Facing The Unexpected

It maybe that we have been brought up in a religious atmosphere and surrounded from our very birth by religious teaching. Being brought up this way we have heard certain things and become familiar with religious truths. Everyone round about us seemed to believe them, and, in time, we found ourselves repeating them and regarding ourselves as true believers in them. We never thought of examining these beliefs, still less of doubting them. We just seemed to accept everything without thinking at all deeply about them. We assumed that everything was all right and that we ourselves, also, were all right. We had not taken the trouble really to understand and to try to comprehend all these statements about religion. We had not troubled really to take in their teaching.

As I heard a man once put it, we had taken our religion very much in the same way as we had taken our bread and butter daily from the table. And while all was well, we had gone on with our religion and its duties, assuming that we had the right and the real thing, without suspecting any real lack or need. Then suddenly, we were confronted by a difficulty, a problem, and face to face with this we found ourselves behaving and reacting almost in precisely the same way as men and women who have never laid any claim to religion whatsoever. We were equally helpless and equally hopeless. Our religion seemed to make no difference.

There is nothing which is quite so sad and so tragic in the life and the experience of a minister, as to find people of this type whose religion does not seem to give them anything. Their beliefs seem not to be of the slightest value to them when face to face with the greatest needs and crises of life, such as illness, bereavement, sorrow, disaster, threatened calamity, or a war. They had appeared to be such excellent examples of religious people. They had never been guilty of any heretical statement or of any gross violation of the moral code. They seem, in times of normality, to be the ideal type of a religious person. And yet when their religion was put to the test and needed most of all, it suddenly seemed to mean nothing and to be quite useless. Have you known such people?

M. Lloyd-Jones

May the “trial of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it be tried with fire, be found unto praise and honor and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ!“ 1 Peter 1:7