Brothers & Sisters,

             Sometimes when we sing, we preach. Take, for example, the hauntingly beautiful hymn, “Be Still My Soul” by Kathrina von Schlegel.  In that hymn, we preach and quiet our hearts with the truth of Psalm 46:10. In the final verse, we even preach to ourselves the hope of glory when we sing:

Be still, my soul: the hour is hast'ning on
when we shall be forever with the Lord,
when disappointment, grief, and fear are gone,
sorrow forgot, love's purest joys restored.
Be still, my soul: when change and tears are past,
all safe and blessed we shall meet at last.    

            This wonderful verse encourages us to look forward to glory, but it does not diminish the difficulties of the present. In particular, it acknowledges the disappointments, griefs, fears, sorrows, change, and tears that we shed in this life. What do we do with difficulties in this life? What do we do when our hopes and plans don’t work out? What should we remember? In his little book, Where Was God When That Happened?, Christopher Ash answers those questions like this:

 

Is God in control when my hopes and plans don’t work out?

 

You and I naturally hope for all manner of good things in this life. Most of us hope to be happily married, and perhaps to have a happy family. Many of us hope for success and fulfilment in work. But what happens when we remain unmarried, when our marriages break down, when we cannot have children, when our career is not successful, when our plans are not fulfilled? What are we to make of this? What is God doing?

            We need a clear and glad grasp of what God has and has not promised. Jesus taught us not to “work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life (John 6:27). If our hopes and longings are focused on marriage, children, success—in fact anything in this age—we will ultimately be left frustrated and hungry. However much success, intimacy and joy we may have in this age, in the end there will be bereavement, failure, ageing and death. God in his kindness gives us many good things in this life, different for each of us, but each of them a sign of his goodness (1 Timothy 6:7). But he does not promise us any of them. What he promises is the “food” that will keep us alive on the journey to the age to come; and that “food” is Jesus, the bread of life (John 6:35). He has promised to make us like Jesus in our character and hearts (Romans 8:29: “to be conformed to the image of his Son”), and he will do this in each one who belongs to Jesus.

            When our plans are frustrated, we are bound to be sad. But we need never doubt that God is making us like Jesus, as he has promised to do; and that he will bring us right through the journey into the joys of the age to come. --Christopher Ash, Where Was God When That Happened?, Questions Christians Ask (Place of publication not identified: The Good Book Company, 2017), 77-78.]

By God’s grace, let’s continue to preach to ourselves, that our good and loving Father is making us like his Son. Let’s be still and know that through the difficulties of the present, he is in the process of presenting us blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy (Jude 1:24).

Warmly in Christ,

Mike