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Day 1 Expectation

Thanks for joining me for our Advent series: Expectation.

We will be working our way through portions of Isaiah, focusing on the expectation of the Messiah. In our final week before Christmas we will also explore Psalm 22. Invite a friend to join you as you connect with your expectations this Christmas.

Isaiah 7:13-16

“Then Isaiah said, “Listen well, you royal family of David! Isn’t it enough to exhaust human patience? Must you exhaust the patience of my God as well? All right then, the Lord himself will give you the sign. Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel (which means ‘God is with us’). By the time this child is old enough to choose what is right and reject what is wrong, he will be eating yogurt and honey. For before the child is that old, the lands of the two kings you fear so much will both be deserted.”

This Christmas season, I am reminded of the feeling of expectation and longing that the Jewish people had in waiting for their promised Messiah. Waiting is hard in general, but when you have something specific you are waiting for it can be excruciating. As Christians we live in a waiting, longing state as we hold the expectation of Jesus’ return. And while we have some clues as to what this final return might look like, the restoration of heaven and earth is not nearly as clear as some might believe.

In today’s passage, we look at some signs that God promised that would help his people identify the Messiah. The first clue is a virgin giving birth to a child. That must have been a pretty big head-scratcher before the fact… A second clue that God gives his people is that the Messiah will be called Immanuel, meaning “God is with us.” And when he arrives on the scene, your precious kingdoms will be long gone.

We tend to fill in information when we are given bits and pieces, so the Jewish people had filled in a lot of gaps in the prophecies with information and expectation that was not true. When we cling to our own expectations based on the things we have “figured out,” we might miss what God is actually doing. Many Jews at the time of Jesus expected him to be a political leader. Only a bunch of rowdy shepherds would believe he was a baby in a stable. God’s work is always greater than what we can imagine, and his plans out-do our expectations every time. But we must remember to hold loosely to the things our minds expect as we continue to hope in the goodness of God far above any circumstance.

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Coping with Hardship — Day 6

Today we finish the last day of this brief series exploring hardship through the book of Job. One of the most common ways that we respond in hardship is to look for quick fixes. Millions of books are sold each year because they promise quick fixes. Parenting troubles? No problem, just count to three and your children will behave! Financial problems? Pay me to solve them for you! Every gimmick out there is based on our thirst for quick fixes in hardship.

In the book of Job, his friends give him all kinds of unhelpful responses. Doing this series has actually made me realize that we study the book of Job completely backwards. Instead of focusing on what happens to Job, we should take it as a lesson in how NOT to respond to our friends when they are suffering. In Job 22:21-30, Job’s friend Eliphaz takes another stab at “helping” by offering very spiritual-sounding quick fixes.

A far less glamorous approach to hardship is to seek the face of God. Quite the opposite of a quick fix, God offers eternal fixes. He’s not always in a hurry to end your hardship. This is not because he is harsh, but rather because he does not see hardship as a problem. It’s part of the journey. Job realizes this in the last chapter of the book as he sits with God and realizes he was wrong about God after all.

Life involves suffering. Jesus came to voluntarily suffer. It was the path to the eternal fix. If you are facing grief, loss, pain, or hardship, seek the face of God. Just keep sitting with him, seeking to know him, seeking to find him everywhere. It moves the focus from temporary to eternal.

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Coping with Hardship — Day 5

In this six-day series we’ve been exploring some common ways that people deal with hardship using the book of Job to guide us. We’ve talked about some negative approaches, like proof-texting Scripture, victim blaming, spiritual bypass, and blaming God. We’ve seen some alternatives that can help us cope better, such as seeking wisdom, remembering the good, feeling our feelings, and appealing to God.

Today we are going to talk about an increasing problem in society and especially in the church: toxic positivity. Even some clinical approaches to mental health treatment border on toxic positivity. Perhaps you’ve heard of “the power of positive thinking.” While positive thinking can be powerful, it’s unhelpful when you need to work through hardship. We see a bit of this in Job 4:1-6 when his friend Eliphaz first tries to cheer him up. When someone is suffering, it’s unhelpful to tell them to look on the bright side. Simple answers are for simple problems.

Instead of using toxic positivity as a response to hardship, practice humility. We need to align ourselves first with God, using a humble posture like the one Job shows in chapter 40 verses 3 through 5. Notice here that Job pulls back from some of his harsher complaints here, admitting that he has “nothing left to say.” Silence is one of the first steps to true humility. If you or someone you love has been suffering, simply pause in silence. Begin to admit that you don’t have all the answers, and it may be that some questions will remain unanswered. When you posture yourself in this way, you open the door for healing as you begin to accept your own limitations.

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Coping with Hardship — Day 4

One of the first things people do when they face hardship is to start blaming. We blame ourselves, we blame others, we blame society as a whole, and we blame God. Suffering must be someone’s fault, and when we are hurting we are often determined to find the guilty party. We already talked about victim-blaming, so today we’re going to focus on blaming God.

In Job 10, Job blames God for his problems. At least he starts the chapter announcing that he is going to “complain freely” so you know what you’re in for. He says that God is oppressing him, rejecting him, nitpicking him when he’s done nothing wrong, created him simply to catch him doing something bad, and pouring out anger on him. It makes sense. Job is hurting. But here he’s lashing out and hitting hard, questioning the motives and heart of God.

While blaming God might be understandable and make us feel better for a time, in the end it creates bitterness in our hearts and alienates us from God. In Job 31 we see an alternative: appealing to God. Notice the difference between chapter 10 and chapter 31. In the first, Job is making accusation after accusation. In the second, he is asking a lot of questions. He’s asking where he’s gone wrong and ultimately declaring his own innocence. He is still wondering if God is somehow punishing him, but he’s asking instead of blaming. The feelings underneath are ultimately still the same, but the approach is different. When we appeal to God, we are asking him to show us more than we can see. If we do that with a truly open heart, we are more likely to heal.

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Coping with Hardship — Day 3

It’s harder than it seems to actually feel your feelings. We have found all kinds of inventive ways to avoid feelings — drugs, alcohol, sex, work, food, gambling, pornography… the list goes on and on. For Christians, however, there is another way that seems to involve less directly sinful behaviors: spiritual bypass.

Spiritual bypass happens when you use spiritual language to avoid feeling your feelings. Something like, “Well, I know that God doesn’t want me to stay angry…” or “Just cast your anxiety on Jesus because he cares for you.” We can do this to ourselves or we can encourage it in others. We rush to make things spiritually tidy and in the process makes things a whole lot worse. We can see an example of that in Job 11:13-19 when Job’s friend Zophar responds to Job’s suffering.

Instead of using spiritual-sounding ideas to bypass your feelings, sit with them. Grieve. Cry. Weep with those who weep. Job takes time to feel his feelings in many places in this book of the Bible, and chapter 14 is a good example. You can really feel his sense of hopelessness in that place. Feeling your feelings does not mean that you will remain in those feelings forever. That’s a common myth about feelings. In reality, feeling your feelings helps you process and deal with grief better. There are no easy answers, but allowing yourself to feel is a way of addressing reality head on rather than avoiding hardship or hiding behind spiritual language.