing.

Well, what I didn't realize was that that thing was on three wheels, and it was stable while I was at that end. The weight was on those three wheels. But when I walked to the back, it shifted onto these three wheels, and the whole lift went away from the building, like a foot or two, and I'm 20 feet in the air. Now, you think in those situations, if you work on lifts, you think, what I'm going to do is I'm going to jump. off of the thing at just the right time. I'm here to tell you that is not what you will do. What you will do is freeze and grab a hold of the railings that are falling, and you will go down in that position. You will not jump off of it because your brain doesn't process that quickly. The amount of time that it takes you to go pop, your brain's still stuck at what's happening. I could tell you many other stories of dumb stuff I've done where you think, I'm going to do this. There's no time.

You react. And this same principle is true with adversity. We play out the things we're worried about in our heads and we think, well, if this bad thing happens, then I'm going to respond like this because this is how Christians should respond and this is what we ought to do and this is how it's all going to work out. And we do this with every area of our life. And what I want you to know is the only way you will actually do anything other than do poorly is to train. and to make a habit in your life of doing the right things so that you don't have to think about it. If you have to think about what to do, you don't have time to do it. And so the interesting thing that we see here with Job and his wife is there's no time to think about a response when this kind of grief comes. They're not sitting there going, what would honor God? Because the grief is too strong. The pain is too much. They're not rationally processing through this. Could you imagine having,

Like one servant after the other. They came and they stole your donkeys. They came and they stole your wealth. They came and the house that your kids were feasting in fell in and they're all dead. You don't think when you get news like that. You just respond. And whatever's inside of you, whatever kind of man or woman you are, it's just going to be on display. And that's what we're peering into here with Job. We're peering into the righteousness that God observed about him. We're peering into the good thing about him. You will simply act and speak from what's in your heart without ever giving a thought to all those plans you made about how you know you should respond or how you might want to respond. Whatever's inside of you in those moments of adversity or discontentment, whatever's in there comes out. And it comes out unfiltered. Sometimes we try to make it come out in private where people don't see it, where it's not on display.

But God was kind to us in letting us peer into this tragedy in their life and see how they responded. To instruct us in how we ought to desire to respond and prepare to respond. Have you ever wondered, how could you respond well to the death of a child? Not all your children at once, but a child. How could you even begin to prepare for that? Well, the things that you get discontent about and frustrated about every single day, those are your tests. And if you fail those tests, you're going to fail the big, when the big problems come, you're going to fail those too. Because you didn't prepare when the little things came. You told yourself it was insignificant and it didn't matter and it wasn't a big deal. I'm not really that upset. But if you have the Holy Spirit, you have this commentary in the back of your head that's not always for you. That's not always on your side that's going, you're lying to yourself right now.

You know that's not true. That's not really how it went down. Everybody else thinks that's what happened, but you know better. You know that's not what was in your heart. And so these little trials that we have each day, these are the training ground. These are the tests that we ought to seek to pass and do well with so that when more difficult things come that are unbelievable to us, we'll have what we need inside of us to honor the Lord the way Job did. When you read the book of Job, it's easy to take this. Job is sort of, there's just like these bookends. But the vast majority of the book of Job is him not doing what I'm saying right now. It's Job running his mouth about how wrong God was for what he did. And how if he could get an audience with God, he would tell him so. Job's pretty bold. He becomes pretty entrenched.

In his anger, in his bitterness, in his depression? Cursing the day of his birth? Wanting to die? Becoming very foul and hard-hearted? Now, here's an aside. Has your spouse ever gone through something like that? They probably will at some point. Job's wife had her trouble here at the beginning, and then we don't know anything else about her. But she stood by while he struggled and cursed and was grumbling and did all the stuff that she, in her moment of weakness, said he eventually did do. It's interesting at the end of this, at the end of verse 10, it says, in all of this, Job did not sin with his lips. And we say, oh, that's good. Job didn't sin. And I say, well, let's be careful and take scripture for exactly what it says. It says that he didn't sin with his lips. And all of the Jewish scholars say, actually, he probably had sin in his heart. Because you look at the balance of the rest of the book and you're like, Job didn't come through this adversity without any bumps and bruises, you know, quite literally and figuratively.

The whole rest of the book is him being, doing poorly. And so when it says that he didn't sin with his lips, we say, okay, so what he said in this moment to his wife and about God, that was good. And we recognize that he was probably disciplining the same things that were coming out of his wife's mouth. He was disciplining those thoughts and feelings in his heart. And what the rest of the book is, until the end, until the Lord shows up, is him stopping the discipline. And so it's not enough just to keep our mouths shut. Sometimes we need to keep our mouths shut. And we need to say just a little bit and then mostly nothing. Because we know if we speak, we're going to pour out wickedness. But in this moment, Job did well. He looked at his wife and he says, you speak as one of the foolish women speaks. And what he means is, you speak as one of the women who has no faith in God, that has no trust.

who can take all of God's bounty and all of his blessing for granted. And in the moment when adversity strikes, you say, well, I'll take one from the Lord, good from the Lord, but not evil. And so he asks her, in his grief and in her grief, he asks her a question. Shall we indeed accept good from the God and not accept adversity? The first thing we need to realize is whatever comes to us in our life is allowed to come to us in our life by God. If you have good things in your life, like children and houses and money and family, those are gifts that God's given to you. If you don't think that's the case, just consider for a moment what you'd do if it was all taken away. If your spouse was taken away, if your children were taken away, if your job or your home or your vehicle or your clothing or your retirement account or whatever it is, if it was taken away, all of a sudden you go, that was mine and I needed it.

It was helpful. I loved it. I loved them. So those are the blessings of God that Job had. Those are the blessings that were taken away. And so all things that we have, good, bad, or indifferent, come to us from God in one way or another. Here's the difference between the good and the bad. We accept the good freely, and we enjoy it. We don't even think about it. We think, this is a good thing. I'm thankful for it. I'm glad to have it. We may not take the time we should to thank God for his blessings. It can feel repetitious to thank God for the things that you have very regularly. But there's a lesson, not in this passage of Job, but before that, that Job had a habit. He had these seven sons, and they all were well-to-do. And their habit, basically, as a big family, a huge family, is they would go around each of their houses. There were seven days in a week, and there were seven sons. And they would go around, and they would have a feast.

I'm one day at this son's house and the next day at the next son's house and the next day. And they just, that was their habit. They just rotated through and their life was a life of comfort, a life of bounty, a life of feasting. But what did Job do in addition to the feasting? It says that every week he would get up early in the morning, he would go out and he would offer sacrifices, burnt offerings in case his kids had sinned. He was thankful for them, and he was thankful for what he had, and yet he wanted to make sure that if there were sins that had been committed against God, that they were accounted for and taken, they were provided for through these offerings. Job was thankful for his life. He enjoyed it. And yet he was humble and knew that they were sinful people who didn't deserve those things. Are you grateful in the same way?

Do you give thanks for the normal stuff that you have in life that are God's blessings? Or does it have to be an extravagant thing for you to say, oh, I think this is from the Lord? Do you thank God for your spouse when you get married? Or do you thank God for your spouse when you've been married for 20 years? Or will you, maybe, for almost all of you? Will you continue to give thanks to God for his kindnesses? Or will you just come to take them for granted? Do you thank God for healthy children? For living children? For growing children? Most times we accept the good freely and without a thought. One way to fight against this neglect is to make time, to make a habit of thanking God for his blessings so that you don't become inured against them, so you don't become to think, well, that's just the way it is. Because it could become not the way it is. All of us have heard of tragic stories. Our daycare director, Sarah, has a nephew who's been dealing with...

for the last year. He's on the end of it. It's childhood leukemia. He's toward the end of the treatment. It was a very treatable type, but he's lost a year of school. His parents had to change their jobs. Everything in their life changed. He was just a happy 15-year-old, and then he got sick. And they just spent the next year of their life at Riley with their son going through chemotherapy. And so the way things are, you're not guaranteed to always stay that way. And so we ought to give thanks to God when things are good. You know what we don't do with good things? We never reject them. We don't ever say, oh, here's a good thing. I don't want that. I mean, maybe if someone comes to us with another piece of dessert and they say, you've already had a dessert, and they say, but here, have you tried this dessert? You might say, yeah, you really shouldn't have another dessert. Maybe we reject it then. But most of the time, when good things come to us, we just go, pile it on.

We don't grumble and complain and say, oh, I've had enough good stuff. Go give that to somebody else. We just accept it. We don't grumble. We don't reject because they don't cause us to struggle. They're not a temptation to us as we see it. We say, these are good things and I'm glad to have them. We receive them without question. It's important for us to recognize this right now because Job asks his wife, will you accept good from the Lord? And the answer is, of course, yes. Who wouldn't? But then he goes on to say, in my own words, If you'll accept good from the Lord, why won't you accept adversity from him? The obvious answer is because I like good things and I don't like bad things. I've got a bowl of ice cream and I've got some okra. Want another bowl? Some of you southerners might say, yeah, I like okra. What? I think if we took a poll, that would not be the consensus. We take good things without question. And what Job is arguing for here is if you accept good things from the hand of God,

without question, and you understand those good things to be coming to you because God loves you, because God's kind to you, because he just blesses you, why would you not trust that the exact same God, when he gives adversity to you, isn't doing something good for you? You say, well, because it's unpleasant, because it's painful, because it makes me cry. But if we'll accept one, we ought to accept the other. And we ought to accept it in the same way. It doesn't say, shall we accept good from God and tolerate adversity, or endure adversity, or resign ourselves to adversity. It's the exact same word. It's the exact same construction. If you will accept gladly and contentedly good things from the Lord, why will you not accept gladly and contentedly adversity from the Lord? And if we're honest, the answer to the question is because we don't think it's right for God to give adversity to his people.

That's the thing no one will say, but it's the thing that's in all of our hearts is, well, we think that that's a misstep. We think that's not the best thing to do. And we're wrong. And we ought to be very careful in our own hearts and minds to question what God does. And so living as a Christian, here's the difficulty of living as a Christian, is that you will spend your life wanting good things, desiring them, and receiving them. And then when something... Bad happens, God is still good. He's still good. He hasn't changed one bit because his gift to you, his will for you is different. He hasn't changed one bit. And so you say, we could think of this example, the example in scripture that we could use to sort of illustrate this is will my children become Christians? Do we have a guarantee in scripture that our children will become Christians? No.

We don't. Does that mean that it's just a crapshoot, it's just a coin toss that our children will follow the Lord? It's not that either. Do we have a guarantee they won't become Christians? No. We have this promise that God will be a God to us and to our children, and we have this declaration that Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated, that I've accepted the offering of Abel, but not the offering of Cain. And you're like, why? And the answer is, we don't know. We don't know, but God does know. So how are we to live? When you have children, for all of the hardship and all of the sorrow and all of the ups and downs and the sacrifices and all of that, wouldn't it all be made tolerable if you could have a guarantee that your kids would turn out the way you want them to? It'd make it a lot more tolerable. And it's an easy thing to say, but it's an impossible thing to promise. And so we all have to live in this tension where we,

We have children not really knowing what it's going to mean for our lives, how they're going to grow and mature and what they're going to require of us. We want them to become Christians, and then they struggle. And we say, okay, well, did I do something to deserve this? And we're always trying to mediate the transaction between God. How can I get to the safe space where I don't have to live by faith anymore, where I can say, I'm settled now. And we all have our places and ways of processing that. Sometimes the way we process that is through the sacraments. Once they get saved, once they get baptized, or once they become communicant, or once they pray the sinner's prayer, or once they, once they what? Have children never fallen away from the faith in their 30s or their 40s or their 50s?

Aren't all of us somebody's children and aren't our parents wanting things for us still? We recognize that if we throw our hands up in the air at the tension and say, well, it just doesn't matter then, that really what we've done is become like Job's wife in this passage. And so we have to live in this tension where we will pursue good things, desire good things, claim good things, like from our sermon last week about God's blessings, that we would take hold of them and say, those are mine. And when God, in his wisdom, doesn't give us that good thing that we were pursuing or has given it and removes it, we say, naked I've come into this world and naked I'll leave. Blessed be the name of the Lord. And that's hard. It's hard because that's something that's required, could be called up and be required of us at any moment. It could be required of you on the way home from church today if you get into a car accident. It could be required from you tomorrow at work if you lose your job or when you go to the doctor and find out not all is well.

It's the sort of thing that you can't ever be like, oh, I'm going to have time to prepare and think about it. Many times bad stuff and adversity come to us in the same way that they came to Job and his wife, which is all at once and without warning. And then what we are and who we are and what our commitments are will be visible and will be seen. I don't mean to stand here and to say, doing what Job did, even in that moment, even in that one little thing he said to his wife, that that's an easy thing. I don't know how. If I had to say, Dave, do you think you could do that? The answer is no. Because I haven't been faithful enough in the small things that would build up to that. And I don't think I'm unique. I think many of us look at these sorts of passages and either despair or just sort of brush over them away because it's so like, I don't know what to do with that. Like, I couldn't do that. And often we have to be careful that when we say, I don't think I could do that, that what we mean is, I don't want to do that.

I wouldn't want to do that. That would be a shame. That would be a wicked thing. So we pursue good things. We thank God for good things. We accept them, realizing that if bad comes to us, if adversity comes, we ought to accept that in the same way. Maybe you think that, well, I just need to sort of get it out. I just need to, if something bad happens, I just need to express my dissatisfaction with it, and that will help me move on. I have not met anybody who has been able to give voice to their sins and have it help them accept their adversities. I remember reading an account one time of a relative of Jonathan Edwards. I don't remember if it was his wife or one of his daughters, but some sort of difficulty had come into her life. I don't know if one of her children had died. I don't think it was his wife. I think it was one of his daughters. And the story said of her that what she did was she pressed both of her hands over her mouth.

and held them there so that she wouldn't speak. Because she knew that anything that came out of her mouth was going to be sinful. And that's all she could do. That's all she knew to do was to just shut her mouth with her hands because her muscles that keep your mouth shut in your face weren't going to work. Job didn't do that through the rest of this book. Job opened his mouth. Job argued his case to his friends. And then God showed up. And what did God have to say to Job? Well, I know that I gave you a really, this is me, this is not what God said. But we might think that after all the terrible things that happened to Job, that God might show up and say, I'm sorry. I had to prove something to Satan and so I'm sorry you were collateral damage, but here you can have your wealth and your kids back. That's not at all what God said to Job. The last three chapters of the book of Job, 40, 41, and 42.

are the longest, most extended, most intense rebuke in all of Scripture. It'd make you want to crawl under your chair. You understand why the Israelites said, Moses, you go talk to him. We don't want to talk to him. Because it is just the most intense rebuke of all of Job's sins that he committed in response to losing all that was precious to him. God didn't apologize for it. God didn't say, well, it's understandable that you responded so poorly because you were in such dire straits. Basically, God asked him the same question his wife did. Do you still hold fast your integrity? Were you there? Are you me? Do you know the things I know? Do you have the power that I have? Who in the world do you think you are to question the things I do? Three chapters of that, but really intense. And what can Job say? What does Job say? What?

Yeah, who am I? I repent in dust and ashes. You did all this stuff and you were right to do it and righteous to do it and I responded so poorly to it, I repent in dust and ashes. There's a real lesson in taking responsibility for your sins in response to adversity. Just because you've been sinned against is no excuse for your response. You have to learn this in your homes. You have to learn this with your spouse. You have to learn this with your kids. You have to learn this with your employers. You have to learn this with your neighbors. You've got to learn this with your civil magistrates. The fact that somebody sins against you grievously is no excuse, not even the slightest bit of an excuse for your response. Not in God's sight. In the world's sight, sure. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. If someone hurts you, you hurt them back. You tell them, I ain't going to do it. But God doesn't reckon.

the same way. We will stand before God and we will give an account for the things that we say and the things that we've done, and we will not be able to stand and say, well, it was because of, like Adam did, well, it was because of this woman that you gave to me. What did God say to Adam when he said, well, it was because of this wife, this woman? He just cursed him, kicked him out of the garden, and clothed him. And so our excuses before God for our behavior, the context in which we commit those sins, Doesn't change God's view of it. Didn't for Job, it won't for us. So how do we accept evil or discontentment or adversity or hardship or being sinned against? How do we accept it with the same sort of disposition that we accept good? That's really the question we've been driving at. How does that work? Here's a few things to remember.

The way to be faithful in big things is to be faithful in small things. You remember I started my sermon by saying, you have tests every day. Your discontentment's being tested every day. Your hardships are for a purpose. Are you passing those tests? When we fail, it's often because we tell ourselves, I can't handle any more of this. I don't deserve this. This isn't fair. I'm sure you've realized that saying all of those things does not change the situation one bit. In fact, it makes it harder for you to bear up under it because it stands in the way as a roadblock between you and accepting your adversity. So be faithful in small things. If you want to learn to stop cursing, pay attention to what you do when you stub your toe. That's a small thing, right? Be faithful in little things. That's the first. The second is that you should trust God that...

He has a purpose in allowing adversity into your life. What happens with us when hardship comes, when adversity comes, is we get myopic. It's all we see. All of a sudden, all of the context of the rest of our lives currently and all of the context of the past that we know and the future, which we don't know yet, all that goes away. And we say, this is the only thing that I'm going to process the Lord's love for me through. That is a foolish thing to do. Because there's lots of context. And a lot of that context you can't see because it's in the future. Job couldn't see what his future was going to be. He couldn't see that he was going to live. He couldn't see that his health was going to be restored. He couldn't see that he was going to receive back his children and his wealth. And there's a question of how he received back his children. Of whether he had ten more children or whether or not his children were brought back to him by the Lord.

You know he has kids, he has grandkids, he lives a long life. All of his wealth and his animals that were killed or taken away, they come back. And the Bible doesn't tell us how he got all that stuff back. But we know he got the same number of sons and the same number of daughters back that he had before. We're never told their names or their ages. We just know that he has grandkids before he dies. If he could have seen all of that, it might have helped him. But he didn't see it. We can't see it. Neither could Abraham when he had to offer up Isaac. He couldn't see it, the future. So the question regarding the future is, do you believe that God will be faithful to you in the future as he has been in the past? Or does this adversity that you're facing, is it the whole story? If you treat it as though it's the whole story, you will fail. If you treat it as though it's one page in the story, you're much more likely to do well and to be able to bear up and accept it and endure it.

Another thing to do is to admit to yourself when you're having trouble accepting the difficulty, the adversity of God. There's a way for you to acknowledge the burdens that you feel without accusing God. Job's failure was not that he acknowledged his sorrow and his grief at all. It's the way in which he did it. There's a way to express grief and sorrow. The Psalms are filled with it in a way that... submits to God and accepts what God's doing and doesn't accuse him. There's a way of accepting adversity saying, I don't know why this is going on and I don't know what will become of it or how I'm going to bear up underneath it, but I do know what I would like the outcome to be. And the outcome that I would like to see is that I would honor God in this situation. And I hope that he's merciful to me, to my family or the people around me. The next thing I would say to you is, I mentioned this earlier, but I'll say it clearly now. Discipline what you say when you're suffering.

Guard your mouth. In all of this, Job did not sin with his lips. That's where he was able to put up a boundary and say, okay, I know enough. He maintained his integrity enough to keep his mouth shut when his wife tempted him. Doesn't mean he was without sin altogether, but it meant that there was a commitment inside of him. And he knew that speaking wasn't going to be good. So be careful when you're upset. It'll be the time when you have the most to say, isn't it? It's like you quiet ones who never have anything to say and aren't very good at conversation. When you get mad, all of a sudden the words flow. You've got plenty to say and plenty of opinions and plenty of judgments. That's the time you ought to be quiet. You should talk when you're happy and content. We would all appreciate it more. The final thing is that you ought to commit yourself to serving God in whatever situation you find yourself in. Stop worrying so much about your circumstances. You have way less control over your circumstances than you think you do.

We act as though we've got all this control and all this power and all of our planning and all of our hard work in the past and all of this, it's just a machine that's just going to be chugging along and kicking out the things that we want. That's a testament to God's faithfulness and to his kindness and to his constancy. It's not a testimony to our wisdom and our brains and our ability to hold it all together. I mean, if you think for a minute, how much does it take for all of your plans and all of your rhythms and all of your habits to get thrown off? I don't know.

You get the sniffles. You get sick. All of a sudden, you're like, oh, man, I can't think, and I can't go to work, and I can't love my wife, and I can't talk to kids. Like, everything you do, all of a sudden, it's like, oh, my nose is running. I've got allergies. It doesn't take much. It's not like your leg got chopped off. It's like your eyes got puffy, your head got congested, you lost a night of sleep or a week of sleep, and all of a sudden, it's like we're reduced to just a puddle of inability. So stop focusing so much on your circumstances. Work at asking God to help you accept them and to change your perspective on them. We need to see as God sees. Most times we can't. And so when we can't see as God sees, then we need to trust that what he sees and knows and what he's doing is for our good and not for our destruction. That's one of the ways that we can apply our sermon from last week of pursuing and taking hold of and proclaiming.

His blessings is to say, difficulty has come now, but I trust that it will not always be this way because you've promised to be good to me. And I trust that you will be. Let's pray.