Sticks & Stones: Desirable Difficulties

The last two weeks, we’ve learned how appearances are not what they seem and how a disadvantage may just actually be an advantage nobody knows yet. Today, I want to teach you from God’s Word that difficulties are desirable. Yes, you’ve heard me correctly, difficulties, hardships, troubles, afflictions, sorrows, tough times, etc… are desirable—it is something you want. The reason you want it is written in 1^st Peter 1:6-7. Let’s read that together. ⁶ So be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you have to endure many trials for a little while. ⁷ These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world. (1 Peter 1:6-7) Peter is writing to people who believe in Jesus who are currently living in persecution—meaning that they are being attacked, bullied, ridiculed for their beliefs, that the “trials” [read difficulties] will bring you the real prize and should therefore cause you much joy. What Peter calls “trials”, I call “difficulties”, and what Peter calls “precious” I call “power.” So in translation, what he is saying is that difficulties cause you to learn and be better off from it. Write this in your notes: Learning from difficulty is more powerful than learning that is easy. What you will probably recognize is that when you learn out of necessity, that is, out of need, you have something powerful that goes a long way. If it were easy, then everybody would be powerful and well gifted. But we know for a fact that not everybody is powerful, nor has any gift that is worthy. In fact, what we know is that anybody who is powerful or has a worthy gift, did not get that gift or power very easily. Jesus for example, giving us the gift that is free, which is salvation, had to endure the difficulty of death, of being separated from his Father. We didn’t pay it, so we might not realize it. But when we accepted that incredible gift, as many of the people Peter is writing to did, then it comes with the territory that the gift has a steep price and that price’s name is difficulty; but it is incredibly desirable. It is more precious than gold—meaning it lasts and doesn’t fade away. See, people who accept Christ out of necessity, that is because there is no other hope or anything that they can cling to, they usually have a powerful faith. Likewise, when people learn when they need to survive, they have something powerful. I want to turn our attention back to the story of David and Goliath. When we read this story, for the third time, I want you to see how David learned from his difficulties and how that power gave him what was necessary to do something awesome in God’s name. 1 Samuel 17:32, let’s go and open up our Bibles there. ³² David said to Saul, “Let no one lose heart on account of this Philistine; your servant will go and fight him.” ³³ Saul replied, “You are not able to go out against this Philistine and fight him; you are only a young man, and he has been a warrior from his youth.” ³⁴ But David said to Saul, “Your servant has been keeping his father’s sheep. When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, ³⁵ I went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it. ³⁶ Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, because he has defied the armies of the living God.  Here’s my first bullet: God builds character in our lives through difficult situations. Look at verse 34. Do you see that David, when he was younger, and we know that he was young when he fought Goliath, so when he was younger—aka, he was a kid, he fought a lion and a bear! I don’t know about you, but I’m 31 years old and if I had to fight a bear or a lion, even if they were tied up, I may not win that fight. But see, God built David through those situations. Facing the bear and lion gave David the right mixture of personality to overcome. When I was a kid, I didn’t have good self-esteem because people used to always tell me that I couldn’t ever amount to anything because I wasn’t good looking enough and I wasn’t strong enough, I wasn’t athletic enough, nor was a smart enough. In fact, people used to tell me, just don’t come in last place, if you come in second to last place, then you’ve done good and we’d be proud of you. But I realized that when you start facing difficulties, it changes you because you learn something, and then you see yourself more and more like the person God wanted you to be and so other difficulties you face start to face you in a different way. Share with your neighbor: what is the most difficult situation you’ve faced and how did God change you for it. Let’s continue to verse 37. ³⁷ The Lord who rescued me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will rescue me from the hand of this Philistine.” Saul said to David, “Go, and the Lord be with you.” ³⁸ Then Saul dressed David in his own tunic. He put a coat of armor on him and a bronze helmet on his head. ³⁹ David fastened on his sword over the tunic and tried walking around, because he was not used to them. “I cannot go in these,” he said to Saul, “because I am not used to them.” So he took them off. Every difficult situation we face gives us a choice. We can choose to confront it or we can choose to avoid it. When I say avoid it, I don’t mean run away, because confronting a difficult situation may mean that we runaway. Let me give you an example, if you are facing a hurricane, like a real live hurricane, confronting the situation may mean taking your family, your stuff and running as far away from the hurricane as possible. Avoiding the hurricane means doing nothing and pretending nothing is going to happen. There’s a difference. David made the choice to confront the difficulty named Goliath. But his choice was deeper. David chose to confront Goliath the way God trained him to confront the difficulty. Write this down: When we make the right choice, our character grows more like God’s. Let’s keep reading, verse 40. ⁴⁰ Then he took his staff in his hand, chose five smooth stones from the stream, put them in the pouch of his shepherd’s bag and, with his sling in his hand, approached the Philistine. ⁴¹ Meanwhile, the Philistine, with his shield bearer in front of him, kept coming closer to David. ⁴² He looked David over and saw that he was little more than a boy, glowing with health and handsome, and he despised him. ⁴³ He said to David, “Am I a dog, that you come at me with sticks?” And the Philistine cursed David by his gods. ⁴⁴ “Come here,” he said, “and I’ll give your flesh to the birds and the wild animals!” I want you to write this down: The tools needed to overcome difficulties today can be solved by looking in the past. Not only did David make the right choice, he found that God had already gave him the tools to solve the problem through the previous difficulties he’s faced. Do you see this? Difficulties in our lives are desirable because they create in us learning and experience and give us the tools to overcome other difficulties and make us more like God and the provides us with the history to rely on God to overcome. ⁴⁵ David said to the Philistine, “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.⁴⁶ This day the Lord will deliver you into my hands, and I’ll strike you down and cut off your head. This very day I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds and the wild animals, and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel. ⁴⁷ All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves; for the battle is the Lord’s, and he will give all of you into our hands.” ⁴⁸ As the Philistine moved closer to attack him, David ran quickly toward the battle line to meet him.⁴⁹ Reaching into his bag and taking out a stone, he slung it and struck the Philistine on the forehead. The stone sank into his forehead, and he fell facedown on the ground. ⁵⁰ So David triumphed over the Philistine with a sling and a stone; without a sword in his hand he struck down the Philistine and killed him. If it is our habit to come before difficulties and avoid them, or if it our habit to succumb to lose and victimization and doubt when we face difficulties, then difficulties are desirable because when we are Choosing God’s difficult way, we transform our natural habit. Look at what David says to Goliath in verse 45. The natural habit would be to tremble in fear, that’s what all the other Israelites were doing. But because David chose God’s way, habits were transformed. Let’s go back to 1^st Peter 1:6-7. ⁶ So be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you have to endure many trials for a little while. ⁷ These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world. We all have difficulties in our lives, the problem is that some of us will spend more time trying to avoid it than overcome it. I want you to know that when we overcome the difficulties in our lives that we actually become stronger for it. We have a reason to be joyful when we confront it. We have God to transform us in a brand new, amazing way. Difficulties in life are desirable because they make our faith stronger that will make us glad when it matters most. Let’s sing this song.