Don't Curse Your Season

Don’t Curse Your Season

I don’t like the winter. I love the summer. I love hot weather. In the summer season, everything is green, and flowers are blooming. Winter is cold, inclement weather with no green grass and naked trees and on top of it all, everything looks dead.

If it was my choice, I would like to have summer all year around. But I know that would bring an imbalance to nature and the growth of creation. Believe or not, as much as I like summer, I know we need the winter season as well.

What could be positive about having a season called winter? The Bible says there is a season for everything. (Eccl 3:1) And while the earth remains there will be cold and heat, summer and winter and day and night shall not cease. (Gen 8:22). This means winter is not going away. It will remain along with all the other seasons.  Seasons are important for life.

What is true in the natural is true in the spirit as well. Just like natural seasons exists, there are also spiritual seasons. Every season have its own characteristics, activities appropriate to each season, as well as activities that are inappropriate and its purpose.

In Psalm 88, David describes his winter season to us. Winter is when our  knowledge about God and our experience of God are separated and does not line up; our theology and our reality are irreconcilable. From the very start of the psalm, David affirms the most beautiful, exquisite, enduring theological truths about God: "Oh Lord, the God who saves me." Verses 10-12 have a steady drumbeat of God's attributes: his wonders, love, faithfulness, righteousness. There's nothing shaky or vague or half-baked in the David’s doctrine of God.

However, his experience and his doctrine bear little resemblance to one another. What he tastes and sees of God, mocks what he confesses and proclaims about God. His reality taunts his creed. He experiences not God's wonders and love and faithfulness, but God's rejection and anger and indifference. At every turn he's met with more bad news—sorrow upon sorrow, trouble upon trouble, loss upon loss. Darkness eclipses light. Sadness consumes joy. Despair overtakes hope. He experiences a God who simultaneously abandons him and punishes him, a God of apathy and of wrath, a God who hides himself and only shows up to express his anger.

Wintertime is when we pray according to what we know, not according to what we see. This season grows almost nothing, but what it does grow is, it grows our faith.

Winter is for the ultimate cultivation of biblical faith. It is the season in which we nurture a certainty of things hoped for, an assurance of things unseen. We walk by faith and not by sight until we see change.

As delightful and fertile as summertime is, it is almost useless for growing faith. Think about this: when you want someone to pray for you, you instinctively seek those who have endured many long, hard, dark winters—those whose faith in the character of God is not subject to whim or mood.

The discipline of winter is waiting. We pray, call out, cry out, and spread our hands and it seems like God doesn't show up or hear us for that matter. Waiting is the gift we learn, and patience is having her perfect work in us. But as Isaiah tells us, "Those who wait on the Lord, they will renew their strength."

In 2 Corinthians 1:8-9:  Paul writes, "We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death."

But look how Paul continues in verses 9-10: "But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us."

Paul goes on in 2 Corinthians 4 to disclose the full value of his winter season. Here is finally the great gift that the season called winter alone is able to give us: it makes us heavenly minded. It helps break our addiction to the ways of this world and nurtures in us an anticipation of things unseen, setting our minds on things above.

When you go through winter, DON’T CURSE YOUR SEASON, but be still and know He is God. Wait on the Lord, He is our help, salvation and redemption. Like I said, set your mind on things above, ponder on them and trust God. Seasons may come and go, seasons may change but one thing is very certain, God do not change, nor will He leave me or forsake you no matter your season.

Winter will pass and summer will come again.

Pastor De Wet



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