My Grandpa Was Awesome

Tonight I watched a sermon that my grandpa had preached while he was still alive. He led off the sermon with something an individual had once told him that he had found to be true: "The only measure of success in the Word of God is character."

"But how exactly do we define character?" he asked. Well according to him, character is "that which we should be rather than what is easy to be. That which we want to be if we're thinking the way God would have us to think rather than that which we would want to be if we are giving way to the flesh in the world and the lusts of this life. That which is shaped when it costs us something." "Character," he states, "is never shaped in the easy way; it never comes easy." But most importantly, my grandpa preaches that the only true definition of character in the Bible is Jesus Christ. Our shaping of character is our shaping and molding into the character and essence of who Jesus was.

Within the sermon, my grandpa gave an illustration he had read in a devotional. A man, while in nature, came upon the cocoon of a moth and brought the cocoon home. The cocoon developed a small hole in the bottom and the moth began to struggle to get out. However, as the man watched the moth struggle for hours, he decided that the moth was struggling too much, that he knew more of what the moth needed than its creator. He then proceeded to cut the hole in the bottom of the cocoon to a bigger size to make the moth's escape easier. The moth came out, but its body was too fat and its wings were underdeveloped. See, in this type of moth, the struggle to get out pushes the juices from the body into the wings, so that when the moth emerges, its wings are nearly fully developed. This moth escaped the cocoon more easily, but its body was too fat and its wings underdeveloped, and it spent the few hours of its life crawling on the ground.

God will use struggle in our life to develop character, to shape us to be more like Him. We are never fulfilled, joyful, or satisfied, my grandpa preached, until Christ-likeness is fulfilled in us; other worldly things will not bring us that.

In the sermon, my grandpa did make the distinction between struggles we suffer due to our own mistakes and suffering for God's name's sake. I don't know how much of my struggle is due to my own stupid mistakes and how much of it God is putting me through and using to develop character and Christ-likeness in me or how much is for God's name's sake. If I knew that, I would be God, and I don't want that responsibility :) However, it is interesting, and comforting, to see struggle in this manner. If God is going to put me through testing/trials and my struggle will develop character in me, I am excited to see what that character is!