Job LXXII

 Unless you’ve gone through it, the best any of us can hope for is an abstract understanding of what the sifting is. The reality of it, its crushing weight, and the constant buffeting with seemingly no end in sight must be experienced in order to be understood. It’s like someone explaining the difficulties of crossing the Atlantic on a single-passenger sailboat. Sure, you can get an idea of the level of difficulty with being alone on the stormy seas for weeks on end, but unless you’ve experienced the sunburn, cracked lips, anxiousness, isolation, seasickness, and privation, you only know the half of it.

There’s a reason ‘you had to be there to understand’ is a saying. Some things cannot be adequately explained unless they are experienced, and nothing less than the experience will suffice.

The notion of being sifted is not exclusive to Job or even to the Old Testament. It’s not a practice God decided to do away with or no longer allow because the idea of it didn’t poll well when it was peer-reviewed. The misconception that God is somehow subject to our feelings and emotions is ludicrous on its face but ever popular in the modern-day church. We’ve talked ourselves into believing that since we have no appetite for suffering, sifting, or testing, God’s just going to eliminate those things from our lives.

Luke 22:31-32, “Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift all of you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.”

Okay, fine, so two guys. One in the Old Testament and one in the New. That doesn’t make it a common practice, does it? Read those two verses carefully, and you’ll realize it’s not just two guys. It wasn’t just Job and Simon, who would later be known as Peter. Satan had asked to sift all of them as wheat. Jesus singled out Simon in telling him that he’d been praying for him that his faith would not fail, yet as far as the sifting goes, Satan had asked to sift all of them.

Being sifted and having Satan ask to sift the servants of God is not an exception but the rule. These were the guys, Christ’s inner circle, those whom He called by name and spent the last three years of His life ministering with, yet when Satan asked that they be sifted, his request was not denied. Jesus didn’t say Satan asked to sift all of you as wheat, but I got your back and told him no.

Knowing what the future held for Peter, knowing he would deny Jesus three times before the rooster crowed that day, knowing how wrecked he would be once that happened, Jesus encouraged him the only way He could: by telling him, He’d prayed that his faith might not fail.

God determines how far He will let Satan go and the lengths to which he will sift a given individual, but at some point in life, most of us go through it. Are there exceptions? I’m sure there are, but I haven’t met one yet. The firing process makes clay stronger. Without it, it remains fragile and porous. If you are determined to serve God, if Jesus is established on the throne of your heart, the day will come when Satan will ask to sift you.

In that moment, all you have is the faith and trust you’ve built up over the course of your spiritual walk and nothing more. When the sifting begins, it’s too late to grow, press in, mature, or deepen your understanding of the God you serve. Peter already possessed faith; Jesus prayed that his faith would not fail.

We put off the important things, thinking we have forever to implement them, nurture them, and grow them. We know having a prayer life is necessary for the health of our spiritual man, but something always comes up, and we delay the consistent practice of going before God and having fellowship with Him until something happens, and all the distractions melt away, and we find ourselves with nothing but time to sit in our prayer closets, weep and groan and call out to Him pleading for an intervention of some sort. Where were you before the storm clouds? Where were you before the thing that made your world turn on its ear happened in an instant?

Situational relationships are nothing more than usury. If the only time I approach God is when I need something from Him, it’s neither love nor the desire to know Him fueling my pursuit but rather desperation. Seek to know God, make time for Him, and fellowship with Him with as much enthusiasm and desire during your days of plenty as you would in your time of famine, and when the time of famine arrives, He will be present without having been called.

If we think we can ignore God for six days out of the week and pay Him lip service on the seventh, and that’s all it takes to have a firmly rooted relationship with Him, we’re fooling ourselves. I have a friend who’s a bit on the chunky side and doesn’t take care of himself at all until the week before he’s due for his annual physical. That’s when he gets serious, cuts out the sugar and the carbs, starts to move beyond his front door, and gets a little exercise in the hope that he can fool the blood analysts into giving him a clean bill of health. I keep telling him that’s not the way it works, but my counsel falls on deaf ears because he insists it’s worked in the past, and so it will again. That level of self-delusion will eventually be shattered, but by then, it will be too late.

You don’t get on a flight and only then consider packing a bag. By the time the doors on the plane close and you’re taxiing for takeoff, it’s already too late. You must possess faith, know the character of the God you serve, learn to trust Him and establish your heart to be faithful to the end long before you find yourself on a proverbial ash heap scratching at yourself with a potsherd. Your spiritual man needs something to tap into as he is being buffeted. He needs a strong foundation from which he will not be moved, and the onus is on us to redeem the time and do what we must in order to ensure that we have done all to stand.   

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.