From the Macedonians we gain significant insight into our attitude toward trials. They met their crisis with an attitude of "overflowing joy." We have the capacity to meet our trials in the same manner, but there are conditions.

The condition of commitment.

The first condition is stated in verse 5, "They gave themselves first to the Lord." They really believed the words Jesus spoke in Matthew 6:33. "Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." It has been said that our lives are second rate because the kingdom of God is in second place. Get your priorities straight and you can deal with your problems constructively.

The condition of positive thinking.

The second condition is involves attitude. If you focus on the positive things in life, negative factors will be outweighed by the positive and overflowing joy will be the end result. The Macedonians weren't concentrating on their poverty and suffering even though both were real. They weren't escapists, who took mental flights into fantasy, naively assuming that their destitute situation was in reality the "best of all possible worlds."

Without a positive attitude, people tend to wring their hands and ask, "What on earth am I going to do?" Instead, these people were so proactive in their response they begged Paul for the privilege serving.

A. J. Cronin wrote about a man who demonstrated the potential of becoming a great artist prior to World War II. His airplane was shot down in the Battle of Britain. He suffered a skull fracture and two broken legs. His optic nerve was severed, forever ending his dream of becoming a professional artist. Cronin went to see him in the hospital. He expected to find a broken down, disheartened man, who was nothing more than a shell of his former self. When he got there, the fellow was on crutches and working at a table. He was trying to arrange some wooden blocks. He said to his friend, "Since I can't paint anymore, I thought I would take shot at building houses." The man later became a successful architect.

It's that spirit that moved Helen Keller, Glen Cunningham and Wilma Rudolph to rise above adversity to heights of excellence in their chosen fields. That same spirit was alive in the Macedonian churches.

The condition of helping.

The third condition involves helping. If you get involved in helping people with their trouble, you'll end up helping your own trouble. The Macedonians had more trouble than most, but they chose to find someone else with trouble and offer to help them out.

Watchman Nee was the author of several popular books that circulated through Christian bookstores a few years ago. Watchman Nee lived in China. The Communists imprisoned him in the fifties. He died in a labor camp in 1972. Once he told the story of a Christian rice farmer who rigged up a pump to irrigate his rice paddy. The pump was powered by a bicycle wheel, which the man had to pedal in order to get the water onto the rice. A Communist who had no use for Christians operated the rice paddy, just below his. When the Christian farmer flooded his field with water, the neighbor would take down all his dikes and let the water flow onto his own field, thus by passing the need to work at irrigating his own paddy. The Christian farmer worried about all this. He knew that if this practice kept up, his own rice crop wouldn't produce and his family would starve. He devised a plan. When he went to his irrigation pump, he began by irrigating his neighbor's field, then pumping water onto his own paddy. By meeting someone else's need, he was able to take care of his own need. Watchman Nee said that the neighbor eventually became a Christian as a result of the unselfish example he had witnessed.

Jesus spoke about these same principles when he said, "For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it."

CONCLUSION

We are all subjected to unpleasant circumstances in life. Much of the way we deal with our trials depends on how we look at things. You may remember February 1994 when an ice storm knocked out power in much of North Louisiana. A lot of people took it all in stride. They devised different ways of cooking and keeping warm. Some people opened up their freezers, prepared enormous meals and invited folks over to share it with them. Better to do that than let the food ruin. Others couldn't get past how terrible things were and complained because the power company didn't get the electricity back on fast enough. Actually everyone was experiencing the same level of inconvenience, but their attitudes were as different as daylight and dark.

When you can see adversity as an opportunity to serve, you will then find the key to overcoming your own adversity. Oliver Goldsmith put it this way. "The greatest object in the universe, says a certain philosopher, is a good man struggling with adversity; yet there is still greater, which is the good man that comes to relieve it." That's even better than throwing stones into the sea.

Norman Bales
Southern Hills Church of Christ
Norman's e-mail address: nlbales@allaboutfamilies.org

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