I used to enjoy watching Storage Wars. Eventually, it turned into more of a soap opera than anything else so I’ve stopped watching. But I loved the premise of the show; people finding treasure in other people’s trash (or at least things not important enough for them to keep paying their storage unit bill). It was a good representation of the old adage: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”.
I’ve been wondering, lately, though if there’s another adage we need to say as believers. The story of the Bible could be summed up as God convincing humanity that our treasures are actually trash compared to that which is truly valuable. It is the sorry story of humanity that we gladly exchange the fountain of living water for cisterns which cannot even hold water. We prefer sludge over the all-satisfying.
The other day as I was counseling someone going through a season of suffering I tried to comfort them with the truth that no Christian has ever died in the furnace. I didn’t mean, that no believer has died in the throes of suffering. What I mean is that Christian faith will always endure the furnace of suffering. The gold of our faith always comes out the other end. The only thing which disappears is the dross.
I’ve always liked this statement from Randy Alcorn from The Goodness of God:
Evil and suffering have a way of exposing our inadequate theology. When affliction comes, a weak or nominal Christian often discovers that his faith doesn’t account for it or prepare him for it. His faith has been in his church, denomination, or family tradition, or in his own religious ideas—but not in Christ. As he faces evil and suffering, he may, in fact, lose his faith.
But that’s actually a good thing; any faith that leaves us unprepared for suffering is a false faith that deserves to be abandoned. Genuine faith will be tested by suffering; false faith will be lost—the sooner, the better.
I’m bothered by how much I like my false faith. I’m bothered by how much I consider the dross of imperfection to be a necessary part of my being. I’m not advocating a posture of kissing the furnace—that’s just sadistic. But I’m saying that the furnace is necessary if I’ve got a ton of dross.
When my heart is prone to anger because God is chiseling away imperfections, it says something about me. It might say that I don’t trust God’s refining work. It might also indicate that I’m a little too in love with the dross in my life. I don’t see it as odious. Here I am wishing that God could somehow see the treasure in my trash—but He’s so radically dedicated to my enjoyment of Him that He will stop at nothing to give me the eyes to see my garbage for what it really is. And he does this not because He is some mean ogre. He does this because I cannot rightly see the beauty of Christ while I’m white-knuckling rubbish and trying to make it fit into a kingdom for which it doesn’t belong.
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