No Special Effects

Just read this in Matthew 17 where Jesus pays his tax in a rather miraculous way...

"However, not to give offense to them, go to the sea and cast a hook and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth you will find a shekel. Take that and give it to them for me and for yourself."
Matthew 17:17

It's interesting the way Jesus does miracles. There are no special effects. If I was Jesus I would be tempted to stretch out my hand, have a beam of light descend from Heaven onto it and have the coin materialise out of nothing. There would be no mistaking your power and authenticity.

But his miracles don't seem to go like that. Most of the time he leaves space for faith. He does miracles, but in quite an ordinary, understated way. Like when he feeds the five thousand. You get the impression that people couldn't really see where the food was coming from. It didn't fall out of the sky, materialise in front of them and drop into their hands. All they knew was that Jesus was giving out food, and it kept coming.

When Jesus healed people, there were no bolts of lighting, no thunder, no earth tremors. He just speaks and it happens. You just see the end result, not the process. When he raises people from the dead, there's no awesome sight of regeneration. No elaborate process of a corpse gradually coming back to life. They just wake up as if they were sleeping.

Interesting. Jesus, even when performing miracles, seems to leave room for faith. You can find another explanation if you want to. You can call it coincidence, some sort of elaborate trick, or create some bizarre scientific explanation. Faith is always required, even with the supernatural.

(The only exceptions I can think of are when Jesus walks on water and when he has the transfiguration on the mountain. But even then it's just for the disciples – a very select few who get a special insight.)

What you want vs what you need

"Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness."
James 1:2-3

I've been chewing over these verses for quite a while. They are two verses which imply trials of all shapes and sizes are good for the exercise of your faith. If we didn't have such trials, our faith wouldn't be strengthened.

But what's interesting is if you're a 'good Christian', you've most likely been praying for a resolution. For God to get you out of a situation, to fix things up. And then, when there seems to be no definite answer, we may start questioning why.

Our lack of faith? Perhaps we haven't been praying hard enough, or often enough. Perhaps there's some sort of spiritual battle going on, and we haven't been praying in the right way.

But the first thing these verses say is 'count it all joy'. Obviously our natural reaction is to do the opposite, to get stressed and freak out. Otherwise that particular instruction wouldn't be written. 'Count it all joy' implies the trial is a blessing, and that we have to reconfigure our pattern of thought to acknowledge that.

The verses state that our trials produce steadfastness. Jesus says elsewhere that 'the one who endures to the end will be saved' (Mark 13:13).

It seems steadfastness, perseverance and endurance are what God is developing in our lives. They are qualities of unbelievable importance, and perhaps very central to his work of regeneration. Trials, of shapes and kinds, are the process in which they are developed.

It seems that trails are often the thing we ultimately need, and not always the quick fix answer to prayer we were looking for.