By Pastor Adam Parker

I’ve been reflecting a great deal on living during troubling times. It was about a month ago that we moved out of our home in Mississippi. We spent a week on the road and arrived here about three weeks ago. Since then we moved into our new house in Hillsboro, experienced incredible hospitality and kindness from the congregation here at Evergreen PCA, set our kids up to begin attending St. Stephen’s Academy, and have started to settle in. We really did only just arrive, but already it feels like the Lord has thrown our family and church into the deep end of the sort of troubles that are a part of living in a fallen world.

Not only have there been nightly riots, not only does the coronavirus have much of our society in paralysis, but now the sky is darkened to a haunting orange because of fires to the south. On top of this, families at Evergreen have been effected by the fires: some are hosting family and friends who had to flee, while other members are being told they may have to evacuate if things don’t turn around.

As of my writing this, Clackamas County is under a level 3 evacuation and the five biggest fires in Oregon are only 5% contained. 900,000 acres are reported to have burned, and apparently tens of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate their homes.

You don’t typically come to your pastor for a rehash of local news or to hear the very bad news that you already live with every day. Why do I mention all of this? Well because I’ve been reminded in a pointed way that we don’t do theology in a vacuum. We hear God’s Word and live out God’s Word in the real world where there are real troubles. We never have the luxury of knowing God, studying God, and spending time in his Word from some elevated tower above the earth’s surface absent of the world’s problems: those never go away this side of heaven.

This has me thinking about the inevitability of trouble in a fallen world. We might look at a passage like this and think that God will help us live peaceful lives without trouble: “I sought the LORD, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears” (Psa. 34:4). The Bible isn’t telling us that we will live a trouble-free life.

God always delivers his people from their fears, but He often doesn’t do it in the way we desire or expect. Sometimes he delivers us from our fears by graciously letting us avoid the thing that we fear. We could never count all the many ways he’s delivered us from trouble and we didn’t even know it.

But sometimes he delivers us by taking us through things we fear but ultimately preserving our faith. The promise of Isaiah 43:2 is not that “You will not pass through the waters,” the promise is “when you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.” Notice that the promise here is clear: the trouble will come, but it won’t destroy. It’s not a promise of immortality, it’s a promise of spiritual perseverance.

How does that apply to this moment? As a believer, your security is in this: the troubles you are enduring right now are guaranteed by our God to lead to a stronger, firmer, more joyful dependence on God. These events we are living in the midst of will refine and shape you so that you learn how to depend on Christ and not on yourself or on worldly security. For a follower of Jesus, that is amazing news.

I’ve also considered during this time how we should pray. I confess that my prayers were initially quite worldly in their orientation: “Lord, deliver those in harm’s way. Protect property. Make the fires go away.”

And yet I also felt reproved that I had lost a spiritual perspective on these matters. After all, things will all go away, eventually. There is a spiritual anemia to a kind of prayer life that focuses on worldly needs. John Calvin reminds us about how easily our priorities are upside down:

“We are warned not to put the cart before the horse whenever we ask God for what we need. There is an order here which we must observe. First of all God must receive us in his grace; then he must send us what is good and needful. Our nature, of course, works the other way round, in the same way as an invalid is more concerned by his pain than by what is causing it! Hence when we pray to God we ask for bread to eat and for our needs to be met. If we are sick we ask for healing; if we lack something we ask him to provide it. That is why our prayers are always back to front. We forget the major things—God’s grace and peace—and we concentrate on the minor. So one man will ask for wealth and another for something else he fancies. In short, we are so perverse in our likes and dislikes that we do not know what is good for us. That is why we should follow this rule, that when we address God in prayer we should ask above all that he may be gracious to us, and that in pardoning our sins he may gather us to himself.”

We should absolutely care about the physical needs of ourselves and others. This world does matter; physical needs matter. Jesus tells us to ask God for our daily bread, after all. But he also reminds us that we can’t live on bread alone (Matt. 4:4). In response to that reminder, are we in prayer firstly for the spiritual needs of ourselves, our families, and the folks in the path of these fires? Are we in prayer that God would use these physically and emotionally unsettling circumstances to remind us that because this whole world is a forest marked for the woodcutter’s axe we should be careful not to make our lasting home in its boughs?

This is an opportunity for all of us to grow deep in the Lord and to lean upon him. I believe our God will use this moment in the life of his people to create a newer, deeper, richer dependence upon him instead of depending on comfortable circumstances for our security.

Adam Parker is the Senior Pastor of Evergreen Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Beaverton, Oregon. He and his wife, Arryn, have been married for 19 years and have four children. He is a graduate of Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, MS.