HELP IN TIMES OF TRIAL
Luke 22: 39-46; Luke 8: 22-25; 1 Peter 1:6-9; Revelation 2: 9,10
The apostle Paul told Timothy “that in the last days difficult times shall be there” (2 Tim.3:1), but at no time did he suggest that there would not be the resource to continue. The days are difficult now. I think anyone can see that these are the last times. You can see it in the affections of the saints, the way the brethren have just sung about the coming of the Lord Jesus (Hymn 353), something that must be very pleasing to the Lord Himself. People may look for external signs, but there is no need to look for external signs; there is nothing that needs to be fulfilled before the Lord Jesus comes for all His saints. The world, including Christendom, is ripe for all that will follow the rapture of the saints. Christendom has largely turned away from the Lord, turned away from the One who died in order that souls should be saved; it has turned away from His thoughts and His mind. People have imposed their own minds, their own ideas. There is nothing that we are waiting for that must take place before the Lord Jesus comes. Is that not a wonderful thing? And in this time, as the apostle says, “in the last days difficult times shall be there”.
It is not my desire to occupy anybody with what is difficult. But Christians are in days of trial. What I desire is that we may get a little impression in our souls of the resources that are available to keep us, in times of trial. That is what we need. Peter’s heart was for the Lord, and when he saw the Lord walking on the water, he said ‘I want to be with Him’. He said, “Lord, if it be thou, command me to come to thee upon the waters”, Matt.14:28. The Lord bid Peter to come, he went and he did walk on the water, and then he looked at the trials in the form of the wind and waves. Do not be occupied with the trials, keep your eye exclusively on One. That is what we spoke about in the reading. It is important in our experiences here; and it is important when we look back at our history: what do we see? Look at the church’s public history: what do you see? It is enough to make you weep; church history is full of breakdown and failure. Look at it from another perspective, and you see the One who has carried His people through, carried the saints through in spite of man’s unfaithfulness, in spite of all the enemy could do:
‘He safely leads His saints along:
His loving-kindness, O how strong!’
(Hymn 107)
That is the way to regard history, and when you regard history like that it gives you something stable that you can rely on, because what has occurred in the past is plain evidence of what can be accomplished now, and if the Lord has preserved His people through trials, He will do that to the end. We have His promise that He will do so.
I read the passage in Luke where the Lord Jesus was facing the greatest conflict that has ever been faced. There could be no conflict greater than this, when the Lord Jesus was in the garden. Luke’s gospel was written with humanity in mind. In Matthew and Mark, you have great emphasis on the pressure, the judgment, the forsaking that the Lord bore. These are not emphasised in Luke, where you see the Lord Jesus as a model for us. Here He is at the time of greatest trial and suffering, and what did He do? This passage is such an instructive one; the first thing He did, once He was withdrawn from His disciples and was alone, is that “having knelt down he prayed”. He did that as a model. That is the instinctive action of any true believer. If there is a true believer who is going through trials, you do not have to tell them to pray because they have been praying long before you knew about their trials. It is the instinctive, first reaction, and rightly so, to turn to God, who allows all things under His hand. He allows the trials, the difficulties, and the joys as well; but in times of trial the first thing to remember is that God has allowed them, and He has allowed them for a reason. Perhaps you ask Him what the reason is and you do not know; you will know one day. We will all know:
‘With Him look back on all the way;
To learn the meaning, at His hand,
Of every deed in every day!
Clearer than ever shall we see
The grace which God our Saviour showed,
The love that led so faithfully
Along the pathless desert road.’
(Hymn 299)
Be patient, for you will know one day. It is not given to us to know everything now: God has His own way, and He works according to His own mind. The day will come when we will know, and in the meantime we have our recourse to Him at all times, in prayer.
In Matthew’s gospel the disciples are enjoined to enter into their chamber and pray. We know that God will hear our prayers, but Matthew tells us something else: “pray to thy Father who is in secret, and thy Father who sees in secret will render it to thee”, Matt.6:6. He sees: God loves to see a praying person – He “sees in secret”. He is the heart-knowing God; He looks upon everything; He knows what we are thinking; He knows what our true desires are. He sees in secret and rewards in secret. The apostle in Philippians says, “by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses every understanding, shall guard your hearts and your thoughts by Christ Jesus”, Phil.4:6,7. He does not say, ‘Make your requests known to God and God will grant them’; He may not. When you are in the presence of God and you pour out your soul to Him, He may not grant you what you ask Him for; but He will give you something else: He will give you peace. It is a blessed thing: our Father is wiser than we are and as accepting that, He will give us peace.
The Lord Jesus prayed saying, “Father, if thou wilt remove this cup from me:– but then, not my will, but thine be done”. He was not looking for His own will to be followed. We know that, throughout the life of Jesus here, if He had followed His own will, it would have been perfect and perfectly in accord with the will of His Father. But that was never His motive for doing anything; His motive for everything that He did was that it was the will of His Father. He says here, “if thou wilt remove this cup from me:– but then, not my will, but thine be done”. Could the Father have removed that cup from the Lord Jesus? That cup had to be drained; if the Lord Jesus had not drained that cup, who could the Father have given it to? Could you or I have drained that cup? It was the cup of God’s wrath: who could endure that? It was a cup of woe, a cup of suffering: who else could God have given that cup to? Only to One who was able to exhaust all that was contained in that cup. Blessed be His Name!
How great He is, how wonderful! He did not turn aside. He was like the lion that Solomon speaks about, “The lion, mighty among beasts, which turneth not away for any”, Prov.30:30. The whole power of Satan was coming against Him yet He turned not aside for any. Then an angel appeared to Him. I suppose we are the subject of angelic protection and care far more than we realise. I wonder if many of us have been in a situation where we were conscious that an angel was giving us strength. The Lord Jesus knew it here. The angels are His servants, they are at His bidding, yet in the full and perfect humanity that marked the Lord Jesus here, He was able to be strengthened by an angel. Think of Him, and who He is, and yet He took part in flesh and blood and was perfectly in man’s condition, sin apart. We have been speaking about the life of faith, and the Lord having entered into that and having completed it, as Man. He was so perfectly a Man that an angel could be sent from heaven, strengthening Him, and confirming to Him a sense of the total delight that the Father had in seeing One who was prepared to relinquish His own desires, even His own life, “becoming obedient even unto death, and that the death of the cross”, Phil.2:8. That was the extent of His obedience, it was complete and could go no further. There is no greater obedience than obedience as far as death, and He displayed it.
Then “being in conflict”. Who was He in conflict with? It was not His will against the Father’s will: the Father’s will was fully accepted. This was conflict with Satan. Satan had come back; it says after the temptations that the devil “departed from him for a time”, Luke 4:13. Now he comes back, bringing the full horror of what was before the Lord Jesus to see whether he could turn Him aside. Someone said that Satan would have offered Him a choice: all the kingdoms of the world on one side; and on the other, the bearing of the judgment of God and death. Satan would have presented that as a choice. The Lord Jesus did not turn aside for any: this conflict was already decided. He rose up: “rising up from his prayer, coming to the disciples”. Here we have the Lord Jesus as the great model for us: the trials were there and He prayed; He accepted the will of God for Him. He had a conscious knowledge in His soul that being submissive to the will of God was entirely pleasing to heaven, and so He went forward in the face of what would have appeared impossible opposition.
It is wonderful to take account of the Lord Jesus as an example: what a blessed thing it is. He stands alone in all His moral excellence, stands alone as the One who was capable of taking up everything for God, and fulfilling it. The whole purpose of God hung upon this moment when Jesus was in the garden – the whole purpose of God hung upon Him, and He went forward. Thinking about these things would sober us. Christianity is not all elation: our hearts rise up in joy when we think of His return, but the work that Jesus accomplished, and the fact that we have the assurance of His return, have been established at a terrible cost. It is a cost that neither you nor I could have met.
I now want to refer to ourselves and the disciples. In chapter 8 He was in the boat: “they set off from shore. And as they sailed, he fell asleep; and a sudden squall of wind came down on the lake, and they were filled with water”. It says, “a sudden squall of wind”: in the epistle to the Ephesians we are told of “the ruler of the authority of the air”, Eph.2:2. I think in Scripture where the wind is spoken of as bringing disturbance or danger, it refers to the power of Satan, and the waves are the circumstances. Satan would stir things up and make things difficult for believers. We are weak, we are frail creatures, and Satan would stir things up to make things difficult for us. Sometimes we may not know which way to turn. A sister told me once about a time when one disaster after another had happened to her in the space of about a week, and she did not know which way to turn, and then she said, ‘Of course there was only one way in which I could turn’. That was true. The disciples here turned to Him: “Master” they called Him. The ship was full of water, the waves were beating in, the wind was strong and they say, “Master, master, we perish”. Nobody has ever perished in the presence of the Lord Jesus, it could not be. He is the living One, nobody can perish in His presence.
As trials come – they come upon the testimony, they come in our private lives, there are trials too which we experience as part of our lot with mankind: these all come – get into the presence of the Lord and stay in His presence. It is the only way of safety. It does not say that the disciples rectified things: “he … rebuked the wind and the raging of the water; and they ceased”. It does not say that they started bailing out the ship: they were still in the same circumstances. But what did they receive? What changed? They received peace. “he … rebuked the wind and the raging of the water”; He did not rebuke the disciples. He questioned them: “Where is your faith?” We can have faith, whatever the trials may be – the trials of our life, the trials of the testimony – we can have faith in the One who said, “behold, I am with you all the days, until the completion of the age”, Matt.28:20.
Has the Lord gone back on that word? Could He go back on that word? No. When He was here, the wind and the waves were submissive to His voice, and they always will be: “they were astonished, saying to one another, Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?”. There will soon be a public demonstration of His power: the winds, the “ruler of the authority of the air”, will have to obey, because he will be bound. The circumstances of life, the waves, will submit to His voice. How precious it is to know that, and to know in our own hearts that we have recourse to the One who is over all. The Holy Spirit would help us to know this: He too knows our hearts, and He knows the things of Christ. We can cry to Him at all times and He will help us.
You might say, ‘Why are these things allowed?’. In this passage in Peter – it is very confirming – he says, “Wherein ye exult, for a little while at present, if needed, put to grief by various trials, that the proving of your faith, much more precious than of gold which perishes, though it be proved by fire, be found to praise and glory and honour in the revelation of Jesus Christ”. You say, ‘I have faith, I have faith in the Lord Jesus’; the trials are the means of proving it, it is not testing to destruction; God never does that, but He proves faith. If someone makes something that has a function, the first thing he does is to test it out to make sure that it works. That is what God does. He has given you faith, He has given you a principle by which you can live, and He will test out that faith through trials to show whether you are exercising it as you should in order to get through the trial. That faith is precious, “more precious than of gold which perishes, though it be proved by fire”.
God allows things, and, in fact, God does things. We referred in the reading meeting to Psalm 4. At the beginning of that Psalm, the psalmist says, “in pressure thou hast enlarged me” (v.1). It has been said that that is like the work of the potter: he puts his hand inside the vessel of soft clay and exerts pressure, and the vessel grows. God allows things in order that we should grow in our souls, that we should learn Him more, and that we should have greater capacity to answer to Him in a fuller way. It is one of the reasons why we have pressure: God as the Potter increases the vessel by applying pressure. We do not enjoy the pressure, it is not pleasing, it is inward, but as the pressure is applied inwardly, the vessel grows. Every one of us is a vessel in the hands of the Potter. A dear brother with us used to say, ‘Do not try and take yourself out of the hands of the Potter’ – do not try to do that because God is wiser than we are, and He knows what He is doing. He knows what He is forming, and He is forming each one of us into a vessel. Ultimately He is forming one great vessel, a vessel the like of which has never been seen upon this earth, a vessel which is eternal in character and which carries His glory, the glory of the One who has formed it. Beloved, how wonderful the assembly is and it is being formed at the present time.
In Revelation where we read, the Lord Jesus is addressing the assembly of Smyrna. Historically, the believers in Smyrna suffered terribly, and the Lord Jesus tells them about it. He says, ‘You are going to suffer’, but then He adds, “Fear nothing of what thou art about to suffer … Be thou faithful”. Be faithful, be true to what you have. The word of God has come to us, it has come down through many years; matters of the truth have come to light, one after another; aspects of the truth have come out. The word would be, “Be thou faithful”: be true to it. Do not hold things lightly. You might say, ‘I will try and work things out for myself’. How are you going to do that? Who is going to help you to do that? You may say, ‘The Holy Spirit can do that’. But He is entitled to say, ‘I have already brought this truth out, I have already set it out’. Look into what the Lord has given by the Holy Spirit and be true to it: “Be thou faithful”. I am not suggesting that we learn the truth by rote, but that we should take things on in our hearts and our souls. We should let the truth have its way, and we should be faithful to it. All the trials of life will never overturn the truth: “Be thou faithful … and I will give to thee the crown of life”.
There is another touch in this address to Smyrna: “ye shall have tribulation ten days”. When anyone goes through a time of trial, it is limited. The Lord puts a limit on what He passes His people through; it is never indefinite. As far as the Lord is concerned, every trial is limited; it has an end. He is faithful to His own. If there was no end, we may not be able to go through, we may fail. He says to the assembly in Smyrna, “ye shall have tribulation ten days”. What the Lord allows and what He brings upon His people in the way of trial is limited, but what He gives in the way of blessing is eternal. There is never any limit to the blessings that come from our ascended Head. How glorious He is!
The believers in the assembly in Smyrna were not to be afraid of what they would suffer, because the worst thing that the enemy can do will result in putting you in the presence of the Lord Jesus for ever. The Lord Jesus says, “be not afraid of those who kill the body”, Matt.10:28. The effect of that is that you go to be in the presence of the Lord. Satan cannot do any more than that. Soon we will all be in the Lord’s presence. It will be a wonderful moment when we see Him:
‘To see Thee who hast loved us,
Then face to face above,
Whose grace at first had moved us
To taste and know Thy love!’ (Hymn 200)
What a prospect we have, of seeing Him and being in His presence eternally. May we be looking for it increasingly.
For His Name’s sake.
Address at Chelmsford
31 May 2025
Andrew Martin