Why do we endure the pain of surgery? Isn't it funny that we pay doctors to do to
us, what we would call torture given a different circumstance? I once asked a friend why he waiting so long
to get a hip replacement. He replied
with a smirk, "Because they cut your leg off, lay it on a table, and then
reattach it. That just didn't sound
pleasant to me." So why would we
ever pay someone a great deal of money to put us through such horrible
ordeals? How is it that we got tricked
into paying doctors to do us pain?
Well, we really didn't get tricked, we came to realize that
sometimes to heal one point of pain, we must create pain in another area. The pain that an expert physician causes is
similar to God's pain. We don't consider
physicians to be barbarians, though we pay them to do some seemingly barbaric
work. In a similar way, we are called on
by James to consider the pain in our lives as pure joy.
James reminds us that trials, sufferings, and pain are
useful tools in God's hand. The pain and
trials in our lives are not outside of God's control, rather it is God who is
using these hurtful people and painful events, so that those who bear the name
of Jesus will become ultimately mature and complete, not lacking anything.
Thus, the appearance of trials and
sufferings mean for the Christian that God is not yet done with his work of
perseverance. When a trial comes our way
we tend to believe that God is against us, we doubt his goodness, we believe we
are abandoned. But James reminds us that
our trials cannot be used as evidence for the non-goodness of God. Rather, trials mean that there is some area
in our lives that is not yet complete or whole.
What God is doing, then, is using trials to form us, purify us, to grow
us up.
This is why Christians consider
trials as pure joy. We are not
masochists, loving pain in and of itself.
Rather, we consider our trials pure joy, because God is a good surgeon,
who will use the difficulties to make us 'mature, and complete, not lacking
anything' (v. 4).