Gleanings From The Word

Tag: Kevin Corbin

  • Tribulation Produces Perseverance

    Tribulation Produces Perseverance

    perseverance- you dont always see what's happening

    I have a scar on my right hand from a job I worked in my twenties. I will not bore you with the details, but the short version is that I did something careless, something sharp moved faster than I expected, and the rest is biology. What I remember most is not the moment it happened. It is the weeks after, when the wound was closing but not closed, when it itched in a way that made you want to crawl out of your skin, and when the doctor told me that the itching was the tissue knitting itself back together.

    The discomfort was the healing.

    I have thought about that a lot over the years, because it is a remarkably accurate picture of what God does with suffering and our times of waiting.

    Paul does not tiptoe around this. We also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance, and perseverance, proven character, and proven character, hope (Romans 5:3-4).

    Read that slowly, because it is easy to skim past what Paul is actually claiming. He is not saying suffering is fine because it will be over eventually. He is saying suffering produces something. Actively. Right now. In you. The tribulation is not an interruption to your growth. It is the means of it. The gap is where God does His best work.

    That is not how we usually feel about the hard seasons. We forget that tribulation produces perseverance.

    We feel like we are falling behind. Like everyone else is moving and we are stuck. Like God has either forgotten where He put us or decided we can handle more than we actually can. The gap between where we are and where we thought we would be by now can feel less like a workshop and more like a waiting room with no magazines and no news on when your name will be called.

    But here is what Scripture will not let us do. It will not let us call that gap wasted time.

    Hebrews 12 puts it plainly. Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith(Hebrews 12:1-2).

    Two things in that passage that are worth sitting with. First, the race is set before us — not chosen by us, not designed to our preferences, not adjusted for our comfort level. It is set. Second, endurance is not something you summon from inside yourself. You run it with your eyes fixed on Someone outside yourself. The moment you look away from Him and start measuring the distance you have left, the legs go.

    Perseverance, in Scripture, is not optimism. It is not telling yourself it will get better and pressing on with clenched teeth. It is obedience in the dark. It is continuing to do the next right thing when you cannot see what it is producing, because you trust the One who can.

    James says it this way. Consider it all joy, my brothers, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing (James 1:2-4).

    Perfect and complete. That is the finish line. Not comfortable. Not unscathed. Complete.

    The gap between who you are and who God is making you is not evidence that something has gone wrong. It is evidence that something is still going on. The wound is still closing. The tissue is still knitting. The discomfort you are feeling right now may be exactly that — the feeling of becoming.

    I will not tell you the hard season you are in is easy, or that it is short, or that you will understand it on this side of eternity. I cannot promise any of those things, and I would not insult you by trying.

    What I can tell you is what Scripture says. That it is not random. That God wastes nothing. That the same Jesus who is the author of your faith is also its perfecter, and He does not start things He does not intend to finish. Tribulation produces perseverance

    Keep going. Not because you can see the end. Because He can.

    Be blessed,

    Kevin

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  • Every Member Is Necessary — 1 Corinthians 12

    THE BODY NEEDS EVERY PART — INCLUDING YOURS

    I have a friend who has not been to church in three years. He has his reasons, and some of them are legitimate. He was hurt, and the people who hurt him should have known better. But somewhere along the way, staying home became a habit, and the habit became a conviction, and now he will tell you he does not need the church to follow Jesus.

    I love him. And I think he is wrong.

    Not because church attendance is a rule to follow. Because he is a member of a body that is missing a part, and so is he.

    Paul does not leave us much wiggle room on this. Just as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ (1 Corinthians 12:12). He is not describing a meeting you go to. He is describing an organism you belong to. Those are not the same thing, and the difference matters more than we usually let ourselves admit.

    Here is the part that should stop you if you have ever felt like your contribution to the church was minor. The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you, nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. On the contrary, the members of the body which seem to be weaker are necessary (1 Corinthians 12:21-22). Not helpful. Not appreciated. Necessary. That is Paul’s word, not mine.

    If someone has told you, by their words or just by the way they treated you, that you do not have much to bring — that your gifts are small, your role is replaceable, your absence would barely be noticed — Scripture is flatly contradicting them. The parts that look weaker are the ones Paul calls necessary. The ones that feel least visible are not optional.

    But let me say the harder thing too.

    Some of us are physically present and functionally absent. We show up, we sit, we leave, and we have arranged things carefully so that nobody really needs us and we do not really need anybody. We have been hurt before, or we are private people, or we just never got around to going deeper, and now the habit of distance has hardened into something we have started calling preference.

    The body feels that absence too, even if nobody says so.

    God does not tend to grow us in the quiet of our own company. He grows us through each other. Through the person who says the thing we did not want to hear. Through the one whose need shows up at an inconvenient time and asks something of us we did not plan to give. Through the Sunday morning conversation that turns out to be exactly what we needed and had no idea we were walking toward.

    That is not an accident of community. That is the body working the way it was designed to work.

    If the church has wounded you, I am not asking you to pretend it did not happen. Wounds in the church are real, and they leave marks. But the answer to a broken expression of the body is not to live permanently outside the body. It is to find your place in it again, imperfect people and all, because imperfect people are the only kind there are, and God has chosen to do His work through them anyway.

    You are not a guest in this body. You are a member of it. And somewhere in it, there is a function that belongs specifically to you, that nobody else can fill in the same way, and that the rest of the body is waiting on whether they realize it yet or not.

    My friend knows all of this. We have talked about it more than once.

    I am still praying he comes back.

    Kevin

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