HOW TO "STAY GOLDEN"

Glimpses of Gold

But he knows the way that I take; when he has tried me, I shall come out as gold (Job 23:10, ESV). Job knew suffering. This one man absorbed more pain than most of us ever have to imagine. In a single day, Job lost his wealth and all ten of his children. Then he was stripped of his health and honor. Did he have anything left? Sure, a bitter wife who advised him, “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die” (Job 2:9) and a handful of self-righteous friends who were “miserable comforters” (16:2). Yet Job clung to God, saw past the trial, and by faith declared, “But he knows the way that I take; when he has tried me, I shall come out as gold” (23:10). Refining hurts, but the result: pure gold. Trials draw sin out of our lives, as illustrated in this picture of the refining process. Allow me to give you a little lesson in Gold 101. First, when gold is being refined, it must be melted. Gold ore is mixed with other metals and impurities when it comes out of the ground. So the goldsmiths crank up the furnaces to 1064ºC (degrees Celsius), the temperature at which gold melts. [That's mighty Hot!🔥] The second process is binding. Once the gold is molten, the goldsmiths mix in a special flux to make it more fluid and to bind the impurities together. Then, when they pour the gold into a mold, the impurities, called slag, rise to the top. Lastly, they separate it. After the gold has cooled, the slag is broken off, and the steps are repeated—sometimes multiple times for greater purity. This process hasn’t changed significantly in thousands of years. Technology hasn’t improved it. God has given us a lasting illustration of His methods with us. This process of refining gold is what filled Job’s mind as he wrote those words: “when he has tried me, I shall come out as gold.” Job’s trials were refining him. Your trials are refining you. Do you feel the heat? Do you see the slag rising to the top? The biblical word for slag is sin, and it’s what makes you restless, miserable, fearful, and selfish.  Is God drawing the impurities in your life to the surface? When some people go into the furnace of affliction, it burns them; when others go in, the experience purifies them. If you submit to the Lord, as painful as the crisis may be, your suffering will refine you and make you better. If you resist what God is doing, the furnace will only scorch you to death.  If the trial is making your faith purer and stronger, if you have not grown bitter toward the Lord but are loving Him more, then no doubt about it, you “shall come out as gold.” JOURNAL When some people go into the furnace of affliction, it burns them; when others go in, the experience purifies them. What’s the difference? What trial are you enduring? How are you responding—resisting or submitting? Growing bitter or better? PRAY Father of all wisdom, You are a Master Refiner. You use the pain in my life to purify me. Please draw the sin out of my life, and help my faith to grow stronger. Please don’t let me grow bitter. I want to love You more. The refining process hurts, Lord, I admit it. But the reason I can trust You is because You love me, so I know You want what’s best for me, and You see that far more clearly than I do. I entrust myself into Your hands that I may “come out as gold” for the glory of Your Son, Jesus my Redeemer, in whose name I pray, amen. This is a Black Tie! Made with sweetened condensed milk! Love it! Embrace it!  Robbs

THEOLOGY DONE WRONG...

Theology is a dangerous subject. In fact, there may be no area of interest more perilous than theology. That is true if it is not pursued in the best way and for the highest purposes. In the opening chapter of Knowing God, J.I. Packer says that if we wish to avoid the perils, we need to always consider this question when we consider the study of God and his ways: What do I intend to do with my knowledge about God, once I have got it?

If we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it is bound to go bad on us.

Any knowledge and any expertise can lead to pride, but theology is particularly dangerous this way. The reason is simple: Theology is such a great and high subject—the highest there is. Packer offers this warning: “If we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it is bound to go bad on us. It will make us proud and conceited. The very greatness of the subject-matter will intoxicate us, and we shall come to think of ourselves as a cut above other Christians because of our interest in it and grasp of it; and we shall look down on those whose theological ideas seem to us crude and inadequate, and dismiss them as very poor specimens.”

I suspect you can identify this very tendency and perhaps this very pattern in your own life. Packer writes to you and me here, to people who are theologically-minded, and warns us that a little theology can do a lot of harm. “To be preoccupied with getting theological knowledge as an end in itself, to approach the Bible with no higher a motive than a desire to know all the answers, is the direct route to a state of self-satisfied self-deception.”

But this does not mean we must avoid the study of God altogether. Far from it. We need to pursue God for the best reason - to know God himself better. Our concern must be to enlarge our acquaintance, not simply with the doctrine of God’s attributes, but with the living God whose attributes they are. As he is the subject of our study, and our helper in it, so he must himself be the end of it. 

We must seek, in studying God, to be led to God.”

We also need to pursue God through the best methodology, and that involves meditation. “We turn each truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God.” He goes on to offer an excellent definition and description of the art of Christian meditation:

Meditation is the activity of calling to mind, and thinking over, and dwelling on, and applying to oneself, the various things that one knows about the works and ways and purposes and promises of God. It is an activity of holy thought, consciously performed in the presence of God, under the eye of God, by the help of God, as a means of communion with God. Its purpose is to clear one’s mental and spiritual vision of God, and to let his truth make its full and proper impact on one’s mind and heart. It is a matter of talking to oneself about God and oneself; it is, indeed, often a matter of arguing with oneself, reasoning oneself out of moods of doubt and unbelief into a clear apprehension of God’s power and grace.

The effect of such meditation is a gracious humbling, in which God shows us who we are and who he is by comparison. He reveals true knowledge of himself and ensures that our theology works itself out in genuine relationship with God. Theology is a dangerous study, but God redeems it for our good and his glory.

This is my second time through this book and it is even more exciting than the first!! 

We will tlk about chapters 3-4 in the next post.  

Happy KNOWING!

Robbs