JEFF TURNER
There is a moment in certain trials when you come to the end of what you can manage. You have brought everything you have, every resource, every strategy, every reserve of strength and patience and faith, and none of it is sufficient. You cannot handle what you are in the middle of. And it is precisely at that moment, when the self-sufficiency runs out, that something God has been waiting for becomes possible.
Because what happens when you face something you cannot handle? You go to your knees. And on your knees, something shifts. The heart that was perhaps moving through its days with a kind of spiritual self-confidence, checking its own boxes and keeping its own accounts, is now searching itself before God, asking hard questions, repenting of what the ordinary days allowed to accumulate, clearing the ground so that the voice of God can be heard without obstruction. This is the purifying process, and it is not incidental to the trial. It is the point of it. The fire does not destroy the believer. It refines them. This is why the psalmist, looking back across his own suffering with the clarity that only distance provides, arrived at what sounds like a startling conclusion: it was good for him. Not easy. Not painless. Good. The God who loves you enough to allow the fire is the same God who is standing in it with you, and he will not remove you until the work is done.
For it is time for judgment to begin with the household of God; and if it begins with us first, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God?
1 Peter 4:17
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