We've been studying the book of Romans and
we're in the 8th chapter and we're just
going to kind of do a little survey
of some stuff between the lines.
For in the 8th chapter and verses 17
and 18 we are introduced to a subject
that is going to occupy our attention in
the next section but before we get into
the next section we need to stop for
a few moments and do a little homework
because for most of us there has been
very little teaching on this whole issue.
I'm reading from Romans 8 verse 17 and
I just want to read these verses and
we'll look at them later but notice it
says, and if children then heirs, heirs of
God, join heirs with Christ.
We're all excited about the first part of
that and then it says, if indeed we
suffer with him that we may also be
glorified together for I consider, said Paul, that
the sufferings of this present time are not
worthy to be compared with the glory which
shall be revealed in us.
J.
I.
Packer, the great theologian, defines suffering like this.
He said, suffering is getting what you do
not want while wanting what you do not
get.
There are many terms used in the scripture
to deal with this issue and it's far
more extensive than we would ever believe because
nobody ever sets out to study this.
But when you become sensitized to it you
start running into words everywhere in the New
Testament.
Words like affliction and anguish and distress and
misery and grief and pain and tribulation and
chastisement and metaphors in the New Testament like
the refining fire of Isaiah in the Old
Testament and overflowing waters and birth pangs.
All of these are used as pictures of
suffering.
I do not know what the health and
wealth gospel people do with all these terms
because in their terminology there's no place for
any of this.
But Paul says that before we can reign
with Christ and before we're going to be
glorified we're going to identify ourselves with him
also in his suffering.
And when I talk about suffering I'm not
talking about suffering we deserve.
Peter says if you suffer for doing wrong
you got what you deserved.
Don't take any glory in that.
I'm not talking about people who get in
trouble because they violate God's laws or they
step outside of the moral boundaries which are
so clearly said in the Bible.
I'm talking about the kind of suffering that
comes on people who are living for God
who are walking in fellowship with him who
more than anything else want to glorify God
with their lives.
How do you explain that?
C.S. Lewis who has written one of
the most definitive books on pain said in
his book, now God who has made us
knows what we are and that our happiness
lies in him.
Yet we will not seek it in him
as long as he leaves us any other
resort where we can even plausibly look for
it.
While what we call our own life remains
agreeable we will not surrender it to him.
So what can God do in our own
best interest but make our own life less
agreeable to us and take away the plausible
sources of false happiness?
Interesting thought.
Did you hear what he said?
Sometimes God helps us to understand at a
very deep level that where we thought our
happiness and joy was was only a mirage
that our happiness really lies in him.
So we're going to take a few moments
and talk about this whole issue of suffering.
Let's talk first about the relationship of suffering
to the Christian life.
In Romans 8 that we read a moments
ago we are reminded that suffering and glory
go together.
Suffering and glory belong together.
They are married together.
They were married in the experience of Christ.
They are married in the experience of his
own people.
It is only after we have suffered for
a little while that we will enter into
God's eternal glory in Christ.
So the sufferings and the glory are married
and we can't do anything about that.
We all want the glory.
We don't want the suffering.
We want the joy.
We just don't want the tribulation.
We want Easter Sunday without Good Friday.
That's how we're put together.
But these two things are welded.
They cannot be broken apart.
Whatever else you're going to learn please learn
this from the Word of God.
You will get glory.
You will get joy.
You will get fulfillment and somehow this is
not a masochistic thing of some fundamentalist preacher.
It's just the truth of the Word of
God.
The pathway to glory takes you through some
suffering.
Now let's talk for a moment about the
reality of all of this.
The reality of suffering in the Christian life.
There is suffering that is the direct result
of our sinning and we're not talking about
that.
There is suffering that we endure for Christ's
sake.
Suffering that comes from our Christian profession in
a world that doesn't have anything to do
with Christ.
There is suffering that comes because we are
in this imperfect world.
There is suffering that is ours because we
are identified with Christ and the Bible never
tries to dodge that issue.
I was shocked at how many times this
subject appears and the reason we don't know
it is because we read past it.
We don't want to stop and camp our
tent there at all.
It's not a comfortable subject.
We would rather just act as if it's
not here.
But watch these verses.
Notice what it says in 1st Peter 5
.10. 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.
2nd Timothy 3.12. Yea, and all who
desire to live godly in Christ Jesus, what's
the rest of it, will suffer persecution.
Philippians 3.10. Paul writes that I may
know him and the power of his resurrection
and the fellowship of his sufferings.
2nd Corinthians 1.5. For as the sufferings
of Christ abound in us, so our consolation
also abounds through Christ.
1st Peter 4.12 and 13.
Beloved, do not think it strange concerning the
fiery trial which is to try you, as
though some strange thing happened to you.
But rejoice to the extent that you partake
of Christ's sufferings, that when his glory is
revealed, you may also be glad with exceeding
joy.
Philippians 1.29. For to you it has
been granted on behalf of Christ's sake, not
only to believe in him, what's the rest
of it, but also to suffer for his
sake.
In John 15.18-20, Jesus is speaking,
listen to his words.
If the world hates you, you know that
it hated me before it hated you.
Now is that supposed to comfort us?
It's the truth, isn't it?
If you were of the world, the world
would love its own, but because you are
not of the world, but I chose you
out of the world, therefore the world hates
you.
Remember the word that I said to you,
a servant is not greater than his master.
If they persecuted me, they're going to persecute
you too.
John 15.18-20.
You know, one of the things that happens
is a lot of Christians come into faith
in Christ and they get excited about the
Lord, they have a conversion experience, and then
you get thrown out into the world and
nobody ever tells them this.
And all of a sudden they show up
in a hostile environment, they're excited about their
faith, they're excited about Christ, and they find
out that everybody's not excited about that.
And nobody has helped them to understand, and
then they begin to wonder if something's wrong
with them, or something's wrong with their faith,
or why didn't God come through for me
when I was under all this pressure?
Listen, what the Word of God teaches is
this, that suffering is the normal, natural, expected
experience of believers, and we shouldn't be shocked
when it happens to us in some fashion.
John Piper said, so we must not water
down the call to suffer, we must not
domesticate all the New Testament teaching on affliction
and persecution just because our lives are so
smooth.
It may be that we have not chosen
to live in all of the radical ways
that God wants us to live, it may
be that our time of suffering is just
around the corner, but it will not do
to take our own comfortable lives and make
them the measure of what we allow the
Bible to mean.
In other words, we live, many of us,
in very comfortable surroundings, in nice homes, and
we drive decent cars, and wear halfway decent
clothes, and we have most of our needs
met, and so it's very difficult for us
to come to grips with a subject like
this.
Suffering?
What are you talking about, Pastor?
David Barrett, who has done some research on
us, estimates that in 1993, there were a
hundred and fifty thousand Christians who died as
martyrs, 93.
He foresees that by the year 2000, there
will be two hundred thousand martyrs in the
world who died for Christ, most of them
not in this country, but all over the
world where people have borne witness for Christ.
They have given their lives for their faith.
Suffering is often the lot of God's people.
It's just reality.
I love what Peter said, don't think it's
strange when it happens to you.
Don't say, why me, why now, whoops, what
happened?
Just understand, and this is not a defeatist
attitude, it's a realistic approach to life, that
there are bumps on the road.
Can I get a witness?
Amen.
You know that, the reality of suffering.
Now, here's the real crux of the issue.
What are the reasons for suffering?
Why in the world does God allow this?
Why does he let us suffer?
I mean, if he's a good God, I
remember when Rabbi Kushner wrote his book, Why
Bad Things Happen to Good People, remember that?
It hit the bestseller, it was on New
York Times bestsellers list for weeks and weeks,
and I always have admired him as a
communicator.
I don't, I don't, I'm not into his
theology, because he's got, he's got a theology
without a Messiah, which I mean, how do
you have a theology without a Messiah?
And he came to the conclusion that the
reason bad things happen to good people is
that God is an absentee God in their
lives.
That he creates the world, and he creates
people, and then he just sort of walks
away from it, and lets these things happen,
because he said, if God is love, and
God is in control, then those two things
are in conflict, and the only way he
could measure that out in his rational thinking
was to, to assume that God created us
in love, but withdrew to let us live
our lives, and God is not involved in
our pain.
But God is involved in our pain.
Remember, Paul talked about the fellowship of Christ's
sufferings.
So why do Christians suffer?
First of all, suffering proves the reality of
our faith.
Did you know that?
1st Peter 1.7 says it this way,
that the genuineness of your faith, being much
more precious than gold that perishes, though it
is tested by fire, might be found to
praise, and honor, and glory at the revelation
of Jesus Christ.
Peter said, suffering proves the reality of your
faith.
Hebrews 12.5 says, have you forgotten the
exhortation which speaks to you as sons?
My son, do not despise the chastening of
the Lord, nor be discouraged when you are
rebuked by him, for, watch this, whom the
Lord loves, he chastens, and scourges every son,
every son whom he receives.
If you're a son of God, one of
the evidences of that, a daughter of God,
if I can be politically correct, then you
have to understand something, that part of your
heritage in the family, you're going to experience
some suffering.
Jonathan Cho, who is the president of Christ
College in Taipei, director for the Chinese Church
Research Center in Hong Kong, has studied suffering
in the context of the suffering church in
China, and he says, quote, one can almost
say that suffering for Christ in our country
is a mark of discipleship, end of quote.
And Martin Lloyd-Jones said, if you are
suffering as a Christian, and because you are
a Christian, it is one of the surest
proofs you can ever have of the fact
that you are a child of God.
If you're going through something right now, and
you can't figure it out, and as far
as you know, there's no sin in your
life, and God has just put you in
the crucible, and you're under pressure, and you're
experiencing some things, you say, what's the good
of this?
Well, if the Bible says that all who
live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer, then
one of the reasons God allows this is
that it might be a proof to us
of our sonship.
That's the first reason.
Secondly, suffering promotes our dependence upon God.
Boy, do we know that.
We are so independent.
Listen to this verse of Scripture from 2nd
Corinthians 1, 8, and 9.
Listen to these words.
For we do not want you to be
ignorant, brethren, or of our trouble, which came
to us in Asia, that we were burdened
beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired
even of life.
Yes, we had the sentence of death in
ourselves.
Now, watch the rest of this.
That we should not trust in ourselves, but
in God who raises the dead.
How many of you know it's harder to
trust in God that when everything's going great?
When, you know, you just got to raise,
you got everything in order, I mean, you
got your whole life planned out, the retirement
program is looking pretty good, the kids are
all kind of, you know, they're okay, you
know.
Trust in God.
But then you go to the doctor and
you hear some bad news, or something happens
in your home that you haven't expected, and
all of a sudden, in the midst of
suffering, what do you do?
Wow, does it change.
You understand how desperately you need God, and
you are forced into dependence upon Him.
2nd Corinthians 12, 9 says it this way,
and he said to me, my grace is
sufficient for you, for my strength, now watch
this, is made perfect in weakness.
Therefore, most gladly, I will rather boast in
my infirmities, why?
That the power of Christ may rest upon
me.
God often takes his children and puts them
through the ringer, so that they are divested
of their own power, and then are filled
with his power, and Paul said, if that's
what I have to have, to have the
power of God in my life, then so
be it.
I'd rather have the strength of Christ and
the weakness of the flesh, than have it
other way around.
God knocked the props out from under Paul,
so that he would have no choice but
to fall on God, and get his hope
only from him.
When we go through suffering, it is in
order to promote our dependence upon God.
Let me give you the third reason.
Suffering purifies our relationship with God.
I remember these verses, underlining them in my
Bible, during these last couple of years, from
Psalm 119, verses 67 and 71.
Watch this, this is the psalmist.
He said, before I was afflicted, I went
astray, but now I keep your word.
It is good for me that I have
been afflicted, that I may learn your statutes.
In other words, what the psalmist is saying
is, that God, you put me through some
trouble, and the trouble made me come closer
to you.
You know what happens when you're a Christian,
and you face pressure?
The pressure does what?
It drives you back to God.
The pressure is out here, and it drives
you back to God.
It draws you closer to him.
It makes your relationship with God, to be
a very special relationship.
I remember reading a story about a French
painter, by the name of Pierre Renard.
He was afflicted with arthritis.
His hands became twisted, and deformed.
So much so, that a simple task, such
as holding a brush, became excruciatingly painful.
In time, he was confined to a wheelchair,
but he would not give up painting.
He refused to do that.
One day, his friend, Henri Matisse, visited him,
and watched him as he painfully grasped a
brush with only his fingertips.
Every movement caused him pain, yet he doggedly
kept at this painting.
Matisse asked Renard, he said, what do you
do this for?
How can you paint at the expense of
such torture?
And he replied, the pain passes, but the
beauty remains.
That's what happens to a Christian who goes
through suffering.
The pain passes, but the beauty of a
greater, deeper, more loving relationship with God, drawing
closer to him, that is a lasting value.
One of our hymns puts it this way,
when through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,
my grace all-sufficient will be thy supply,
the flame shall not hurt thee, I only
design thy dross to consume, and thy gold
to refine.
What is the hymn writer saying?
You're gonna go through this, it's gonna be
painful, but the thing that'll happen is, God
will use it to burn away the impurities
of your life, and drive you back to
him.
James 1 3 says, consider it all joy,
my brothers, when you encounter various trials, knowing
that the testing of your faith produces endurance.
I remember clipping this out of a discipleship
magazine, which I get and have taken for
a number of years, and it was kind
of an analysis of why this is such
a hard subject for us here in America.
It goes like this, patience is the supreme
taunt to the West.
It taunts us because we have grown up
with the habit of immediacy.
We have watched the deepest of human conflicts
resolved in 30 minutes on a television screen,
and we have come to expect the modern
medicine a quick cure for every attack of
disease.
To the West, endurance is synonymous with frustration.
Small endurances bring on a stamping of the
foot and a rearing of impatience.
We honk the horn if the car ahead
of us doesn't pull away from the light
when it turns green.
We mutter when waitresses take too long.
Is it any wonder that we are undone
and shattered when we are held in the
vice of a prolonged difficult experience?
We flail about helplessly.
Thoughts of coping are overwhelming and bewildering.
We don't want stamina, we want out.
Isn't that true of us?
So one of the other reasons for suffering
is that when we suffer it produces endurance
in us.
It makes us hang in there when we
don't want to.
God takes our impatience in his hands and
and he helps us to learn.
Someone said God often moves the tape ten
feet further just when we think we're finishing
the last lap.
Has he ever done that to you?
And something happens in us when we've spent
all that we have and we think we're
at the end of our resources and then
we look up and there's still another thirty
yards to go.
How are we going to do that?
And we discover that when we are at
the end of ourselves and we have no
resources, when we have been put through this,
God gives us the endurance to get up
the next day and to put our feet
on the floor and to start walking ahead
and going forward and we discover in the
process of this that he gives us the
strength for the day.
How many of you know that?
Isn't that true?
And until you experience this, you can't know
that.
You are incomplete.
Let me just tell you something, if you've
had any suffering, you know, you're just not
complete.
God is, he's left something out of your
training.
He'll get to it sooner or later.
But the completeness of walking through the fire
with God and knowing that he is sufficient
for every emotion and every experience and every
deficiency you feel, that is the benefit of
suffering.
It causes you to have endurance in your
life.
And the next time he comes around, you
know, hey, I've been down that road and
it doesn't seem like there's any answer right
now and it's really tough but I want
to tell you something, I remember when I
was on this road before, God was enough.
He was enough.
So I'm going to keep going.
I'll just touch on this and you can
put it in your notes.
Suffering prunes us for greater effectiveness.
Did you know that?
The Bible says in John 15, every branch
that does not bear fruit, he takes away.
And every branch that bears fruit, he prunes
it, that it might bear more fruit.
One of the reasons God brings suffering into
our life is to take away the things
that are drawing off the energy of the
Spirit that should be directed toward more productive
things.
And I'll just say this, sometimes when you
go through a time of suffering or discipline
in your life from God, he makes you
stop and look at all the things you're
doing and ask yourself, am I doing the
things God wants me to do or am
I doing the things that I want to
do?
And sometimes he'll start lopping things off the
edge.
Because you see, one of the reasons why
they prune a vineyard is because little shoots
begin to grow on the vine that suck
up the sap that causes fruit to happen.
And so they go through the vineyard and
they take their shears and they clip off
these little shoots that grow out of the
vine that don't have any fruit on them,
because what happens is they suck away the
energy that's in the vine that should be
directed to the fruitfulness of the vine.
Does God ever do that in your life?
Comes along with pressure, and in the midst
of that pressure you say, wait a minute,
I need to get that out of my
life.
That's just eating up the energy that God
wants to use for this.
I don't think we'll ever, ever get finished
with that process.
You know, you just think you've got it
figured out and it happens again, and you
get rid of one thing and five more
things grow back.
Have you noticed that?
The pruning process for more effectiveness.
And I want to spend a little time
on this one, that suffering provokes courage in
other believers.
Because this is a really exciting evidence of
how God uses this in our lives.
Philippians 1.14 says it this way, and
that most of the brethren trusting in the
Lord because of my imprisonment have far more
courage to speak the Word of God without
fear.
Paul said that when he was in prison,
one of the evident things that happened while
he was in prison was that the people
who knew he was in prison took courage
from his pain.
And they were more bold to preach the
gospel.
They saw the suffering of Paul, and because
of that, they were emboldened to preach with
greater power.
In our own time, it is hard to
overstate the impact that the martyrdom of Jim
Elliot and Nate Saint and Ed McCulley and
Pete Fleming and Robert Udarian has had on
generations of students.
The word that appeared again and again in
the testimonies of those who heard the story
of the Akha Indians and the slaying of
those men, the word that was heard was
the word dedication.
But one of the things that is often
untold when the story of the Akha Indians
is told is that the real courage was
probably in the women, in the wives of
these men.
Barbara Udarian, the wife of Raj, wrote in
her diary that night in January of 1956
these words, and I have these words from
her diary.
She said, tonight the captain told us of
finding four bodies in the river.
One had a t-shirt and blue jeans.
Raj was the only one who wore them.
God gave me this verse two days ago,
Psalm 84 14, for this God is our
God forever and ever.
He will be our guide even unto death.
As I came face to face with the
news of Raj's death, my heart was filled
with praise.
He was worthy of his home going.
Help me, Lord, to be both mommy and
daddy.
And out of that testimony, hundreds and hundreds
of recruits went to the mission field.
More recently, the execution of Wycliffe missionary Chet
Bitterman by the Colombian guerrilla group, M-19,
in March of 81 unleashed an incredible zeal
for the cause of Christ.
Chet Bitterman had been in captivity for seven
weeks while his wife Brenda and their little
daughters Anna and Esther waited in Bogota, and
the demand of the M-19 was that
Wycliffe get out of Colombia.
They shot him just before dawn, a single
bullet to the chest, and the police found
his body in the bus where he died
in a parking lot in the south of
town.
He was clean and shaven, his face relaxed.
A guerrilla banner wrapped his remains.
There were no signs of torture.
In the year following Chet Bitterman's death, applications
for overseas service with Wycliffe Bible translators doubled,
and the trend has continued into this very
day, and it all goes back to the
moment of his suffering for Christ.
It is not the kind of missionary mobilization
that any of us would choose, but it
is often God's way, and John says, unless
a grain of wheat falls into the earth
and dies, it remains alone, but if it
dies, it bears much fruit.
How often that has been true in the
history of Christianity.
When we suffer, God uses our suffering to
bring courage and strength to others, and then
suffering provides opportunities for witness.
2 Corinthians 4.10 says, always carrying about
in the body the dying of Jesus, that
the life of Jesus may be manifest in
our body, for we who live are constantly
being delivered over to death for Jesus' sake,
that the life of Jesus may be manifest
in our own mortal flesh.
And Paul, again writing in Philippians, said, but
I want you to know, brethren, that the
things which happen to me have actually turned
out for the furtherance of the gospel, so
that it has become evident to the whole
palace guard and to all the rest that
my chains are in Christ.
What is Paul saying?
Here I'm in prison.
You guys are all praying for me, and
you're worried about me?
But I want to tell you that while
I'm in prison, what you need to know
is, God has used my suffering as a
means of testimony, and you know what happened
to him, don't you?
Every day, over four-hour periods, they chained
two guards to him.
Just what Paul wanted.
He had a captive audience for the gospel.
These guys would wake up every day, they
wanted to get away from him, but they
couldn't.
They were handcuffed to the guy, and he
witnessed to them, and when you get to
the end of the book of Philippians, there's
this great passage where he lists all the
people who were saved out of Caesar's household.
How did they get saved?
God put Paul in prison, and in his
prison experience, gave him this opportunity to testify
to the grace of God.
And some of you here today, and I've
talked to you because over the years, and
I've been thinking about some of this this
week, I would never know very much about
you, except what I have learned about you
because of the pain God has allowed you
to experience, and in the midst of that
pain, you have been a testimony to so
many people.
Some of you will never know the sight
of eternity.
The witness.
One of the most powerful illustrations of the
purpose of suffering and witness is presented in
a story that Michael Card tells about a
man named Joseph, who had come to Christ
out of his Muslim religion.
Michael Card, as some of you know, is
a wonderful man of God, a singer, a
writer.
He tells this story.
He said, one day Joseph, who was walking
along one of those hot, dirty African roads,
met someone who shared the gospel of Jesus
Christ with him.
Then in there, he accepted Jesus as his
Lord and Savior, and the power of the
Holy Spirit began transforming his life.
He was filled with such excitement and joy
that the first thing he wanted to do
was go back and return to his own
village and share the same good news with
the members of his local tribe.
Joseph began going from door to door, telling
everyone he met about the cross of Jesus
and the salvation that it offered, expecting their
faces to light up just as his had.
To his amazement, the villages not only didn't
care, they became violent.
The men of the village seized him and
held him to the ground while the women
beat him with strands of barbed wire.
He was dragged from the village and left
to die alone in the bush.
Joseph somehow managed to crawl to a water
hole, and thereafter, days of passing in and
out of consciousness, found the strength to get
up.
He wandered about.
He couldn't understand the hostile reception he had
received from the people he had known all
of his life, and finally he decided that
he must have left something out or not
told the story correctly.
So after rehearsing the message, he decided to
go back and share his faith again.
He limped into the circle of huts and
began to proclaim Jesus.
He died for you so that you might
find forgiveness and come to know the living
God.
And again, he was grabbed by the men
of the village and held while the women
beat him, reopening the wounds that had just
begun to heal.
Once more, they dragged him unconscious from the
village and left him to die.
To have survived the first beating was truly
remarkable.
To live through the second was a miracle.
Again, days later, Joseph awoke in the wilderness,
bruised, scarred, and determined in his heart to
go back.
He returned to the small village, and this
time they attacked him before he had a
chance to open his mouth.
As they flogged him for the third and
probably the last time, he again spoke to
them of Jesus Christ the Lord.
And before he passed out, the last thing
he saw was that the women who were
beating him had begun to weep.
This time he awoke in his own bed.
The ones who had so severely beaten him
were now trying to save his life and
nurse him back to health.
And the entire village came to know Jesus
Christ.
What a story.
And I read that and I wondered, you
know, we think we're going through such hard
times.
I wonder how much pain we are willing
to bear so that someone might know Christ.
I'm going to tell you something.
Sometimes God allows suffering in our lives that
it might be a means of witnessing to
others.
In the midst of our pain, we can
tell others what they might not ever listen
to in our wholeness.
And then this is sort of where we
began, and this is the last reason.
Suffering prepares us to reign with Christ.
Romans 8, 17 is the verse we started
with, that if heirs, heirs of God and
fellow heirs with Christ, indeed we suffer with
him that we might be glorified with him.
And 2 Thessalonians 1, 4 and 5 says
this, therefore we ourselves speak proudly of you
among the churches of God for your perseverance
and faith in the midst of all your
persecutions and afflictions which you endure.
This is a plain indication of God's righteous
judgment so that you may be considered worthy
of the kingdom of God for which indeed
you are suffering.
You know, I wish I could tell you
that I understand all of this.
I've been meditating on this all week.
There seems to be in the Bible, and
maybe we can talk about this a little
bit more next time, there seems to be
in the Bible a relationship, now listen to
me, between the amount of suffering we do
in this life and the amount of reigning
we do in the kingdom.
It seems as if suffering is a very
special kind of preparation for reigning with Christ.
I don't understand that completely, and yet everywhere
I turn, 2 Timothy 2, 12 says, if
we endure, we shall also reign with him.
If we deny him, he also will deny
us.
John Piper writes that following Jesus means that
wherever obedience requires it, we will accept betrayal
and rejection and beating and mockery and crucifixion
and death.
Jesus gives us the assurance that if we
will follow him to Golgotha during all the
good Fridays of this life, we will also
rise with him on every Easter day of
the resurrection.
Amen.
There was an aging Christian who once objected
to John Patton, the great missionary's plan to
go as a missionary to the South Sea
Islands, and he said, if you go there,
Patton, you're going to be eaten by cannibals.
Patton responded, Mr. Dixon, you are advanced in
years now, and your own prospect is soon
to be laid in the grave there to
be eaten by worms.
He said, I confess to you that if
I can but live and die serving and
honoring the Lord Jesus, it will make no
difference to me whether I'm eaten by cannibals
or eaten by worms.
And in the great day of my resurrection
body, I will arise just as fair as
you in the likeness of our risen Redeemer.
Amen.
Well, I've just given you a little survey
of some of the reasons why God allows
suffering.
And you know, one of the things that
happens to me when I go through this
is, it helps me a little bit as
God's child, when tough things come, to realize
that God has a purpose.
But I want to end this by just
telling you that there's a response to suffering
that we ought to just think about, and
I can by no means even touch the
hem of the garment of this truth.
But the response to suffering in the Christian
life is, first of all, preparation.
Paul tried to prepare his converts for suffering.
Did you know that?
I don't know if you ever saw that
in the Bible.
After Paul established the churches, he'd go back
and he'd train them.
And you know, he didn't have classes on
how to manage your marriage.
He taught them how to suffer.
For instance, in 1st Thessalonians 3, 2, and
4, he says, and we sent Timothy to
establish and encourage you concerning your faith that
no one should be shaken by these afflictions.
For you yourselves know that we are appointed
to this.
For in fact, we told you before when
we were with you that we would suffer
tribulation, just as it has happened.
Paul said, I want you to understand this
is part of this business.
You need to be prepared for it.
When he returned from his first missionary journey,
he stopped at the young churches that he
had established and he encouraged them with the
same truth.
Listen to this passage.
And when they had preached the gospel to
that city and made many disciples, they returned
to Lystra and Iconium and Antioch, strengthening the
souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue
in the faith, and saying, we must through
many tribulations enter the kingdom of God.
I am astounded at the honesty with which
the apostolic teaching took place and the way
we deceive ourselves into thinking that being a
Christian is a walk in the park.
It never has been that way since the
beginning.
I had the privilege several years back to
meet Richard Wurmbrand, who endured 14 years of
imprisonment and torture in his homeland of Romania
between 1948 and 1964.
He had led a secret underground ministry when
the communists seized Romania and tried to control
the church for their purposes.
And Wurmbrand, like the Apostle Peter, stresses the
tremendous need to get spiritually ready to suffer.
And I want you to hear what he
said.
What shall we do about these tortures?
Will we be able to bear them?
If I do not bear them, I put
in prison another 50 or 60 men whom
I know, because that is what the communists
wish from me, to betray those around me.
And here comes the great need for the
role of preparation, he wrote.
It will be too difficult to prepare yourself
for it when the communists have put you
in prison.
I remember, he said, my last confirmation class
before I left Romania.
I took a group of 10 to 15
boys and girls on a Sunday morning, not
to church but to the zoo.
Before the cage of lions, I told them,
your forefathers in faith were thrown before such
wild beasts for their faith.
Know that you also will have to suffer.
You will not be thrown before lions, but
you will have to do with men who
would be much worse than lions.
Decide here and now if you wish to
pledge allegiance to Christ.
They had tears in their eyes and they
all said yes.
I wonder what would happen if we recruited
our recruits like that.
Take them to the zoo before the lion
cage and say, here's what your forefathers put
up with to be a Christian.
Are you willing to sign on?
I think our converts might go down a
little bit, don't you?
We need to be prepared.
And I'm not talking about, again, having a
morbid attitude about life.
I'm just saying, when you know that there's
going to be some hard times because of
who you are in Christ, you're not going
to be surprised when they come.
You're going to walk through them with courage
and strength.
And then, I just want to just add
this little thought, and that is, after preparation,
I want to put down the word memorization.
Because, you know, when you're going through tough
times, you don't have time to go back
and memorize.
And there's some wonderful truths in the Word
of God that help you when you go
through trouble.
Did you know that?
It'd be such a wonderful thing if you
knew some of these verses.
When you pass through the waters, I will
be with you.
And through the rivers, they will not overflow
you.
When you walk through the fire, you will
not be scorched, nor will the flame burn
you.
Isaiah 43.
Did you ever stop and think about memorizing
some passages of Scripture to arm yourself, so
that when trouble comes, you'll know how to
deal with it?
Get it in your vocabulary, so that immediately
it comes to mind, and you know how
to deal with it scripturally.
And then the last word is the word
dedication.
Paul was dedicated in such a way that
even if suffering was to be a part
of his experience, he was willing to face
it.
I wonder if we're dedicated to God in
such a way that we are willing to
face the challenges that come with being a
Christian.
We're going to see that it's harder and
harder to be a Christian in this culture.
In fact, let me say this.
It is acceptable to be almost anything in
the American culture today than to be a
Christian.
You can get by with anything.
You can believe anything.
You can say anything.
You can do anything.
But if you say you're a Christian in
public, you can count on it.
They're going to pull the mic away from
you.
You go into the schools.
You want to talk about Christ?
You can talk about Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, any
kind of craziness you want to, but you
start talking about Christ, and you will be
singled out.
And I don't think that's going to get
better.
And I'm not trying to say let's all
get scared that the world's caving in on
us.
I'm just saying, wouldn't it be good for
us to be kind of prepared, so that
when the challenge comes, we're not weak.
I want to tell you something.
Nothing's going to come upon us that we
can't handle in power of God.
Nothing.
God and us are a majority.
You know that, don't you?
And for those of us who are pastors,
I want to end with this word from
an old friend of mine by the name
of Charles Haddon Spurgeon.
I feel as if I've known him for
years, even though I wasn't born before he
died.
But I've read so many of his writings
and so have admired his testimony for Christ.
He has written a book for preachers, and
in that book he has a word about
what we've talked about.
And I want to finish with this.
He said, don't be surprised when friends fail
you.
It is a failing world.
Never count on the immutability of man.
Inconsistency you can reckon upon without fear of
disappointment.
The disciples of Jesus forsook him.
Don't be amazed if your adherents wander away
to other teachers.
They were not all yours when you had
them.
All is not gone when they've left.
Serve God with all your might while the
candle is burning, and then when it goes
out for a season you'll have less to
regret.
Be content to be nothing, for that is
what you are.
When your own emptiness is painfully forced upon
your consciousness, chide yourself that you ever dreamed
of being full except in the Lord.
Set small store by present rewards.
Be grateful for earnest along the way, but
look for your reward in the hereafter.
Continue with double earnestness to serve your Lord
when no visible result is before you.
Any simpleton can follow the narrow path in
the light.
Faith's rare wisdom enables us to march on
in the dark with infallible accuracy, since she
places her hand in that of her great
guide.
Between here and heaven there may be rougher
weather yet, but all is provided for by
your covenant God.
In nothing be turned aside from the path
which the divine call has urged you to
pursue.
Come fair or come foul, the pulpit is
your watchtower, and the ministry is your warfare.
Be it ours when we cannot see the
face of our God to trust under the
shadow of his wings.
I'm going to put that under the glass
on my desk to remind me that it's
easy to follow God in the light, easy
to be excited when everything's going well, but
the true soldier is the soldier who marches
on in the night when he doesn't really
know on the landscape where he is except
he's following his leader.
And that's all God has called us to
do.
He's asked us to follow Christ, the captain
of our salvation, who went before us and
endured Gethsemane and endured the cross for the
joy that was set before him.
And that is our task as well.