1 Peter 5:10 says, “But may the God of all grace, who called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you.”
In both the Bible studies I am in we have covered this idea of Settled in the last week. It is a wonderful and complete sounding word.
Settle you. Make it peaceful, clear, and complete. I am at the creek right now and my feet are under the water on the sand. When they move a cloud of dust appears and the water becomes murky, but when it settles, I can see my feet again. After we have held onto God through the storm and through the trials then we can see clearly. The issues are settled and the dust has dissipated. After the rain has come and gone and the smoke has cleared, then we can see more clearly what happened.
Rarely do we see His purpose in the suffering at the moment. But it is during those moments that God is working. He is perfecting, establishing, and strengthening us, and then He will settle us. Struggles perfect our faith by making it more refined. They establish our faith in God as we seek Him to make sure we are on the right path with the right responses. They strengthen our faith in Him because as we walk through the hard times, we see Him faithful again and again. His consistency builds our faith. Then after all that we are settled and more ready for the next one.
Perfect, make holy, be better for the struggle. Establish, confirm, reaffirm His word, His will, and His promises. Strengthen, affirms, heals and binds up. The healing process, I expected in my own struggles was to be in a spiritual hospital bed of rest with angels attending me, but healing is more than that. As my brother was injured and had to go through the physical healing process I learned about the spiritual one as well. In the physical he had to go to Physical Therapy where they worked and made the injured arm exercise. This caused pain, but not pain just for the sake of injury, but pain for the sake of healing. The pain became the path to the healing. Spiritually I had hoped I was done with the pain, but in order to be healed and strengthened we must work through the pain and with the pain to be stronger. Then, once the strength is back, we will be settled. We can look back and see things clearer because the dust has settled, or in my case at the creek, the sand has settled.
Peter gives us the promise in the pain and suffering and perhaps the keys as well to allowing our struggles and afflictions to shape us into better Christians. So as I sit in the creek and I watch the water become foggy because of my movement I am realizing that the reason I don’t always feel settled is either because I am still in the middle of the storm, or because I will not choose to be still enough to let God settle me and say, “Peace be Still.”