God's Grace in Your Suffering by David Powlison

Author:David Powlison [Powlison, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL012000/REL012000/REL012010
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2018-02-19T15:00:00+00:00

6

My Loving Purpose Is Your Transformation

The fourth stanza of “How Firm a Foundation” makes God’s purpose even more explicit. He designs your significant suffering for three reasons. He is revealing his abiding generosity toward you. He is removing all that is ungenerous in you. He is making you abidingly generous.

When through fiery trials your pathway shall lie,

my grace, all-sufficient, shall be your supply;

the flame shall not hurt you; I only design

your dross to consume and your gold to refine.

Our merciful Lord is with us to work out this purpose. The metaphor of fiery trials that cannot finally harm you comes from Isaiah 43:2. But this stanza’s core promise arises from 1 Peter 1:6–9. Peter uses the metaphor of a smelting furnace. You are a mixed—mixed up!—creature. In God’s hands, experiences of suffering purify you. His love works to take away what is wrong with you: your dross. The outcome is a growing love and joy toward God in Christ, as well as a more sincere love for others: your gold. Peter says that this is the fruit of faith, because you have never actually seen Jesus. But he becomes more and more real in the context of fiery trials. We will look first at the dross and then at the gold.

Your Dross to Consume

Most of the time, we are right to separate sufferings from sins. What you do is different from what happens to you. Your sins are bad things about you as a moral agent. Your sufferings are bad things that happen to you. Agent and victim are opposite in principle. And most of this book has naturally focused on the things that happen to you. As a new creation in Christ, you live in an essentially different relationship to your sufferings.

But it is worth noting that you, as new creation in Christ, also live in an essentially different relationship to your own sinfulness. Your sin now afflicts you. The dross of your blind spots and besetting sins no longer defines or delights you. The sin that indwells becomes a form of significant suffering. What you once instinctively loved now torments you.

What sins do you still wrestle with? Forgetting God and proceeding as if life centers on you? Obsessive religious scrupulosity that starves your humanity? Defensive and self-assertive pride? Laziness or drivenness, or an oscillation between both? Irritability, judgmentalism, and complaining? Immoral impulses and fantasies? Obsessive concern with money, food, or entertainment? Fear of what others think about you? Envy of good things that someone else enjoys? Shading truth into half-truths to manufacture your image? Speaking empty or even destructive words, rather than nourishing, constructive, and graceful wisdom?

These sins are endemic to everyday life. Perhaps you recognize the “seven deadly sins” (and a few extras) within that list of the mundane madness of our hearts! I can identify with each one, and I suspect you can too. Our Father loves us with mercies new every morning and more numerous than the hairs on our heads. He is good and he does good.

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