Tag Archives: Sovereignty

Mind Boggling

February 2, 2010

Jonathan Edwards once said, “Absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God.”

Many years ago, when I first read those words cited in John Piper’s Desiring God, they struck an instant chord in my soul.  This was what made God so incredibly great in my mind: He was in control of absolutely everything.  And when I let my mind start tracing the sequence of causes and effects that lead up to any single event, I am astounded with wonder at the amazing God I serve who can work all things out to His desired ends.

Almost nowhere in the Bible is this more clearly seen than in the story of Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Egypt, and the Exodus.  Just fifteen chapters into the Bible, God promises Abraham that his descendants will dwell in the land of his sojourning (Canaan), but the promise doesn’t end there.  He also says that before that happens, Abraham’s descendants will spend four hundred years in a land that is not their own.  And the reason that God gives for this delay?  Because “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”

So Abraham has no idea how all of this is going to work out, and neither does anyone else.  But one day, Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, ends up favoring one of his sons over the others – an affection that leads ten of the brothers to sell Joseph into slavery because of their jealousy.  While enslaved, this Joseph is falsely accused of adultery by his master’s wife and ends up in prison.  While in prison, he meets a couple of Pharaoh’s staff members who dream some interesting dreams.  God then gives Joseph the interpretation of their dreams which – two years later – leads to Joseph having an opportunity to interpret Pharaoh’s dream of a coming famine.

So God sent a famine on the whole earth, but he sent seven years of plenty first.  And He sent the warning in a dream to Pharaoh, whose cup-bearer remembered the dream-interpreter from the prison.  Therefore, it ends up being this great-grandson of Abraham who is set up to save the world from the seven years of blight by storing up the surplus from the seven years of plenty.  In the process, the family of Jacob is affected by the famine also and has to come to Egypt for food, where they eventually get reacquainted with their brother and end up moving the whole family.

This leads directly to the promised four hundred years of captivity, a situation that causes the Israelites to be forged into a mighty nation.  And it is from this situation that God leads leads His people out with many signs and wonders, creating for them a story of rescue and salvation that becomes the central narrative of their entire existence as a people.  It is an event also that leaves the nation of Israel with a great deal of wealth, as God promised Abraham – a wealth that they will need when God gives them the design for the tabernacle.

And so, when this mighty nation reaches the borders of the Promised Land, they are then set to bring the judgment of God upon the completed iniquity of the Amorites (Genesis 15:16), acting as God’s sword against that sin even as they are fulfilling an age old promise of blessing to their forefather Abraham.  And God has masterfully orchestrated the whole thing to declare His glory: the glory of His justice in punishing the sin of the Amorites, which did not go unchecked; the glory of His grace is saving an unworthy people; the glory of His faithfulness in fulfilling His promises; and the glory of His sovereign will in revealing the sweeping scope of this plan to readers of His Word.

Absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God because a God who rules His creation like this is so different from the false gods that those in world and even some in the church try to craft for themselves.  Their gods that react to situations in the world rather than cause them are weak and powerless wimps and utterly unworthy of worship.  But the God who has revealed Himself in the Bible – the God who has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ – is the majestic Creator, Ruler, Sustainer, and Sovereign King over everything.  Nothing can thwart His will (Job 42:2), and He does all that He pleases (Psalm 115:3).  He guides everything to the end that He has planned, and He is worthy of worship.

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Five Times Fair

February 1, 2010

“My God wouldn’t do such a thing!  He loves everybody equally!”

“I just can’t believe that!  That’s not fair!”

These exact phrases have been spoken by Christians in response to the biblical teaching of God’s unconditional election (Ephesians 1:3-14, Acts 13:48, John 6:37,44, et.al.) and in response to the biblical teaching that God gifts individual Christians with differing amounts of faith and gifts (Romans 12:3-8).  What lies at the heart of these complaints is the idea that God must treat all human beings equally or else He is not a good God.

Strangely enough, this same sentiment does not rear its ugly head when the Bible presents us with a human story of unbalanced blessings.  For example, no one seems to have any problem with Joseph’s lack of “fairness” in Genesis 43 and 45 when he gives his younger brother Benjamin a portion of food at dinner that is five times greater than what his older brothers receive, or when he gives Benjamin five changes of clothes and 300 shekels of silver and the older brothers receive no silver and only one change of clothes.  In fact, if you were to ask the same people making the complaints above whether or not Joseph had the right to do this, they would say, “Of course he does!”  Why is that?

The reasons behind Joseph’s right to give unequal treatment are that 1) he is the owner of the goods being distributed, and therefore he can do with them whatever he likes; 2) he has all the power in Egypt and his brothers have none, so he has every right to do whatever he wants concerning them and they have no legal right to demand otherwise; and 3) Joseph is the one who has been wronged by the brothers – they sold him into slavery and are now literally at his mercy.

In other words, the reasons why someone would believe that Joseph had every right to give any sort of unequal treatment that he wanted are the exact same reasons that ought to lead us to understand that God has that same right.  He is the Creator and thus the owner of every single particle in this universe (or any other).  You are made up of His stuff.  You breathe His air, walk on His earth, eat His produce, and on and on we could go.  Also, He has all power and authority in the universe.  This comes from the fact that He created it, but also because He is the greatest and most powerful of all beings.  We literally have no legal right to appeal any of His decisions.  He is the absolute Sovereign King and we are nothing (Isaiah 40:17).  Lastly, He has been wronged by man.  From the very beginning, He gave His Law (which He as Sovereign Master had every right to give, and which man as lowly creature had every obligation to obey) and man broke it.  And from that point on, all human beings have been steeped in sin – disobedience to the Law of God.  Therefore, man is at every moment living completely on God’s mercy, without any hope in himself.

So when someone complains that the biblical doctrine of election or the biblical teaching of unequal gifts is unfair, then what is really happening is that such a person has forfeited one of the points above.  Either that person does not believe that God owns everything, does not believe that God has all authority, or does not believe that man has wronged God in some way.  Because the proper response of one who has wronged the Almighty Creator and Ruler of the universe is absolute submission to anything He desires to do.  We must leave the heretical idea of entitlement in hell where it belongs.

Are you a Christian?  Then rejoice that your name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life from the foundation of the earth (Luke 10:20, Revelation 13:8).  It’s okay to thank and praise God for choosing to save a “wretch like me”.  That kind of praise leaves all boasting at the door, because you’re thanking God for what He did, not what you did.  He doesn’t save us because we’re worthy of it – far from it – He saves us because He wants to.  His reasons are His own.  And He gifts us to fulfill the role that He has designed for us.  And far from being jealous, we ought to learn to rejoice with those that God has chosen to bless more than us, because they are just as unworthy of those blessings as we are, and so we rejoice at what God is doing through them because it is His work.

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Those High Ways

October 24, 2009

Those High WaysSome awful statistics are tossed around in Baptist circles – or maybe the statistics are for all evangelical churches – at any rate, the numbers say that something like 80% of churches baptize no one in a whole year.  An even larger percentage of churches are plateaued or declining in membership.  And the way that this data is usually presented, the finger is pointed at those declining churches, making them responsible for the loss, pouring out guilt on their pastors, and beating up the members for not sharing the gospel more than they do.

Here’s an odd thing: I’ve never been a member of a “growing” church (at least not one that is growing numerically), but for some reason, I always thought that I would pastor one.  I suppose the odds should somewhat prepare young pastors for the likelihood that they will lead churches that are declining, but they don’t.

I think about this issue a lot.  Recently, at our association’s annual meeting, I had to sit and listen to the evidence that my church was in the 80% as the various annual church profile numbers were read aloud from all of the association’s member churches (we’ll not discuss at this point whether or not such a practice is sinful – maybe that would be a good topic for another time).  Why do churches seem to lose ground?  Why aren’t people saved?  I mean, I’m a pastor that loves Christ, I preach the Word of God and try not to preach myself, I share the gospel, I organize mission trips, outreaches, revivals, etc.  So why does this happen?  I always had in my mind the picture of pastors who didn’t care about the Bible or God’s people, who didn’t know the gospel or how to proclaim it, who were content to maintain the status quo and nothing else.  Those were the ones who were supposed to make up the 80% in my mind – not me!

Then I read a passage like Isaiah 55:10-11:

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

It sounds like the source of power for growth is the proclamation of the Word of God, and from these verses, it sounds like what it accomplishes will always look positive.  And yet we know that such was not Isaiah’s call.  When God told Isaiah to go and proclaim this powerful Word (Isaiah 6:9-10), He told him:

Go, and say to this people: “Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.”  Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.

What I think we have to gather from this is that sometimes God’s intention is that His Word will drive away as much as it draws near.  His Word always accomplishes God’s will as it goes out.  It never returns void.  But God’s will is not always what we think it ought to be.  It is not always a positive number in the ‘baptisms’ column on the annual church profile, or consistently higher numbers on the Sunday School attendance board.  We have to know that God is at work even when we can’t count the signs during the reading of the church letters at an associational meeting.

This reminds me of another passage in Isaiah:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.  (Isaiah 55:8-9)

God knows what He’s doing even if we don’t.  He is conforming His people ever closer to the image of Christ.  He is crushing pride, stirring up a hunger and a desperation for Himself, and even purging His church of those who were not of His people.  He is working on the pastor, He is working on the pillars of the church who love Christ, He is working on the immature who need to grow, and He is working on the seed of the enemy sown into His field.  Who knows, tomorrow He may begin to bring in a harvest of souls, adding thousands to the number of the faithful.  He’s done it before.  But we must remember that when He does, it is not Paul who planted or Apollos who watered who are anything, but it is God who gave the growth (1 Corinthians 3:5-7).

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He Doesn’t Need Your Kid Gloves

October 21, 2009

He Doesn't Need Your Kid GlovesA lot of times when something good happens in the world or in our own personal lives we like to say that God has “done” amazing things.  We confess that it is He who brings such wonders about.  But when some disaster strikes, either on a personal scale or a global one, we use different language.  We like to say that God “allowed” such and such to come to pass.  That way it doesn’t sound so much like God is directly responsible, but we still acknowledge that it didn’t happen outside of His control.

The idea seems to be that God can generate the energy and the cause to bring about good, but He is more passive when the bad things happen, merely “allowing” them.  But is this an idea that we get from the Bible?

I recently had the pleasure of preaching Psalm 107 at our Olney Baptist Association Annual Meeting this past Monday.  What is striking about that Psalm is that in each of the four main verses, God is actively bringing pain and hardship into the lives of His people in order to develop them by it and then deliver them from it.  In verse 4 there is a reference to wilderness wanderings, something that God directly brought about in the lives of Abraham and later the Israelites of the Exodus.  In verse 12 it is God who bows down their hearts with hard labor so that they fall down.  In verse 25 it is God who stirs up the great storm that frightens His people, just so that He can calm it down again and they can know that He is God.  This is not a God who passively reacts to events in His universe.  This is a God who brings all things to pass for His good purposes.  He does whatever He wants, and He does it all for a reason.

Isaiah 45:7 states the case in probably the most blunt way in all the Bible: “I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am Yahweh, who does all these things.”

God neither needs nor wants His creatures to soften the truth that He is in control of all things.  We don’t need to use phrases like “God allowed this or that”.  It is perfectly acceptable and Biblical for us to say, “God brought this about for His own purposes, and we know that His purposes are wise and just and good and that His ways are above our ways.  Therefore, we will submit to His will and trust Him to always do the right thing.”

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My Sick Tastes

October 20, 2009

My Sick TastesSometimes people get on to me when I say that some of my favorite parts of the Bible are verses like 1 Samuel 15:33: “And Samuel hacked Agag to pieces before the LORD in Gilgal.”  I like the parts where God orders His people to slaughter children.  I like it when Elisha makes the bear eat the kids in 2 Kings 2:24.  I like it when God tells Satan to wipe out Job.  I like it when Paul says that he wishes the heretics would just cut their genitals off (Galatians 5:12).  My wife has asked me before, “What’s wrong with you?  Those are horrible things!  Those shouldn’t be your favorite parts!”

Well, I suppose that I should say that really they’re not my favorite parts.  Texts like Romans 7 and Ephesians 2 come most often to mind when I really need some hope.  I just really like to keep bringing up some of the more offensive passages at various times because they illustrate perfectly to me how off-kilter most of the popular ideas about God are today.

There are a lot of people in a lot of churches that don’t want to think about “their god” ordering the slaughter of children or telling a prophet to run around naked for two years (see my previous post on that one).  “My god would never do such a thing!” is what you hear sometimes when you delve into the harder parts of the Bible.  So that’s why I like those gross stories so much!  They’re like a litmus test that can gauge whether or not a person really loves the God of the Bible or a figment of their own politically correct imagination.  If “your god would never do such a thing” then you are an idolater, worshiping a god made in your own image, because the God of the Scriptures has revealed Himself as doing these very things!

Well, I found another one of these passages this morning.  Isaiah 43:3 says, “For I am Yahweh your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.  I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you.”

What’s amazing about this passage is that if you read the chapter in context, you find that Israel has been very naughty.  When we get to Isaiah 43:3, we are not dealing with a God who is destroying the wicked but honoring the good.  No, what we have here is a God that is destroying several evil nations as a “ransom” to save another evil nation for no better reason than that He wanted to do it.  When God killed all of the firstborn of Egypt and then drowned their whole army to save Israel (Exodus 12 & 14), it wasn’t because Israel was a worthy people (have you read Exodus?!).  On the couple of occaisions when God sovereignly redirected the Assyrians to attack Cush and Seba (2 Kings 19, Isaiah 20) instead of Israel, it wasn’t because the Jews were righteous.  Rather, God saves His people because of a covenant.  He decided for reasons of His own that He wanted to save a certain people and then He promised that He would.

Abraham was a pagan idolater just like everyone else when God first came to him and announced His plan to bless him and his descendants.  He didn’t deserve the attention from God.  So why did God pick him?  We know this: it wasn’t because of anything he had done.  And we also know that it wasn’t because of anything that he would do, since God is the One that changes hearts (Ezekiel 36:25-27), give gifts (1 Corinthians 4:7), and leads people along the path that He wants them to follow (Ephesians 2:10).  That power was never in man.  We can see this same logic displayed in Romans 9:10-13.  God’s decision to save someone has nothing to do with man’s choosing (whether in the past or in the future), but is rooted totally in God’s own will and pleasure (Romans 9:15-16).

And this idea is another one of those that works like a litmus test to see if a person is really in love with the God of the Bible or one of their own making.  Do you want a God that loves you because you’re so worthy to be loved, or do you love the God who chose you and saved you in spite of your own worthlessness so that you might live for Him?  It should be no great mystery which one of these views is very friendly with the world and the flesh and deeply man-centered.

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Aisles of the Blind

October 6, 2009

Aisles of the BlindOnce upon a time, Christians believed that salvation was of the Lord and that believers were called by God to live holy lives.

The first belief was built on the Scriptures that claim that man is dead in his trespasses and sins and thus requires a divine act to call him back to life (Ephesians 2:1-5).  Astute disciples realized that if it were necessary for God to call someone to spiritual life from spiritual death, then He must be in control of the process, not the spiritually dead men.  Their hypotheses were confirmed by passages like John 6:44 and Romans 9:10-12.  And it was these ideas that led such believers to fully understand then that those whom God chose to save would certainly persevere in the faith, since it was God who was totally behind their salvation from start to finish (Philippians 1:6).

These Christians, being fully aware that salvation did not begin with man attempting to be obedient to the law, but rather with God calling dead men to Himself, then naturally understood God’s righteous requirements to be a good and holy way to please the God who bought them with His blood.  And so they delighted in righteousness and hated the sin that lingered within them (Romans 7:7-25).

And then sometime later, enemies came into this happy fold and introduced destructive teachings, denying the sovereignty of God in salvation – placing the means for gaining access to eternal life in the power of man’s decision.  Explanations of the gospel turned into cheap offers to escape hell, if only the hearer would “decide to accept Christ” or “invite Jesus into his heart”.  To further the erosion of sacred doctrine, those who bought into this “easy believism” were also told that once they were saved, they were always saved, and that they should never again question their secure place in heaven.  If did not matter what they did after they “prayed the prayer”, they were always and forever ‘saved’.

This deadly seed took a couple of generations before its crop was ready to harvest.  But then, almost before anyone knew what was happening, churches began to wane.  Children and grandchildren of faithful patriarchs left church never to return.  Worse than this absense, though, was the teaching that lingered on in the parents hearts: that their children were still ‘saved’, even though they weren’t living like it.  Now one evil became two.  One group believed that they had a right standing with God because of a decision that was made sometime in the past, even though there was no evidence of such salvation in their lives, and the other group felt as though there was nothing that they could offer the first group since they had already “accepted” the gospel.

The enemy wants us to believe these two cardinal false doctrines: that salvation is in our own hands by virtue of our decision and that we should never question our salvation.  Such teaching takes the focus of salvation off of Christ and then blinds the minds of the deceived to any danger.

The apostle Peter, however, has provided a wonderful corrective in 2 Peter 1:10, “Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to make your calling and election sure, for if you practice these qualities (as listed in verses 5-7) you will never fall.”  In Peter’s way of thinking (inspired by the Holy Spirit – verses 20-21), a believer’s own pursuit of holiness is an indicator of whether or not God has truly chosen to save that person.  Think of how different that is to the false doctrine that says that our decision makes our salvation sure regardless of our behavior.  They are completely opposite ideas!

We need to return our thinking to the way our spiritual forefathers thought as they were guided by the God-centered Scriptures rather than the man-centered culture.  As the Lord said, we should “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls” (Jeremiah 6:16).

We will hopefully begin this week over at TrueBaptist.org to examine some of these historical Baptists who held firm to this “faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).  Be sure to bookmark the main site (http://truebaptist.org) and check it regularly or subscribe to the RSS.

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Saving the World

October 2, 2009

Saving the WorldThe following comes from a sermon preached by Benjamin B. Warfield on the text of John 3:16 entitled, “God’s Immeasurable Love”:

You must not fancy, then, that God sits helplessly by while the world, which He has created for Himself, hurtles hopelessly to destruction, and He is able only to snatch with difficulty here and there a brand from the universal burning.  The world does not govern Him in a single one of its acts: He governs it and leads it steadily onward to the end which, from the beginning, or ever a beam of it had been laid, He had determined for it….Through all the years one increasing purpose runs, one increasing purpose: the kingdoms of the earth become ever more and more the Kingdom of our God and His Christ.  The process may be slow; the progress may appear to our impatient eyes to lag.  But it is God who is building: and under His hands the structure rises as steadily as it does slowly, and in due time the capstone shall be set into its place, and to our astonished eyes shall be revealed nothing less than a saved world.

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Absolutely Clueless

October 1, 2009

Absolutely CluelessWhat is the meaning of Barack Obama’s presidency?  We know that his installment as the executive head of this country was God’s doing.  We are told so in Romans 13:1, “There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.”  But when we start to try to hypothesize as to God’s thinking behind this current state of events, we ought to quickly come to the conclusion that we don’t have much of a clue.

Other hard questions complicate our cluelessness.  Why were planes allowed to crash into New York skyscrapers eight years ago?  Why does Indonesia keep getting smashed with tsunamis and earthquakes?  Why are our loved ones suddenly snatched away from us before their time?  Sure, a lot of people try to give answers to these questions, but the most honest among us can say little other than, “I don’t know what God is up to, but I know that He is in control.”

And, really, “I don’t know” is a fantastic answer to those questions.  Why should we think that we have to know?  We each have our own tiny little spheres of awareness and understanding, and we can’t even get inside the mind of a single other person.  God, on the other hand, intimately knows all of His creation.  He knows how every single mind works and how it is affected by every single event.  In addition, he knows how tiny events on one side of the planet eventually effect events on the other.  When I wash my car (okay, it could happen!), He knows where the soap runoff goes and what it affects, even though I have no idea.  He’s even planned it all to work together to accomplish His ends!  He’s got some crazy-complex master blueprint that includes everything – even supposedly random particle collisions in the rings of Saturn!  And it all works for His purposes.

The smartest man who ever lived, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit Himself, once penned these words, “As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything” (Ecclesiastes 11:5).

Really let that sink in for a second.

You may have read some textbook in biology class that explained cell division and blastocysts, but did it say anything about how the spirit of the child gets woven together with the flesh?  What kind of microscope can you use to see that?  None!  How much are we told about that in the Bible?  None!  We don’t have even the foggiest notion of a clue as to how God does that.  And God says that just as we are clueless in that area, we are clueless as to His great designs in creation – other than what has been revealed to us in His word.

Can we be content with that?  Can we just let Him be in control and confess our ignorance over a lot of these hard questions?  I think we should.  So what is our responsibility, then, if we can’t control everything or even know what is going on?  “Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” (Ecclesiastes 12:13).  I’m going to trust Him and do what He says and let Him take care of all the details.  And if I can’t figure it out, that’s okay.  We’ve got a faithful, good, and just God at the helm of the universe who has everything under control.

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What He Gives

September 26, 2009

What He GivesAccording to the Bible, when I receive a blessing in my life, God is behind it (James 1:17).  Also according to the Bible, when I walk through horrendous trials in my life, God is behind it (James 1:2-4).  In fact, according to the Bible, just about the only thing that we can say that God is not behind is the temptation to sin that we experience.  James 1:13-15 makes it very clear that such temptations come from the sin that dwells within us.  We dare not cast the blame for our sinful desires on God!  It is our own indwelling sin that rises up and produces fruit – God does not implant some alien sinful desire in us – it is wholly natural.

What is fascinating about all of this, though, is that God is very much in control of the consequences of the fruit of our sinful desires, and our sin leads us into various trials.  For what trial or hardship would ever have arisen outside of the sinful state of humanity?  Would we suffer hunger or sickness or loss of loved ones?  No, all hardship is a result of our transgressions of God’s perfect law.  But apparently, not all hardship is an actual wrathful, just punishment for our transgressions of God’s perfect law.

In fact, in James 1:2, we are even told to “count is all joy…when you meet trials of various kinds.”  We are told that such trials produce steadfastness, which – when allowed to exercise its full effect – makes us “perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (verse 4).

So, trials are good, but trials comes as a result of sin, and sin is born through the ripening of temptation.  The start of this chain reaction takes place in our own wicked hearts, and the end is a pure product of God – something that verse 17 of James 1 calls a “good and perfect gift from above, coming down from the Father of Lights.”  But if that’s the case, then why does it feel like He’s punishing us?

I think this is where we have to make a distinction between loving discipline and just punishment.  A just punishment for our sins would be an immediately enforced, eternally enduring Second Death.  This was the wrath that Christ took for us on the cross when He suffered in our place (if we are truly believers).  A loving discipline, however, is a measure designed by a loving Father to keep a child away from a just punishment.

When I discipline my daughter for taking away something from her sister, it is not because I hate her.  It’s not even really because I’m angry with her.  I discipline her because I want her to learn how to live righteously so that she will avoid a just retribution (from God and from the state) for a crime like stealing.

So, in a situation like that, my daughter actually ought to thank me for her stinging backside.  It was a good gift coming from her father.  It was meant to produce steadfastness, which, if allowed to have its full effect, would lead her toward perfection and completeness.  It was given completely in love and ought to be received with total thankfulness.

I sin, but God still just keeps handing out the good and perfect gifts.  Sometimes they seem to come in response to something I’ve done, and sometimes they just seem to come out of the blue.  But all of the time they are loving gifts, designed by a perfect Father to accomplish a perfect purpose in my life, whether they be heapings of joy-filled blessings or long valleys of soul-crushing trials.  One is just as good as another in God’s perfect plan, and so I have to learn to “count it all joy.”

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