What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger?

CONSECRATE Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  HEAR James 1:2–4 (NIV) Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. CONSIDER Recapping yesterday: our faith is being tested by the world, the flesh, and Satan—all the time. We need to restate our words aloud from yesterday: “This is a testing of my faith.” How does this work? Just how does the testing of our faith produce perseverance? The test creates the opportunity for Jesus to transcend and transform our lives. Perseverance does not come from us. It comes from God. I would press through the words transcend and transform into the word transfuse. Transfusing—now there’s a word I have never used, but I sensed it was the word. I looked it up. The first definition relates to blood and the obvious connection to a blood transfusion, which itself has interesting implications when it comes to Jesus. The second definition is the bingo: to “cause (something or someone) to be permeated or infused by something.” I don’t know about you, but the fireworks are going off for me. To cause to pass from one person to another sounds like Jesus’s very words when he said, “Abide in me and I will abide in you.” It gets really interesting when we get to the origins of the word transfuse. Check this out: “Late Middle English (in the sense ‘cause to pass from one person to another’): from Latin transfus- ‘poured from one container to another’, from the verb transfundere, from trans-‘across’ + fundere ‘pour’.” More fireworks. To pour from one container to another—to pour across—evokes all the imagery of the Holy Spirit being poured out on the day of Pentecost and thereafter. Transfusing. This is how the testing of our faith produces perseverance. Jesus causes his life to pass from his person into your person through the pouring out of the Holy Spirit into your spirit. For the longest time, here’s how I thought this process worked: (1) I face a trial, (2) I ask God to help me, (3) I ask people to pray for me, (4) I do my best to get through it, having faith that God is helping me, and (5) I eventually get through it, giving God the glory, thanks, and praise. In this equation, faith seems to be my belief that God is helping me get through the trial. That doesn’t much feel like transfusing, does it? It feels more like God helps those who help themselves. It feels like religious self-help. Here’s the transfusion question: What if Jesus actually wants to come into your core person and take over your life? What if he’s looking not so much for “Help me, God” prayers but “Have me, Jesus” prayers? What if Scripture really means it when it says, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20)? What if “the testing of your faith produces perseverance” doesn’t actually mean “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”? What if it means the testing of your faith leads to Jesus himself, through the Holy Spirit, persevering in and through your life? What if it means the death of the false self and the resurrection of the true self, which is the transfusion of Jesus into your whole self, body, mind, and spirit? That would be something akin to “pure joy,” wouldn’t it? That would be indefatigable hope, wouldn’t it? That would be breathtaking love, wouldn’t it? This is precisely why our faith needs to be tested, so we can graduate from a spiritualized version of “I think I can” to a meek, poor in spirit “I know I can’t” to a sturdy, surrendered, and confident “I know Jesus in me will.” The testing of our faith leads us from faith as believing in something to faith as surrendering to someone. PRAY Father, we want to believe this is true, but we have gone so long without really believing it that we wonder if we can make the leap. It is just easier to keep it at arm’s length, with you helping us on our terms and us taking it from there. Lord Jesus, we sense you really do want us to belong to you and yet we hold back. We know the testing of our faith produces perseverance, but we need to know it at a whole new level—beyond what we used to think. Come, Holy Spirit, and bring me into a wholehearted surrender, the kind that leads to the transfusing of your life into mine all the time. In Jesus’s name, amen.