We don’t seek out disillusionment, but sooner or later, it finds us.

This unwelcome visitor showed up at my door years ago when a slander storm wreaked havoc on our family and ministry. The slander destroyed godly reputations, severed Christian fellowship, and laid waste to years of fruitful ministry. It felt like a lifetime of serving God had all been for naught, and I sank into despair. Over the next several years, I would pray and hope for good. But as false accusations continued to swirl and devastate, I wondered if it was worth praying since God didn’t seem to answer.

“While God wasn’t changing my circumstances, he was using my circumstances to change me.”

But God was answering my prayers. Even though I didn’t perceive it initially, the good I had been hoping for was happening inside my heart. While God wasn’t changing my circumstances, he was using my circumstances to change me. Through a study of the book of Ecclesiastes, God graciously freed me from my despair and helped me find peace and joy in the middle of our storm.

Busy with an Unhappy Business

Our painful circumstances had blindsided me, yet I shouldn’t have been so surprised. We were not experiencing something unusual or unique. God already said that this is the way life truly is. As Ecclesiastes 1:13 tells us, “It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with.” Perhaps this is not a verse you have underlined in your Bible. But if we carefully consider it, this divinely inspired text will transform our perspective of life’s hardships and heartaches.

Ecclesiastes 1:13 informs us that everyone in this life will “be busy with” “an unhappy business.” Now, we women know busy. Every day we are busy with something: school, friends, family obligations, household tasks, job responsibilities, church commitments, community outreach, and the list goes on. However, many of us don’t count on being busy with an unhappy business. Yet as Ecclesiastes makes clear, “unhappy business” is a regularly scheduled event on life’s calendar. That’s why we should be ready for it.

When we expect an unhappy business, we are not caught off guard or disillusioned when it turns up. However, if we ignore the fact that it is coming, we will resent its arrival every time. And resenting and resisting our unhappy business will only blind us from seeing who gives it to us in the first place.

God, the Giver

If Ecclesiastes 1:13 simply taught that we will be busy with an unhappy business, then we all would despair. But thankfully, this verse also contains these words: “God has given.” God is the giver of every painful and perplexing experience in this life. What sweet, comforting words. Whatever our difficulty — fill in the blank — God has given it to us.

“God is the giver of every painful and perplexing experience in this life.”

I needed to embrace this truth in my difficult circumstances. I was struggling with bitterness toward those who were sinning against my family. But when I began to own that, ultimately, God was the giver of my unhappy business, I was then able to get my eyes off others and repent of my bitterness. The Puritan preacher Thomas Watson wisely said, “Whoever brings an affliction to us, it is God that sends it.”

Knowing that God sends our affliction changes everything. Rather than bitterly begrudging our trouble, we can humbly accept it. That’s because we know the Sender. He is good and does good (Psalm 119:68). He promises never to leave us nor forsake us (Hebrews 13:5). He will not allow us to be tempted beyond our ability to resist (1 Corinthians 10:13). He pledges to help us (Psalm 46:1) and to comfort us in all our troubles (2 Corinthians 1:3–4). And he causes all our unhappy business to work together for our good (Romans 8:28).

Trusting vs. Trying to Understand

While we can be sure that God is up to good in our unhappy business, we don’t always perceive it. Time and again, right when I thought I was finally seeing the good that God was creating in our baffling circumstances, it would all collapse. What is God doing? I asked, wracking my brain. The harder I tried to understand, the more frustrated I became. Once more, I found help in the book of Ecclesiastes. We read in Ecclesiastes 3:11, “[God] has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”

We discover from this verse that God gives us the desire to know what he is doing: “He has put eternity into man’s heart.” Yet he also limits our understanding: “[Man] cannot find out what God has done.” In other words, God has ordained our longing to understand and our inability to do so.

Now, we must not conclude from this that God is being unreasonable and unkind. On the contrary, God is graciously teaching us to trust him. While we may be unable to figure out what God is doing, we can learn to trust him anyway. As Charles Spurgeon once said, “The Christian . . . trusts [God] where he cannot trace him.” And of all the reasons we have for trusting our God, there is none more glorious and guaranteeing than this: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).

Hope in God Alone

At times, we think we are trusting God when we are not. Such was the case for me. As the slanderous onslaught continued, I realized I wasn’t hoping in God. Instead, I was hoping for a particular outcome. Whenever the desired outcome failed to materialize, I would despair. I needed to set my hope on God, regardless of the result. Much of our misery in trouble is due to misplaced hope — hoping in something or someone other than God himself. But quiet confidence in God alone generates stability and delight amid all the unhappy business of life.

We should trust God like Sarah and the other “holy women who hoped in God” — women whom the apostle Peter commends as examples for us to follow (1 Peter 3:5). We know from reading the Old Testament that disillusionment called upon these women. Yet they were not surprised by the visit. They knew God was the giver of their unhappy business. And they trusted in his sovereign goodness even when life didn’t make sense. They did not place their hope in changed circumstances but fixed their hope on God and him alone. By God’s grace, we can go and do likewise, no matter how busy we are with life’s unhappy business.

Does our right standing before God depend on our becoming more like Jesus, or does our becoming more like Jesus flow from our right standing before God? I first began wrestling with that question twenty years ago as a college student.

The Bible uses a variety of terms for what God has done for us in Christ — salvation, regeneration, justification, sanctification, adoption, election, redemption, glorification. The question I struggled to answer was, How do all of these terms relate to one another? More specifically and personally, when and how and in what sequence will they happen for me?

Historically, my question was about the relationship between justification (being declared righteous before God) and sanctification (the ongoing progressive work by which we are conformed to the image of Jesus). Did justification precede and give rise to sanctification? Or was justification in some way based upon my sanctification?

Resurrection and Redemption

Romans 8:29–30 often sets the tone for the debate:

For those whom [God] foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

Here we have a basic order: foreknown, predestined, called, justified, glorified. The question was how the rest of the saving realities — saved, redeemed, adopted, and sanctified — fit into the picture.

As I wrestled, I came across a book that proved to be a watershed for me: Resurrection and Redemption by Richard Gaffin, a longtime professor at Westminster Theological Seminary. The book is small — around 150 pages — but packs a theological punch. The basic thesis of the book has been profoundly helpful to me in thinking through how to bring the various biblical threads together on all that God has done for us in Christ.

We Will Be Raised

The book begins with the claim that the unity of the resurrection of Christ and the resurrection of believers runs through the New Testament, citing texts like these:

1 Corinthians 15:20: “Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.”

Colossians 1:18: “[Christ] is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.”

1 Corinthians 15:16–18: “If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.”

2 Corinthians 4:14: “[We know] that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus.”

Each of these passages expresses the reality that the resurrection of Christ is both unique and necessarily connected to our future resurrection. He is the firstfruits, the firstborn from the dead. He is the pioneer, the inaugurator, the forerunner who leads the way.

We Have Been Raised

This unity, however, is not merely a connection between Christ’s past resurrection and our future resurrection. The New Testament also stresses that we have already been, in some sense, raised with Christ.

Ephesians 2:5–6: “Even when we were dead in our trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”

Colossians 2:12–13: “. . . having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses.”

Romans 6:3–4: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

These passages teach that we are united to Christ not only in his resurrection, but in the whole of his life and death as well. We have died with Christ. We have been crucified with Christ. We have been raised with Christ. We have been seated with Christ.

From passages like these, Gaffin draws the conclusion that this existential union with Christ is the most basic element of Paul’s teaching on salvation.

Inner Man and Outer Man

The personal and existential union between us and Christ is intertwined with being chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world as well as being in some sense “in Christ” when he was crucified, buried, and raised in the first century. In other words, while we can distinguish between redemption planned (in eternity past), redemption accomplished (in history two thousand years ago), and redemption applied (in our own individual lives), we can never separate them, since all of them take place “in Christ.”

Gaffin draws attention to the already-not-yet dimension of redemption applied. In particular, the resurrection of Jesus has been refracted in the experience of the believer. We have already been raised with Christ (Ephesians 2:5), but we have not yet been raised with Christ (1 Corinthians 15:12–20).

Gaffin uses Paul’s distinction between the inner man and the outer man to make this point. We have been raised in the inner man, while we await the resurrection of the outer man — that is, the resurrection of the body at Christ’s second coming. Paul makes this point explicitly in 2 Corinthians 4:16: “Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.”

What then does this have to do with the order of salvation and the various terms used to describe what God has done for us in Christ? Let me attempt to express the lessons in my own words.

Five Glimpses of One Reality

When God saves us, the fundamental thing he does is unite us to Christ by faith.

“When God saves us, the fundamental thing he does is unite us to Christ by faith.”

Union with the crucified and risen Lord Jesus is what salvation fundamentally is. But in order to help us understand the wonder and glory of our union with Christ, God gives us multiple word pictures or metaphors to reveal the significance of what Christ has done for us. Each of these word pictures or images enables us to comprehend the incomprehensible fact of our union with the Lord Jesus.

We can unpack union with Christ in terms of a law court, in which words like guilt and condemnation, righteousness and justification figure prominently.
We can unpack union with Christ using imagery from the temple, in which holiness and impurity, sanctification and cleansing are used.
We can unpack union with Christ using familial imagery, with the language of new birth and adoption taking center stage.
We can unpack union with Christ using the image of slavery and redemption, with mentions of bondage and captivity, of purchasing and freedom.
We can unpack union with Christ with the language of salvation and deliverance, of danger and rescue by a Savior.

Rather than trying to put the different terms into the exact sequence, we can instead see them as multiple ways that God has chosen to reveal the greatness and glory of what he has done for us.

Five Already-Not-Yet Pictures

More than that, because of the already-not-yet dimension of our salvation, we can see that each of these word pictures contains three distinct phases: a definitive positional phase, an ongoing progressive phase, and a climactic final phase. If we run through the images again, we might say the following:

In terms of the law court, we are guilty and stand condemned, but Christ lives, dies, and is raised on our behalf, and therefore God declares us righteous in him. This is definitive and has to do with a new position and legal status based on the finished work of Christ. As a result, we leave the courtroom and seek to live upright and godly lives, walking in righteousness before God, as we wait for the day when we are publicly vindicated as his people when he bodily raises us from the dead.

In terms of the temple, God is holy and therefore cleanses the impure and sets apart the common for holy use. There is a decisive cleansing and sanctifying work when we trust in Christ (positional), and then the rest of our lives is an attempt to live holy lives, increasingly and progressively set apart from sin and evil, while we await our full and final cleansing in the new heavens and new earth.

In terms of the family, God decisively causes us to be born again, and then we seek to walk faithfully as his children. Or alternatively, he adopts us into his family (that’s conversion), and we now walk as obedient sons, as we wait for the final declaration of our sonship and conformity to the image of his Son when we are glorified.

In terms of slavery and redemption, we were enslaved to sin and death, and God decisively liberates us when he unites us to his Son. From then on, we seek to increasingly and progressively live as free men, since it is for freedom that Christ has set us free, as we wait for the redemption of our bodies on the last day.

In terms of danger and rescue, God delivers us from the penalty of sin (death), and then throughout our lives increasingly rescues us from the power of sin, all in anticipation of the day when we’ll be completely delivered from the presence of sin in his eternal kingdom.

For Me and Conforming Me

Resurrection and Redemption proved to be a watershed for me because the book resolved the tension over whether my right standing with God (justification) depended on my increasing conformity to Jesus (progressive sanctification).

“Justification is by faith alone, because faith unites me to Christ, who is my righteousness.”

Gaffin assured me, with Scripture, that my position before God — whether we’re talking about the courtroom, the temple, or the family — was decisively and definitively settled, simply by trusting in Jesus. Justification is by faith alone, because faith unites me to Christ, who is my righteousness. The righteousness beneath my justification is not something worked in me by God, but something accomplished for me — outside of me — by Christ. Union with him — his life, death, and resurrection — puts me right with God, so that God is completely for me.

Then, flowing from this new standing and position before God, God begins to progressively and increasingly conform me to the image of Jesus. The work is often slow, frequently painful. Sin remains, even if the wages of sin no longer hang over me. But my pursuit of holiness and obedience to God is rooted in the finished work of Jesus, both in history and in my life, and I hope for the coming day when God raises me from the dead and publicly displays what he has done for me and in me.

If your circumstances were changed into the physical realm, you might depict it this way.

You sit in the waiting room of the hospital, mindful that your case is not urgent. Yours is no life-threatening illness, no shrieking pain or broken bone, no bloody show. People rush in with needs more dire than yours; you gladly concede your spot and move further and further down the list. You sit — a day, a week, a season — never a calm moment granting you admission.

Finally, your name is called. You walk to the reception desk, and the nurse asks why you’ve come. It then dawns on you that you’re not entirely sure. “Any trouble breathing?” No. “Any lingering headaches or soreness of throat?” No. “Any fever or trouble sleeping?” No. “Then what brings you in today?” Well, something like a slow disorientation, an inescapable fatigue — symptoms of living as a single sock left at the back of the drawer.

You feel useless, ungifted, unneeded — in life, and even in the church.

You listen to the preacher every Sunday, and you know he is being used of God. You see the young couples raising children in your local church; you pray for more of God’s fingerprint upon their lives. You intercede for missionaries risking life and limb in foreign lands, lost in the blinding light of the Great Commission. You realize you have never lived twenty miles from your hometown.

You serve the Lord Jesus, but you can’t escape feeling like a background character — cast as “baker #3” — in the unfolding story all around you. More prominent actors live. Compared to them, you merely exist. Maybe you feel it keenest around a friend or family member who eclipses you in Christ. “Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother,” you remain. Every other puzzle piece seems to fit. If you went missing from the congregation, would any take notice? Are you just “singing and praying churchman #13”?

Unimpressive

You do not doubt that Christ has accepted you purely of grace apart from works — apart from your doings of the past, the present, or the future. But when cynicism descends, you still wonder how the church is better off with your inclusion. You’re unimpressive — okay, no problem. You know Paul reminds the church at Corinth that most were not wise in the world’s eyes, not powerful, not noble. Rather, there was a foolishness about them, a weakness and lowliness to win the world’s sneer. A church full of kids picked last at recess — to shame the strong and silence the boasting (1 Corinthians 1:26–29).

But you still wonder why you don’t feel more alive and useful. You are not the sluggard or his sophisticated brother, excusing himself from the committed life. Maybe the Master has cast you as the one-talent saint of lower ability, yet you still want to invest it the best you can — unlike the servant who buried his one talent and, in the end, lost it (Matthew 25:15–30). You want to invest all of you, however much that amounts to, even if you won’t be Adoniram Judson, George Whitefield, or Elisabeth Elliot. But on yawning days, you secretly fear that your ordinary life amounts to a wasted one.

So you sit in the waiting room. With great sins and desperate situations, you don’t want to take up the pastor’s or small group’s time droning on about the inarticulate sense of purposelessness. Thankfully, envy has not swallowed your joy toward the Hermione Grangers of Christ’s kingdom when you admit yourself to be more like Neville Longbottom. But you wonder, What’s the point?

Indispensable

Dear Christian, even timid, lackluster, unimpressive Neville plays his part, a vital part, in the end. And if you pass your days with a sigh and suspicion that even in Christ you don’t much matter, be comforted by one word: indispensable. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you,’” Paul writes to the church in Corinth.

On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. (1 Corinthians 12:21–26)

“Hear him proclaim over your gifts, your service, your membership in the body, ‘indispensable.’”

They, like we, were tempted to value some spiritual abilities and service as vital to the church and others as insignificant. They learned this from the kingdom of men. Most kingdoms tout the rulers and the rich and the noble horsemen and the wise as the indispensable ones. The strong and the skilled move about the board as bishops and rooks and knights, while the rest of us move forward as pawns. Expendable. But the pawns, in Christ’s economy and kingdom, are essential. He turns them by grace into kings and queens, and teaches the rest to see with his eyes, so that all the members might care equally for one another.

Empowered

So, brother or sister in Christ, you may not be able to teach like him, or share your faith like her, or show hospitality quite like them, or pray like that, or shine as brightly with good works. You may feel like the baby toe of the gathered assembly. The eye of the body beholds hidden glories, the mouth proclaims Jesus with boldness, the fingers perform great acts of service — you feel as though you rest in your shoe and darkness. You feel sweaty, stuffy, unventilated. Yet if Christ’s Spirit dwells in you, hear him proclaim over your gifts, your service, your membership in the body, indispensable. One whom we simply cannot do without. The church of Christ needs you.

“Christ did not save you with an eye toward what he might get from you.”

And although countless ways exist for you to walk more faithfully to your calling and live more boldly for the common good of the church, remember that Christ did not save you with an eye toward what he might get from you. The good shepherd has no need of any from his flock. He did not peer into the future and decide whether you were worth the bother of the cross. He does not now look upon you with indifference or wait for you to earn your keep. Treasured saint, before he works in and through you for his own good pleasure, he forgives you, and clothes you, and calls you indispensable — a member of himself already. We put on our new lives and new works of service “as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved” (Colossians 3:12).

No one whom the Father has chosen before the foundation of the world, no one whom Christ has shed his precious blood for, no one filled by the Holy Spirit of God is dispensable or unnecessary to the body. As the Lord gives life, each is needed, each is necessary. So let that word indispensable wash over your insecurities and carry you upon its waves to greater love and works until we stand before our golden King to hear, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”