That Which Remains

 

“Simon, Simon, look out! Satan has asked to sift you like wheat. But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And you, when you have turned back, strengthen the brothers.”

—Luke 22:31-32

Every summer on my family farm, my father and his helpers used the old, rattle-trap, noisy threshing machine on the latest crop of oats. Like harvesting wheat, the machine would beat the grain until the seeds were separated from the straw and chaff. The straw ended up as bedding for cattle, the seeds became feed for them, and the chaff, well, it just blew away. The value lies in that which remains.

We dared not get too close while watching this process. Every time we did, the chaff would find its way into every crevice of clothing, between our bare toes, even up our noses. Chaff—what a dirty and useless material it is. We cleaned and cleaned it from our bodies.

In Bible times, as we read about in Ruth 3:3, men would use sledges, heavy wooden platforms weighted down with stones and fitted underneath with anything sharp. These sledges, pulled by teams of animals, would ride over the crop of wheat on a threshing floor. The farmers would “winnow” the loose plants with a winnowing rake and the chaff would blow away.

The agrarian culture of Bible times provided plenty of illustrations for the writers of Scripture to use in teaching God’s truths. The Psalmist, in Psalm 1:4, likens the chaff to the wicked people who walked away from God’s truth:

They are like chaff that the wind blows away.

But, why did Jesus allow Peter in the passage from the Gospel of Luke at the beginning of this blog post to go through the sifting process with Satan in charge? Certainly Jesus didn’t place Peter in the same camp as the “wicked.” What was Satan’s purpose here? I am convinced that Satan wanted to destroy Peter, the future leader of the Christian church. But, God had a different plan.

I like the way that Beth Moore explains it:¹

Satan’s goal in sifting is to make us a mockery by showing us to be all chaff and no wheat. Christ, on the other hand, permits us to be sifted to shake out the real from the unreal, the trash from the true. The wheat that proves usable is authentic grain from which Christ can make bread.

Often we find that God puts His choicest servants through the hardest circumstances in preparation for powerful ministry. They learn what God considers chaff in their lives and submit to the painful and brutal threshing process.

If God seems to be beating the chaff out of you these days, rejoice that He has called you to suffer for His sake. Trust Him to bring about His purposes in your life, so that you may become nourishing bread for others. Remember, the value lies in that which remains.

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1 Moore, Beth, Portraits of Devotion. Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2014. P. 264.