Count It All Joy

It's not as bad as you think it is.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:21

Hello and welcome to Become a Competent Biblical Counselor. I'm Dr. Dave Jones, and today's episode is entitled Count It All Joy, and it's found in James chapter one and verse one, where James writes, Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy, for you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing. When you first read this verse, or these verses, I should say, they become almost extremely difficult to comprehend and how you can count it all joy when you're falling into various trials and tribulations. That just doesn't make sense to your counselee. You're gonna have people calling you that are really having a rough time. And if you use immediately this verse to help them, it's not gonna work. It's not gonna work insofar as they are coming to you emotionally, scared, frustrated, you fill in the blank. But if you tell them, well, this is what you've got to do, and and you're just gonna have to be happy with what's happening to you, that is just not offering hope and encouragement to somebody who is really going through a difficult time. But there's a way that you can use these verses to accomplish just that. And in today's episode, I want to go through that with you. I use these verses very, very much. I use it constantly, it seems, when people are going through tragedies or difficult times or and to be given the opportunity to explain it to them thoroughly and clearly, they can learn to understand. But it's your presentation of this very particular verse that is confusing. So let's get into it and I'll show you what I have done to help people with these verses. I met with a man a week ago, a 52-year-old man. He'd been married for 14 years to his wife, and his wife had some medical issues, but they were not sufficient enough to keep them from enjoying on a cruise. In fact, they had just returned from a cruise a week before I talked to him. And um they were active as much as they could be. Her wife, like I said, was involved with a had a lot of pain with her medical situation, but she was medicated to the point where she could deal with those. I asked the husband, so I said, What are you wrestling with today? He says, Well, my life wife just left me. And I said, I'm sorry to hear that. How long had you been married? And we got into getting into the details of his life. And they'd been married 14 years, like I previously mentioned. And I said, What caused her to leave? Was there some kind of an event, some kind of an occurrence, some kind of activity that precipitated her wanting to leave you after 14 years? He says, Nope. We um had a wonderful life together. It was just the two of us. We don't have any children living with us. I have two older adult children that don't live with us, but my wife and I were retired in Florida and we just were enjoying ourselves. If you'll remember in previous episodes, I indicated that there are three questions that you should ask a counselee first off. The first one being, what is your issue? What is the problem that you're dealing with? The second is what have you done about it? And third, what do you expect me to do? What are you looking for from me? So I was in the process of doing the first inquiry, what is your issue? And he's explaining to me what actually happened. I said, So tell me a little bit more about your life with your wife. Were there any other involvements for her or for you? He says, No. I said, What did the two of you do together? He says, Well, I built her a house. It's a beautiful house. She loved this house. And I said, and she left the house? Yep, she left. I said, To where did she go? Well, she went north to see some friends and stay with some friends. I said, Have you had any communication with her? She said, Yeah, I spoke with her last week, and she just let me know that I'm going to be getting a letter from my or from her attorney uh pertaining to the divorce that she wants. So in the process of gathering data, I said, You've been married how long? He says, 14 years. And I said, Well, tell me what your life was like with her 15 years ago. He says, Well, we we did this, we did that, we went here, we did. She gave me he gave me a whole line of things that they did when they were first going together. And I said, Well, did you continue doing those things even as recently as last month? He says, Oh yes, we just came back from a cruise. And I said, Okay, why do you think that she left you? He says, He had no idea, but she had threatened that a couple of times in the last couple of years, but obviously didn't follow through with it. And he said, Um, even though she loved the house that we built together, she was more interested in my inheritance than she was in that house. He said further, he says, if she wanted that house, if she wanted out of the marriage and wanted that house, I would be glad to sign it over to her. But she doesn't want the house now. She wants my inheritance. To which I asked, Tell me about your inheritance. He says, It's in excess of a million dollars. My response to that was immediately, do you have legal representation? He says, Yeah, I've got a great lawyer. I said, You need to talk to your lawyer. And you need to do that soon, because there are some legal issues, obviously, that need to be cleared out, and we cannot do that here. And then I went on to say, You appear very calm and telling me about what's going on. What are you really concerned about? He put his head down, he smiled a little bit, and he says, I want to find out how I should live as a single person again. Um, I said, Well, what are you afraid of? He says, Well, I haven't been a single person in 14 years, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do and how I'm supposed to feel and how I'm supposed to act. And I said, Are you sad that your wife left? He says, I would give her that house and anything else that we can negotiate on. I love her, but if this is the kind of person that she's going to be and this is how she's going to treat me, then I need to figure out how I'm supposed to live by myself. I said, Well, what are you afraid of living by yourself? He says, I don't know. I just don't know what to do. And he's smiling, and it's I know I can tell he's very, very uncomfortable with admitting the fact that a grown man of 52 doesn't know how to live by himself. But he had a beautiful, wonderful, well-behaved little puppy. And he was just loving that little puppy. And I said, you know what? Seems to me you still have love in your life. And uh he says, Yeah, I sure do. So that was an interesting conversation in and of itself. So would you like me to tell you what you're supposed to do? And he says, Yeah, give me some give me some hints on what I'm supposed to do if I was living by myself. I said, Okay, let's look at James chapter one. Now, this is a Christian man, he's very involved in his church, he's uh very involved with men's Bible studies, uh, he knows his Bible, and he's very diligent in his walk with the Lord and his relationship with Jesus Christ. So we get into James chapter one. Count it all joy when you've all called fall into various trials and tribulations. I said, How does that sound to you? He says, I don't understand it. God did not put you into this situation to punish you or to disparage you in any way. He allowed it to happen. Understand this too. Nothing grows without rain. You're just having some rain in your life. In fact, you're having a thunderstorm in your life, but it doesn't seem like it's really affecting you that seriously, which is good. But you have to understand this. Something good is going to come out of this, and you just have to be patient enough and understand and accept and believe the fact that God is in this with you. You're not in this by yourself. I'm in this with you, but God is the one who's going to really direct your steps, but you just have to accept his grace to let him do that. You see, he's got a plan for your life, but he needs you to go through or he allows you to go through what you're going through now to get you ready for what he has coming for you. He might just have another woman in your life that he wants you to walk with as far as your walk with God in your Bible studies, in your church involvement. You have to begin to say to yourself and pray to God that you accept what is going through your life because He has a better plan for you. You don't know what that is, but you're accepting the fact that He is going to take care of you in the way that He has a plan for your life. Also, it's important at this point for me to tell you, counselor, that you have to emphasize very clearly and forcefully that the schedule is not the counselees. The schedule of what is going to happen in the future as a result of this is not up to the counselee. Counselees can't say, well, okay, I'll do this for a week or I'll do this for a month, and I'm going to expect God's plan. No, no, no. It's God's schedule. The point to be made is that your counselee has to get to the point where he's saying or she's saying, you know what? This is a trial that I'm going through. I do not understand it. I do not enjoy it. I do not appreciate it. But you know, there must be a reason for this. God has a plan for my life, and I have to go through this so I can get ready for what he has planned for me in the future. And the process could have been, well, I'm sure glad he got me out of that mess that I was in, because now he's preparing me for something else that's better than anything that I've ever experienced in my life. I can't say that I expect this plan to be revealed to me in 10 days or two weeks or a month. It could be months, could be years. But the point is, God is putting all of this together for his purpose, and he's going to use me for that purpose. I continued by telling this man, understand this. There are other men in your in your Bible study groups that are going through the same problems or similar problems that you're going through, and they might need somebody like you. God might just be allowing you to go through this and giving you the strength and the grace to come out of this, a better man than when you went into it, so he in turn could refer people and lead people to you, and you in the same time can say, Let me tell you what God did for me in my situation, which is very similar to your situation. It's hope that you are imparting God's grace and God's relief and victories to somebody else. That's something that could very well be what God is doing. And he looked at me and he smiled. He says, You really think I could be used like that? I said, Yeah, you've got a story. You had a story when we first started talking. You got a better story now, don't you? He says, Yeah. He just smiled. My point is, count it all joy. They can do that. People can do that. It's tough to look at it to begin with with what do you mean count it all joy? I'm miserable with what I'm going through. Yeah, but if you look at it differently from God's point of view, he's got something better. I hope that works for you. God bless you as you apart that information and have a good day.