Suffering Sucks, But The Curse Will Be Broken!

So often we live under the illusion that things are fine. Then the presence of suffering reminds us that things are broken–that the whole creation is under a curse. So what or who do we turn to?

I like how John Piper speaks of two tyrants that exist in this world: suffering and pleasure. When the tyranny of suffering is present, we often subject ourselves to the tyranny of pleasures as a way to escape or numb our pains. But we end up in the same place, living under an illusion that is deceptive in nature.

Yes, suffering sucks. I think of a husband who awaits for the recovery of his wife who is under the tyranny of Covid-19. That husband and his wife are not just statistics–they have been my friends for more than 20 years. As I pray for them, I wrestle with my own longings for them. And as I do, I am faced with more places where suffering makes its constant appearances every day.

But pleasure does not hold the real promises I am looking for. Nor can pleasures deliver what they so colorfully promise. I know this because I have tried it before only to find myself living in the futility of such an illusion.

So today, I am turning to Romans 8:18-25 to seek clarity. I don’t want to live under illusions but under realistic, truthful hope.

Here is the perspective the Apostle Paul offers us: (I invite you to read the following paragraph and invite the Spirit of the Living God to deposit in your soul the truth and promises that can awake real hope).

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Here is what I glean as I read this passage:

• It’s hard to believe, but the best is yet to come.

• Suffering is part of the freedom package.

• The curse the world is under is deeper and more tragic than my personal discomforts or

  disappointments. We are in bondage!

• Complete freedom from bondage is under way.

• We the children of God are at the center of God’s redemptive work.

• Feeling fine or numb about the current decay of our world is both inconsistent with reality and it misses the hope to which we have been called.

• We are saved in hope.

• Hope motivates and generates faith-filled patience.

  May the God of Hope speak to you too!

—Diego Cuartas

*Please be advised that this blog represents the views, opinions and beliefs of the writer and does not necessarily reflect those of our church leadership or denominational affiliation.

Dusting in the Dark

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I don’t think I am overstating it to say I was astonished. A bit annoyed and embarrassed as well.

I had just dry mopped my mudroom floor, my usual housekeeping chore after breakfast. Setting my dust mop aside, I opened the back door on my way out to the mailbox. I blinked my eyes. Early morning sunshine streamed into my cabin through the bare, winter branches of the towering oaks along my driveway, illuminating the faux wood planks at my feet. I was temporarily blinded by its brilliance.

Then I gasped. Dirt, dust balls, hair, and crumbs suddenly appeared like magic in the revealing sunlight—right where I had just cleaned. Are you kidding me? How had I missed all this disgusting crud? Where did it come from?

As much as I hate to admit it, it must have been there in my gloomy hall all along. I just missed it.

It simply wasn’t apparent until there was light.  

Now I live in the woods and, even with lots of windows, my home is pretty dark and shadowed. I wondered how many other floors in my house were this messy and repulsive.

I grabbed my Swiffer wet jet and got busy. What a terrible housekeeper! Maybe I needed to wear a head lamp when I did my chores.

It seemed my key to a clean home wasn’t just my effort. It was light.

Scrubbing away, it occurred to me that there was another quite obvious lesson to be learned. The key to a clean heart, each person’s inner control center, was the very same thing.

Light.

I can’t speak for you, but on so many lazy, self-focused and/or rebellious days, I want anything but light shining in me, probing my innermost me. I don’t want to see, nor do I want anyone else to see, the ugly pet sins I cherish or the dreadful seeds of doubt or bitterness or envy or guilt that have taken root inside me. I want to hide the appalling false saviors that sit on my heart’s throne and the elusive phantom of pride that defiles my very being. Dirty. Messy. It’s really true that men love darkness rather than light. Why? Because their deeds are evil and wicked. So are their thoughts. And mine too. I try to hide them. Do I really think my Father doesn’t see and know?

Other days, when the light is brilliant and I see, like when I am hearing God’s Word preached on Sunday morning or I turn on a favorite pastor’s radio message or when I pick up my dusty Bible, I wonder how all this repulsive junk got in me. I tell myself that I have been sweeping and mopping, working hard to keep myself looking clean, feeling clean. But just like the crud in the shadows of my mudroom, I have missed what was really there. I have been fumbling with no light. What a waste of time and energy.

I need light to see. I need it shining all the time.

Psalm 119:130 says, The unfolding of your words give light; it imparts understanding to the simple.

Ah, God’s Word is the answer. Of course. God’s Word gives light as I “unfold” or read its truths. It also gives me understanding.

Psalm 119:105 says, Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.

As I read God’s Word, it becomes a candle shedding light in the darkness of me, showing me where my next steps should go, revealing the traps, the signposts, the potholes, the bandits, the detours, and the road blocks along the way. It also illuminates ugliness and brokenness and sin I need to confess and take to my Father for help, healing, and restoration.

God’s Word is the inescapable light I need to be all God has designed me to be, to accomplish His very personal and special purposes for me. I don’t want it blocked, crowded out, ignored or covered up.

Paul Tripp says it this way in his devotional, Wednesday’s Word, Does the Bible Influence You Enough?

…I have to say it: many Christians, maybe even you, don’t always live as if [God’s Word] is the most foundational source of wisdom in their life. Yes, we profess that we believe in the doctrine of Scripture—the doctrinal foundation upon which every other doctrine stands—but it probably doesn’t change our everyday living to that extent that it should.

I know it doesn’t always for me.

Sadly, many of us do not spend daily time in our Bibles. Many of us are not avid students of God’s word. Many of us are only fed from it for one hour each week as we gather together for Sunday worship. Yet, we spend hours and hours allowing our hearts and minds to be influenced and shaped by the internet, social media, and political commentary on TV. Functionally, these voices of influence are often more authoritative than Scripture.

If we deeply believed in the doctrine of Scripture, wouldn’t we be looking for every opportunity to share its glorious message with others? Wouldn’t that quiet time, when you separate yourself from other people and other responsibilities, and it’s just you, your Lord, and his word, be your favorite part of your day?

If you, like me, are feeling convicted, the solution isn’t to read God’s word in a quasi-guilty, sense-of-duty, this-is-what-good-Christians-do sort of way. No, we always should approach our Bible reading and study with heartfelt joy.

“Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.” (Psalm 111:2)

“They received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.” (Acts 17:11)

Yes, we approach God’s word with commitment, but we do so because we are grateful, excited, and hungry. We find him there, we find his saving grace there, we find astounding wisdom there, we find guidance for our daily living there, and there we find hope to do it all again tomorrow.

Every time you open the book, pray that God would grant us open eyes and a joyful, grateful, eager, and tender heart.

Pray that the light of His Word shines in you, revealing what needs attention inside, guiding you in the way you should go.  

Won’t you make 2022 the year you quit stumbling in the dark, ignoring the dirt, being uncertain of your path ahead? Won’t you make this the year you resolve to walk in the light of His Word every single day?

I want to.

It’s a better use of my time than dust mopping in the dark, don’t you think?

—Eileen Hill

Suffering: A Meeting Place

Big John’s Pizza Queen owner Rob Johnson spreads the important message that “Everyone has a story to tell.” With over 7 billion people on earth, this means that there are currently billions of unique stories to be told. Incredibly, in every unique story from every nation, tribe, and tongue, one can find a strikingly common thread that ties each of our individual stories together. Suffering. Whether a pauper or a king, suffering is familiar. Misery loves company because misery HAS lots of company.   

Though we do our best to avoid it, we are all familiar with suffering. When we pulled away from the loving hold of our all-knowing, ever-present, all powerful Creator (Genesis 3:6), we started a crack that has spread through the layers of blessed support He had graciously provided us with.  The spreading of this crack has caused a deep and wide valley of spiritual, physical, mental, and emotional decay. What once was beautifully integrated has become a pit of death. Marred by sin, the abundant examples of His goodness have become disfigured. Intimate, shame-free relationships with others have become ridden with backbiting discord. Enjoyable, satisfying work has become sweaty, pointless drudgery. Sweet harmony with the animals, plants, and the rest of creation has become a dreadful siren reminding us of looming disaster. The deeper we fall in this pit, the more our perspective on God’s beauty is limited. Before long, we stop mourning the distance between us and God and start mourning our very existence. The house of misery becomes the most popular meeting place since ALL who enter can relate. Thankfully, here, in this house of misery, we can find the One with the power to mend what has been broken. 

In How Jesus meets us in Pain, Danielle Cummins writes: 

In all the training on how to grow closer to Jesus, suffering was never a chapter heading. We were big on Easter, light on Good Friday, and, as it turns out, life is often the opposite. Especially for most of humankind.

We cannot know our God who sits on the highest throne without knowing his journey into the deepest pit of despair. We must know His suffering to know Him. The Apostle Paul knew this.  He understood that knowing Christ meant knowing the power of His resurrection AND the fellowship of His suffering (Phil 3:10).  If we think we are being conformed into His image without becoming more acquainted with sorrows, we have set our sights on an idol.

Danielle Cummins states:

While human nature, privilege, and the American Dream may justify profound distaste for suffering, Calvary beckons us differently. Reconciliation with God implies further intolerance of this world and its atrocities and injustices, not a shielding from their effects.

The culmination of Christ’s suffering like us “in every way” on the cross should pierce through the thin facades we erect to help ignore our own suffering and the suffering of others. As He has borne our infirmities, by His Spirit we will find the power to connect with others in their suffering.

C.S. Spurgeon’ writes:

The afflicted do not so much look for comfort to Christ as he will come a second time… as to Christ as he came the first time, a weary man and full of woes.

In our suffering, we cannot understand how to get to God from our misery. We are often unaware that He is in our midst. As His children, we can find him and share Him in the midst of suffering.

Suffering binds us with God, as Jürgen Moltmann writes,

…when we feel pain we participate in his pain, and when we grieve we share his grief… People who believe in the God who suffers with us, recognize their suffering in God, and God in their suffering.

Speaking of those suffering with depression, Spurgeon drives this point home further:

When a person “has been through a similar experience” of depression, “he uses another tone of voice altogether. He knows that, even if it is nonsense to the strong, it is not so to the weak, and he so adapts his remarks so that he cheers” the sufferer “where the other only inflicts additional pain. Broken hearted one, Jesus Christ knows all your troubles, for similar troubles were his portion” too.

 To my fellow sojourners in this broken world, let us not forget that His appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being and that his form was marred beyond human likeness. Though the degrees of our human suffering differ, there is one who has experienced all of it to make all things new.  When we suffer, may His Word remind us that we are not alone in our pain and suffering.

In his book Spurgeons Sorrows, Zack Eswine writes of one way the great preacher stayed mindful that Christ was with Him on dark days:

Charles cherished a certain picture. The engraver portrayed the moment in Pilgrim’s Progress in which Christian panics, swallowed up by the deeps of a river and going under. The portrait shows Christian’s companion, named Hopeful, pushing up with his arm around Christian and lifting up his hands shouting, “Fear not! Brother, I feel the bottom.

With this picture on his mind, the preacher so familiar with sorrows then rejoices with those listening to him. “This is just what Jesus does in our trials. “Charles proclaims. “He puts his arm around us, points up and says, “Fear not! The water may be deep, but the bottom is good.”

 Jesus is the good shepherd, He remains present in all ways when things get difficult.  We know He is above.  May we also remember His love for us that has caused Him to go below. We can find Emmanuel in our suffering.

—Roger Garrison

*Please be advised that this blog represents the views, opinions and beliefs of the writer and does not necessarily reflect those of our church leadership or denominational affiliation.

The Next Shiny Thing

I‘ve spent a lot of time reading Proverbs over the years. The succinct wisdom shared in pity statements helps me drink in the nectar of others’ contemplative observations and take the time to downshift in hopes of going further not faster. In Proverbs, I am reminded to seek wisdom and buy truth and, when I gain them, to never trade them off for lesser, passing things.

Easier said than done.

Shiny things just call and look so…shiny.

Sometimes the next shiny thing comes along with beauty, so alluring, we fail to see the dark overtones which foretell destruction and loss. For a time, the pleasure of that thing eclipses good sense and draws us into the idea that diligence and fidelity is antithetical to one’s deep enjoyment of life. We can be fooled into living as though comfort and ease will bring the same results as planting, building, saving, and investing in God’s kingdom. 

Sooner or later, left unchecked by good counsel or thoughtful introspection, “an arrow” comes along to pierce so deeply that there remains little hope for life to continue or flourish. Poverty comes to claim its reward. The result of pursuing a string of the next shiny things. 

So, what is the hopeful cure? Pick up Proverbs, the book of wisdom and find out. Bring it into your prayer life. Ask for the gift of wisdom. Talk with God and others about how to gain wisdom, and once you get some, treat it like the precious thing it is, something that will make your life better.

Then, you will be a son or daughter who is wise and brings joyful honor to your Father in Heaven.

[Suggestion:  Read a chapter a day – there are enough for each day of any month – and see how it changes you and your outlook about what are the true riches waiting for you.]

— George Davis

*Please be advised that this blog represents the views, opinions and beliefs of the writer and does not necessarily reflect those of our church leadership or denominational affiliation.