You could use the normal sound of a clothes dryer to soothe a baby to sleep. But not if you put a tennis shoe in there. Soothing white noise becomes a random warfare of sound battling either to tear up the dryer or the shoes, or both. It’s definitely not healthy for the shoes.
At times I feel like those shoes. Perhaps you can relate. You can’t always tell what will drive you to this point. You can be going along well when something unsettles you, sending you into a spin you don’t know how to stop. You feel banged around by circumstances, making a lot of racket, getting hot, and melting the very fibers that hold together your soul.
The prophet Habakkuk faced such a moment. This short book in the Old Testament bearing his name, details moments of searing pain and fear. He complains bitterly. What redeems his complaining is the direction it travels. He doesn’t complain to a mere human being. He complains to God.
In the end, Habakkuk’s raw conversation with God generates in him a statement of faith unrivaled in all the Bible. He reached the place of unshakable confidence in the Lord. For us to attain that kind of confidence, we have to follow the same recipe as Habakkuk. Spiritual progress is no more instantaneous than physical progress. A mushroom can grow up overnight, but a majestic oak tree takes a lifetime.
Why do we need to study a book in the Bible like Habakkuk? You don’t if it’s your goal to stay exactly the same as you are now with no growth in maturity, no growth in grace, no new perspective, and no ability to rise above your circumstances. You can just go on being like a tennis shoe tossed about in a clothes dryer. Learning to walk the path Habakkuk walked can grow in us a confidence in God that makes us more like an oak tree than a mushroom. The series is called The Path to Confidence. I’m praying we strongly encounter God together through his word this Sunday in a way that walks us down the path toward confidence, where we can learn in practical terms what it means to live by faith.
-Gene Cornett