What to Do When You Don't Know What to Do

David Jeremiah

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780781413312
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

Not sure what to do next?
In this in-depth look at the book of James, Dr. David Jeremiah offers stories and biblical insights about what to do:

• When you're feeling pressured
• When wrong seems right
• When you don't know what decision to make
• When faith doesn't seem to work
• When you're not feeling confident
• When your goals are not God's
• When you're in a hurry and God is not
• When you have financial struggles
• When you face difficult times

Sometimes the big and small decisions in life seem overwhelming. How do you know what choices to make about your career, kids, and relationships? Even when you make good decisions, how do you avoid temptation along the way? In What to Do When You Don't Know What to Do, renowned bible teacher Dr. David Jeremiah walks you through the book of James to glean God's wisdom on issues such as finances, faith, and decision making. What does it look like to consider God in all of your plans, depend on God rather than wealth, and put prayer above your personal efforts? Learn how to receive God's supernatural strength to meet the challenges you face. As James learned, the road of spiritual wisdom always leads to joy.
**Includes Reader's Guide!** This book features a Reader's Guide for group discussion or personal study. Inside you will find discussion topics, activity suggestions for your group, and questions to encourage individual or group discovery and application.

1

WHAT TO DO WHEN THE HEAT’S TURNED UP

(JAMES 1:1–12)

My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials.

They came up to the ensign and poured a glass of ice water down his back and threw another in his face. The ensign, who had fallen asleep in the chow hall after five sleepless nights, opened his eyes for a second, just long enough to utter a dull “Thank you, sir.” A moment later his eyes rolled upward and then closed. His head went down again. He didn’t touch his meal.

It’s called Hell Week and is part of the navy’s Basic Underwater Demolition School where sailors are turned into SEALs—Sea-Air-Land commandos. By undergoing a grueling regimen of sleepless days and nights, sensory overload, and physical testing, these men are transformed into some of the toughest human beings in the world.

The effort to change average men into commandos starts at the Coronado Naval Amphibious Base in San Diego, California. The class commences in October with a three-hundred-yard swim, and the physical regimen becomes increasingly difficult as it builds to the ultimate challenge known as Hell Week.

This final period of torturous physical and psychological training begins on Sunday night. Lights flash on as the recruits are awakened by an instructor. Next to one ear, a machine gun loaded with blanks is fired. A jet from a garden hose digs into the other ear. An instructor shouts out instructions: “We have a mission to perform this evening. I want you to listen to every detail I have for you.” The mission turns out to be exercising and lying wet and almost naked on cold steel plates, installed on a nearby pier.

On Monday the six-man teams are ordered to run races with 250-pound Zodiac rubber assault boats balanced on their heads. On Tuesday, with less than an hour of sleep the night before, they have to row those Zodiac boats to Mexican waters and back, a trip of eighteen miles.

Because of sleep deprivation, many of the trainees confess to drifting in and out of consciousness throughout the trip. Back at the base, most students learn to sleep while eating.

On Wednesday the men continue the races with boats bouncing on their heads, their combat boots sinking in the soft sand. That evening they run again. At midnight, they are ordered to lie naked in the cold, pounding surf. Every ten minutes during the night they are made to stand up to get the full effect of the wind.

After the surf torture, the chance to disenroll awaits each student. All he has to do is ring a certain bell three times and say, “I quit.”

By Thursday everyone is hallucinating. By Friday afternoon the week is over, and the new SEALs are lined up to be checked by a doctor.¹

Only in terms of the ugliness of war can punishment like this make any sense. By pushing these men to the very brink of insanity during times of peace, the navy is giving them the best chance to be ready to face the cruelty of real war if it comes.

With his first words in this letter, James reminds his suffering brothers and sisters that they should not be surprised when they experience intense periods of testing. He knows that they face a spiritual conflict that will require a toughness learned only through proper instruction and monitored experience. James calls God’s training regimen “various [kinds of] trials” (1:2). As he prepares his friends for the inevitable test, he outlines for them and for us the following five strategies to employ when times of testing invade.

CELEBRATE THE REASON BEHIND YOUR TRIALS

When James addresses his letter to the twelve tribes, he is employing a common designation of the Jewish nation (Acts 26:7). When he speaks of them as “scattered abroad,” the word he chooses is Diaspora, a technical term employed after the Babylonian captivity for Jews who lived outside of Palestine among the Gentiles.

The Diaspora began in 722 BC when the Assyrians captured the ten tribes of the northern kingdom (2 Kings 17:6). When Nebuchadnezzar carried away the southern kingdom to Babylon in 586 BC (2 Kings 25:11), the process continued. In the early days of the church as great waves of persecution swept over Jerusalem, the dispersion persisted: “Now those who were scattered after the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, preaching the word” (Acts 11:19; see also 8:1, 4).

Peter wrote his first letter to “the pilgrims of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia” (1:1).

In some of the major cities of the world, such as Alexandria, large populations of expatriate Jews were persecuted by their own countrymen, abused by the Gentiles, and in many places had less standing than slaves.

This is the context of the trials mentioned in this first section. James pictures these disenfranchised Israelites as “falling into” trials. It is a description that is similar to the way Paul portrayed his Roman imprisonment. He referred to it as “the things which happened to me” (Phil. 1:12).

The phrase “falling into” might be better translated “encountering.” It is the same term used in the story of the good Samaritan of the man who “fell among thieves” (Luke 10:30).

By the use of this word, it is obvious that the suffering believers were not overtaken by some sinful activity or temptation. Rather, they were being exploited and slandered and litigated by the rich. God was allowing these experiences to strengthen and mature their faith.

For the Jews, the trials were packaged as persecution. For us today, they could be any number of things: the loss of a job, a divorce, trouble with our children, severe financial strain, illness or death in the family, or relational problems over which we have little control. One writer has observed that this emphasis by James stands in stark contrast to much modern Christian thinking:

A matter worth pondering is the fact that the very first topic James discussed involved the difficulties encountered in the Christian life. Totally foreign to him was the curious modern notion that becoming a Christian will make life easier, that all problems will disappear, and that the prospect in this life for each believer is that he will live “happily ever after.”²

It would be easy for us to reason that since we are not experiencing any difficulty at this time, such teaching on trials is not applicable to us. But please note that James does not say if you encounter trials, but when you encounter trials.

And when these inevitable trials come, our first strategy, according to James, is to consider it all joy. What could he possibly mean?

In his book Where Is God When It Hurts?, Philip Yancey tells about Claudia, a beautiful newlywed who discovered that she had Hodgkin’s disease. One of her greatest challenges in coping with her trial was presented by her host of well-meaning friends who came to the hospital to see her. One woman, whom Claudia described as the most spiritual in her church, came often to read aloud from books about praising God. Her speeches to Claudia routinely sounded like this:

Claudia, you need to come to the place where you can say, “God, I love You for making me suffer like this. It is Your will. You know the best for me. And I just praise You for loving me enough to allow me to experience this. In all things, including this, I give thanks.”

Claudia said that as she would ponder these words, her mind would be filled with gruesome visions of God:

She imagined a figure in the shape of a troll, big as the universe, who delighted in squeezing helpless humans between his fingernails, pulverizing them with his fists, dashing them against sharp stones. The figure would keep torturing these humans until they cried out, “God, I love You for doing this to me!”

The whole idea repulsed her, and Claudia knew that she could never worship or love a God like that.³

When James tells us to consider it all joy when we fall into various kinds of trials, he is not counseling us as Claudia’s friend did. To consider it all joy in the midst of our trials is to respond with a deliberate, intelligent appraisal of our situation. Navy Captain Larry Bailey, commanding officer of the Coronado School for the training of SEALs, said, “Completing Hell Week is 90 percent mental. The men don’t believe it at first, but it is.”⁴

The same is true for Christians going through trials—90 percent of their success is mental and spiritual. They must learn to look at the experience from God’s perspective and recognize the trial not as a happy experience in itself but as the means of producing something very valuable in life.

Spiros Zodhiates explains that the word consider “should rather be translated, ‘think forward, consider, regard.’ As you live in the present consider the future, think forward to the future. Gloom now, but glory in the days to come.”⁵

Jesus taught this kind of joy when He delivered His Sermon on t...