There Is Another in the Fire: Suffering, Part 2
First B Jackson
2024-08-11

Automatically transcribed. Where this and the recording disagree, the recording is the record.

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Good morning, friends. I am glad to see you, and I'm glad to be together. I really am. Glad to see every one of you today. And may I ask you to stand?

I would love to worship in song together. Love a word of encouragement from the scriptures before we sing. You know, it's just it it it leads us into worship. And here's one of them from Hebrews four, and it says this. So let's come boldly to the throne of our gracious God.

We have a we have we we have a command here. We can come boldly, boldly to the throne of our gracious God. And there, we receive his mercy, and he'll give us grace when we need it most. And, Lord, you know we do. Would you join us in singing this is amazing grace?

Who breaks the power? Let's sing

this together. Who breaks the power of sin and darkness, whose love is mighty and so much stronger, the king of glory, the king of all all that you've done for me. Who brings our chaos all that you've done for me. And let's sing of his worthy is the

Amen. You can have a seat here for a moment while Nick, shares some announcements with us.

Hey. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to First Baptist Church. We are delighted to have you here. And first of all, I wanna thank the people who are in the front row today.

Let's give a no joke. I've been saying it for a while. We have prizes for you. So take one, pass it down. Everyone, take one, pass it down this row.

We're gonna talk about crowd dynamics here. In about five minutes, this entire place is gonna be slammed with people. Would you consider coming towards the front? And if there's a seat next to you, stand up and move towards the middle. I I I've I've been many times where I've been here by myself, and I just sit on the corner on the edge thinking that's helpful.

It's actually more helpful if you sit in the center and leave the edge open for the people coming in. It's a way you can help witness to the folks that come in. We were a super slam last week and ran out of seats, which is a great problem to have. But if you're forward in the middle, we can make as room for as much people as many people as possible. The community oh, we're gonna talk about the Worship Hootenanny, August 31 through September 1 in Bondurant.

If you guys have any questions about that on our website, it has all the information, all the location, the map and stuff. You can to August 31 through September 1. I did not have a slide for that this week. So let's see what's next. Oh, the first BBQ, August 18 out here in the lawn.

Great way to meet people. We provide the food. You just come. Invite all the friends and neighbors. And we'll just show up for that and just just be a part of the community here between services.

The first b church camp out, August twenty third through twenty fifth. You don't have to stay overnight if you don't want to, if you just wanna come hang out at Palisades for the day. Would you please come now? Bring your own food, your own camping gear. Super great time.

The are right over here. If you have any questions, I'll ask them and they can help you out. We do have Sunday school for everybody except for grades three through five, but you can go they can go downstairs in miss Crystal's class if they if they want to. Anyway, middle school and high school will continue to be in the library, is in the far end of the building. If you didn't know we have a library, we do.

Check it out. It's free. Old Bills Fun Run's coming up. For those of you who don't know, in September, thousands of people gather up on the square to run a big race, and they raise money for a bunch of organizations in town, including First First Baptist Church's Benevolence Fund. We use the Benevolence Fund to help people nearly every day, sometimes three, four, five times a day.

The need is growing in Jackson, and the opportunities for people to get help are actually shrinking. As more people come in, people are specializing more and more and aren't saying yes to people. And we try to say yes whenever we can. There's a lot of people in emergency situations that need to get home for medical things, or a family member's dying, or need emergency shelter, or medical bills taken care of. You name it, we try to help out whenever we can.

And we use these funds all year long. In fact, the community foundation, we applied for a grant for them this summer and got a 5,000 grant to be able to help out with the benevolence fund. But that is one I shouldn't have done the math on stage, but that's like one tenth of what we need throughout the year, one fifteenth of what we need. So please, would you let us know? If you have any questions about how we use those funds or anything like that, please talk to any of us because we know it intimately.

Also want a community spotlight here for Scott Schneider, our friend here. He was voted as one of the volunteers of the year through the Wyoming what is it? Wyoming Community Heroes. So let's give it up for Scott. Yeah.

We love you, buddy. And we just wanna recognize through the benevolence fund, we had somebody in Riverton that needed a ride to catch a bus, but there was no way to get to the bus from Riverton. So Scott drove he just dropped everything and went and picked her up, stayed in a hotel over the night, and brought her back the next day. Just says yes to things. So we love you, Scott.

Thank you for your willingness to help people out. The Women of Legacy luncheon is coming up August 26 at the Presbyterian Church. There's a bulletin on the the bullet board in the back if you have any questions about that. And there are church wide Bible studies that go out Monday through Friday. They're written by everybody in the congregation.

If you also wanna be a writer, let Brad Yates know. He's the one speaking today. And you can sign up for that email through our website, and you can sign up for the weekly emails through the website as well, which is our weekly bulletin. And that is a lot of information. Did those did those prizes get to everybody?

Everybody has one? Okay. You too could get a prize if you wanna move forward into the middle, stand up and greet each other, and now is a good time to reposition. So thanks for being here, guys. Stand up, greet each other, and we'll come back in song.

Is is that worship putting anything down at Dan, the Toalsons? Yeah. Yep. We did that two years ago, and it was a blast.

Oh, oh, my God. When I am awesome wonder consider art. And forest blades I wander and hear the birds sing sweetly in the tree. Rain out of town from lofty mountain grandeur and see the bread and feel the gentle breeze then sings and sings my soul, my savior God to you. How great thou art, how great thou art, and sings my soul, my savior God to thee.

How great thou art, how great thou art. And when I think that God, his son not sparing, sent him to die, ice skirts can take it. That on that cross, my burden gladly bearing,

Can I share a verse? This is from Lamentations, and it says this, because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed. Some of you may be stepping into this place feeling consumed. Consumed by worry or anxiety or problems or worries, things like that. But it says, because of his great love, we're not consumed for his compassions never fail.

We let that sink in just for a minute. His compassions never fail. They are new every morning. His mercy is new every morning. So today, we have mercy for today, so that those worries, that feeling of being consumed, God has given us grace for that.

God's given us peace for that. Great is his faithfulness. Wanna sing of it in this song, shall we?

Daily, daily, I surrender. Daily, daily, I surrender. Grace for today is all that I need. Surprised by mercy that's new every morning. Awaken my soul to sing.

Awaken my soul to sing. And I will trust. Bear with me. And I will trust when I can't see. Morning by morning, raise your faithfulness to me Breath by breath overtaken by wonder.

Step at a time when I'm overwhelmed. All fear be reminded. My future is secure. Oh, my father has spoken. He keeps his every word.

Now fear be reminded. My future is secured. My father has spoken, and he keeps his everywhere. So I will trust. I will trust you.

Morning by morning. Morning by morning. And I will trust where you lead. And I will trust. I can't see.

Morning by morning, where is your faithfulness to

From the Psalm, this is Psalm 32. God is saying to us, I will instruct you and I will teach you in the way that you should go. Some of us are wondering, where do I go here, left or right? What's happening? And life can feel a little frantic, and God is promising here.

He's saying, I'll instruct you in the way that you should go. I will counsel you with my loving eye on you. And God, we thank you for your loving eye and for your loving hand to direct us. God, would you continue? And would we look to you?

I lift my eyes to the hill. Does my help come from? It comes from you. God, may we look to you. Even when we cannot see, God, would we look to you?

Thank you. Thank you for your loving eye on us. Thank you for your instruction. Thank you for your counsel. In Jesus' name.

Amen.

A thousand generations falling down in worship to sing a song of ages to the man. And all have gone before us, and all who will believe will sing a song of ages to the man. Jesus' name is the highest. Jesus, your name is the highest. Your name is the greatest.

Your name stands above them all. All throes and dominions knock forever. Or if you've been forgiven, if you've been redeemed, sing a song forever Jesus, king your name. Jesus, your name is the highest of your name. He's the greatest of your name.

Stands above them all. And all

You can have a seat here for a moment. And this is the worship through giving part of the service. I'll invite the ushers to come forward, and we get to sing a song called let the redeemed from Psalm one zero seven. It's give thanks to the Lord. He is good.

His steadfast love, it endures forever. And it says this. It goes on to say, let the redeemed of the Lord say so, whom is redeemed from trouble. Oh, before we sing, would you join me in prayer? Lord God, we we thank you.

Thank you, God, for redeeming us, for drawing us to yourself. Thank you, God, for your loving kindness that you are light. God, we wander around in darkness, and then we find you. We find the light, God, and you illumine us, and you fill us with your Holy Spirit, and our lives are are are never the same. Lord, thank you for the transformation that comes from knowing you and believing in you and being filled with your spirit.

God, we do want to give thanks because you are good. Your steadfast love, it endures forever and ever and ever. It goes on and on and on. And God, you have redeemed us. And we want to say that.

Thank you. We want to we want to respond, Lord, in word and deed to you with an open heart, with an open hand, with an open life. God, we offer these gifts, not just what comes in the plate, Lord, everything beyond the spiritual gifts that you've entrusted us with to use to advance the kingdom, to be a part of something much, much greater, bigger than ourselves. We thank you. In Jesus' name.

Amen. Children's Church. Kids, you are invited to go down for Children's Church. Brad is coming up.

He's

Can share I a little bit of practice

before you Please. Before you talk.

Brad's been sharing. It's a two part series on on suffering. And may I pray and just ask God's blessing here as we hear the word and hear it through Brad's personality this morning. Lord, we thank you, God, for your word. Thank you for the comfort and encouragement that it brings, but also that it can exhort and rebuke and correct us and do all these things.

And and, Holy Spirit, we ask, Lord, that you would speak to us in a way that we would truly understand and and resonate this morning. In Jesus' name, amen.

Amen. Morning. Morning. So last week, we looked at the chipper topic of the global problem of suffering and the Christian response to it. And if you missed it, it's the idea that suffering and evil exist.

So how do we reconcile a personal God who is all good and all powerful with the reality that suffering exists? And the answer is love because God loves us and is patient with us. Because of sin, evil is so intrinsically intertwined with our very being. It's so deeply rooted in our hearts that if God were to rid the world of all evil, he would have to kill the very ones that he loves. So instead, he's patient, and he's made provision for evil, and he uses suffering that exists in the world for our good and for his glory.

But in summary, suffering is real, but it's not without meaning. God will not waste your suffering. So you'll hear people say that I can't believe in a God that would allow x to happen. What they're really saying there is that they can't believe in a God that is beyond their own comprehension. And when I reframe it like that, it's obviously illogical.

Because if God is infinite and we are finite, then we're not gonna understand everything that he's doing. But it's okay to admit that you can't imagine what God is doing in the midst of something. The good news is it's okay to be angry at God because it's hard to be angry at somebody that you don't think exists or that you don't think is in control. You can actually have good theology in your anger at God. And I wanna circle back to one incredibly important thing that we touched on last week.

That there is a huge difference between the penalty for our sin and God's discipline. If you have a saving faith in Jesus Christ, God does not penalize you for your sin. Jesus paid for that in full at the cross, and the empty grave is our receipt. It's our proof of payment. That said, there are consequences in this world.

If you make bad decisions, it will go poorly for you. But if you are in Christ, God is not punishing you for your sin. He may, in wisdom and in love, choose to discipline you. He may be as a potter molds clay, shaping you into something that if he were to tell you, you couldn't even begin to imagine. Imagine.

There were two quotes that we looked at last week that I thought were really helpful. Uh-oh. We're we're I'm not doing great here. We've lost our order of slides. So there's two quotes that we want to look at again from last week.

One is from Tim Keller. Is the highest good that we be comfortable and without trouble or that we become spiritually and morally great? I'll say it again because it's that powerful. Is the highest good that we become or that we be comfortable and without trouble or that we be spiritually and morally great? And from John Piper, God is always doing 10,000 things in your life.

And if you're lucky, you might be aware of three of them. In contrast, think about the people in your life that have known nothing but ease and comfort. Are those the people that you want on your team when life gets hard? No. The people that know nothing but ease, they tend to be more selfish, more thin skinned, more easily disrupted, more easily shaken.

I don't know about you, but if if I have to go into a fight, I don't want the guy that has only ever done yoga and gotten massages before. I want the guy that's had his nose broken a few times and his ears don't sit flat anymore. And the same thing is true with spiritual and Christian growth. But the irony, of course, is that none of us want to go through the things that we have to in order to become that person. None of us want our spiritual nose broken.

I don't and and it's also true for my kids. I don't ever want them to suffer. I don't want them to go through the things that they need to go through in order to be mature Christians. And yet, I recognize that all throughout scripture, the way that God develops people to be truly useful through the kingdom for the kingdom is through suffering. And yet sometimes I can't imagine what suffering or loss might be preparing me for.

And sometimes it is purely a function of the evil that exists in the world, and yet God still redeems it. So how can evil and suffering work for our good? We don't always know. And yet and yet God tells us that it does. And so we have to choose to actively trust him.

And why can we make that choice? What's our proof? It's Jesus. God loved you so much that Jesus set aside his equality with God, took on flesh, and died for our sins on the cross as it talks about in Philippians two. We can believe because of the cross and the empty tomb and the prophecies and the apostles and the biblical record of God's patience and faith and love for us.

We have to choose, though, actively to trust God, and we will have to especially work hard to do so in the midst of suffering. So that's our review of last week. If you missed it and you want to catch it, it's on the First Bee YouTube page. You click the live tab. It's right there.

But for this week, we're going to look at now what are you supposed to do when you or someone close to you is in the midst of suffering. We're going to look at it in three scenarios. Let's see if we get this

yay.

Yay, I'm suffering. Work with me. So we're going to look at it in three scenarios. We're going look at it as a collective, as others and for yourself. So for collective, we're going to cover this one fairly quickly because this is pretty straightforward from an application standpoint.

But we need to talk about what do you do when regional or national or global tragedy strikes. If it affects you or someone close to you, then that's the latter part of our conversation today. But we're going to talk about when it's collective suffering. And the appropriate biblical response is always repentance. Plagues, drought, flood, invasion by a conquering army, all of these things, these are ways that God has historically chastened cultures throughout the Bible.

And we saw this last week in Luke 13, and we don't love this idea cause it grates against our Western sensibilities. We don't like the idea that God can judge an entire nation all at once. And yet it's there, and we have to deal with it. And we can instead remind ourselves that none of us actually get what we truly deserve because what we truly deserve, as you guys have heard me say before, is death. We can be glad that we don't get what we deserve.

Because Christ died for your sins too, not just your favorite pet sin that you think is the epitome of evil in the world. He died for me too. And we can all recognize that. And when collective tragedies happen, we can repent and we can pray. So we can think about that for ourselves, and we can repent with renewed vigor when global tragedies strike.

And we can call the people around us to repentance, and we can do so in humility. And the best way to do it is to tell them about the grace that you received when you repented of the sin that was in your life. And we can call ourselves in community to constantly do that together. But that does not mean that we know what it's going to look like. So whether it's AIDS or nine eleven or hurricanes or fires or any other tragedy, it's not for us to say, this is God judging the world as if we can know exactly what God is doing in any given moment.

And it's also true for both Israel in the Bible as well as for enemy pagan nations. So it doesn't mean just because a nation is judged doesn't mean that God's done using them. Israel was chasing multiple times. Sometimes they repented. When Jonah went to went to Nineveh, Nineveh famously repented.

When Sodom and Gomorrah was warned, they did not. And yet God is sovereign over all of them. And we don't get how that works, and we're not going to on this side of eternity. So that's the the biblical view for the collective suffering. How do we respond to that?

It's in repentance. Let's now look at what most of us are gonna experience more often in our lives. What do we see when individuals suffer? That's two ways. When others suffer around us or ourselves.

We're gonna look first at when others are around us. We're gonna look for that. We're gonna go to Job two eleven through 13. You can turn with me if you want, or I'll have it on the screen and read it for you. Now when Job's three friends heard about all this adversity that had come upon him, they came, each one from his own place.

When they looked from a distance and did not even recognize him, they raised their voices and wept. And each of them tore his robe, they threw dust over their heads towards the sky. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights with no one speaking a word to him, for they saw that his pain was very great. Guys, first point, right off the bat. This is not a job for somebody else.

This is your job. This is my job. It's not just for vocational ministry to be with those that are in suffering. The church, the bride of Christ, is you, all of you. It's not just me.

It's not just the other elders. It's not for anybody on staff. And for proof of that, we'll look at the famous text on this. It's Ephesians four. So Christ gave him Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors, the teachers.

Why? To equip his people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up. Until we all reach unity in the faith and the knowledge of the son of God and become mature. We in church leadership, we actually exist to equip you guys for the work of ministry. And that's part of what we're doing here today.

We're worshiping God, and we are equipping the saints. Said another way, the one anothers of the New Testament. They're not just for people on the payroll. I have printed out here, all the one and o's. If you guys aren't familiar with this concept, you should study it.

It's life changing. This is God's recipe for how we as Christians are to interface with each other on a day to day basis. I have this in a email format. If anybody wants it, just reach out and I'll send this to you. It's a PDF.

But these are the fifty nine one anos you can count in a million different ways. But these are the famous proclamations of how we're supposed to live, that we love one another, we encourage one another, when necessary, rebuke one another or bear one another's burdens. That's not just for the vocational ministry. And I think you guys know this, and our church generally does a pretty good job with it. But what I'm saying is, church, let's excel still more.

Let's keep leaning into that. Let's press on. Because we can all take responsibility for the ministry that takes place in your church. And whether that's signing up for any of the dozens of ministries that happen here or whether it's just generally living on mission, being sensitive to what God is calling you to do in any given moment, looking for the needs and the hurts that are around you, not just in the church, but in your neighborhood so that you can be the bright light in a dark place. That's your job and mine.

But for our application today, the simplest and most effective thing to do when somebody is in suffering is to show up and listen. If you take nothing else from our conversation today in terms of practical application, We'll even make it more basic because it's catchier. It's show up and shut up. Now once you've done that, then you can be useful. So you can show up and you can just start doing something.

Use whatever is your natural gifting. Cook, clean, mow, repair, organize, pray, whatever it is. You just show up and you do it. But we can be a little bit pushy towards the person that's suffering in the way that we want to do this. Because if you send the generic text message, Hey, I'm sorry.

How can I help? When someone's in suffering, their brain is not functioning rightly. So when you're asking them to think creatively and come up with something that you can do to help them, you might as well be asking them to do rocket surgery. It's hard. But instead, you can say, hey, I want to cook for you, or I would love to come clean your house.

Can I do it tomorrow? Can I do it today? And they'll feel loved in that. And maybe they're overwhelmed. Maybe their refrigerator is just stuffed full of lasagna already.

It's good. But and then the other thing is if you're if you're going to tell them that you're praying for them, church, would you pray for

them? Amen.

Do it right then and tell them how you're praying for them. A a a big tip that's been really helpful for me is set an alarm on your phone every day. Make the numbers make the time on the clock correspond to some Bible verse or something like that. I pray every day at 01:20 for some friends of mine back in Dallas that have a specific need. Alarm goes off.

Whoever I'm with, it's oh, I do it 12:20 mountain time, so I'm praying with them. But whoever I'm with, I'm just like, hey, I'm gonna pray for my friends. Will you join me real quick in praying? They don't need context. They don't need the story.

It's not gossip. I'm just saying, God, would you help my friends? And then we can try and be discerning and wise, and we can listen to the Holy Spirit for specific guidance on how we can help that person. Because as we're gonna see multiple times today, there is no one single template for suffering. A book that you give to one person may be incredibly helpful for them.

That same book given to a different believer might inadvertently cause feelings of guilt and shame, and it might increase their burden. And we just got to be aware of that, and we've got to be sensitive to it. And hear me on this similarly, because this is me preaching to myself as much as anything else. Please don't feel the need to be profound. We need to know that your brilliant insights or mine are not gonna be the thing that pulled them out of suffering.

You are not the answer to their suffering. God is. But you can be a tremendous help. So your patience and your love and your presence and your prayers can be incredibly helpful. But we don't need to try and solve people's suffering for them.

And just know that we're all gonna respond differently. Because for true tragedies that don't have an obvious point or cause as far as we can see, some combination of isolation or despair or anger or overwhelming self absorption can set in. And we're just going to recognize that that's part of the process. If we're the one coming alongside them, we don't have to be the one making the diagnosis of any of those. Instead, we just do our job, and we'd be faithful in it.

So maybe going on a walk is helpful for someone. Maybe it's the feeling of being loved and served and bringing over that casserole. Or maybe it's the opposite. Some people when they're hurting, they actually want to serve. They want to feel more useful.

Or maybe they just want to sit and cry. Maybe it's a deep dive into Christian philosophy. Maybe they wanna unpack the meaning of suffering. Or maybe they just need that hug from a friend at church or from a neighbor that lasts longer than they would expect. But by the end of it, they can just barely begin to breathe again.

So what are some common things not to do? My favorite, because it's my is to whip what I call the ninja star verses at people. I go, you know, Romans eight twenty eight, we know that all things God works for the good of those who call him. I've been called according to his purpose. Or who love him, I've been called according to his purpose.

And these are great verses. These are life verses. We should remember these. There's truth in them. But truth misapplied to a tender wound can be really painful.

Medicine given at the wrong time or in the wrong dose is not actually medicine. It's poison. And we can think similarly about this. Because we can recall from the passage in Isaiah that's quoted in Matthew 12 that Jesus was described as being around those as being so gentle that a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. Guys, Jesus never whipped hard truths at those that were suffering or were fragile.

He saved hard truths for the heart of heart. Because these verses are all true. They're classics for a reason. Many of these are life verses, and and and I would commit you or or provoke you to memorize them. But this is what Job's friends did wrong.

They sat around first, and Job's friends get a bad rap. But first, sat around for seven days. Seven days. Anybody here sat with somebody without talking for seven days before? I haven't.

I get about seven minutes. And this is why Job called them miserable comforters. They were off to such a great start with the showing up and listening, but they had a tendency to rush into assuming they knew what God was doing in that specific instance. And that sounds so much like me when I'm alongside somebody. Because many of the things that they said are actually true.

A man does reap what he sows sometimes. God does bless the righteous. But to apply that carte blanche to someone is a really thin understanding of the Bible. And it's akin to that word of faith movement or the prosperity ridiculousness. And I feel like I need to say this clearly, so bear with me.

Because taking Bible verses out of context can make you think that you can force God to get you a Gulfstream jet. Just like that, you or your friend's lack of healing is not a sign of their lack of faith. It is not a sign of their doubt, and I need everybody here to hear that. Just because you pray with an intense emotion or with a specific formula does not mean that you can force God to do what you want him to do, whether in suffering or out. And we need to know that because otherwise, it can really hurt some people.

This is not a genie in a lamp that you rub it just right and you get three wishes. This is the sovereign creator God of the universe who knits you together in your mother's womb, who holds the all of creation together by the power of his word. This is not Aladdin. This is God. And we must always keep that in mind.

And so I'm gonna say on that, so otherwise I can get on a diatribe. But to to summarize, much of the modern approach to suffering, much of what we see in the culture is basically to to hit the suffering checklist. I've done this. I've done this. I've done this.

I've done this. Therefore, I'm gonna be done with it or my friend is gonna be done with it. That way we can hurry up and we can get back to real life. But what a biblical view shows us is that real life includes suffering as much as anything else. This is that contrast to the secular view, that suffering is real and it has meaning.

And yet God uses it in ways that we can't begin to fathom. So we should strive against that current, against that pull to rush through suffering and instead recognize that everybody's going to do this on their own timeline. So as a review, when someone else is suffering, we show up, we listen, we weep with those who weep, we mourn with those who mourn. We can be a help. We recognize that everybody's going to go through it differently, and we don't feel the need to be profound.

And don't throw the ninja star versus Adam. Give them time. In other words, love them as you would want to be loved. After all, the golden rule is a manifestation or is I'm sorry, is an invention of Christ Jesus. Now one more thing I'd be remiss not to mention before we move on is prayer.

And we could do a whole sermon series on it, but a phrase that's been particularly helpful for me of late in thinking about prayer in general, but also in in suffering, is that prayer does not just aid the mission. In view of sovereignty of God, prayer is the mission. We can put our wind, we can put our sails in God's wind, and we can pray. So moving on to our third scenario. That's the one I needed.

There we go. This is preparing yourself for suffering. And this is mostly prep work, so this is hard. How do we prepare ourselves to be the ones that suffer? And to start, I wanna look at a promise that Jesus made to his disciples in Luke 21.

But you will be betrayed even by your parents, brothers, and sisters, other relatives, and friends, and they will put some of you to death. And you will be hated by all people because of my name. And yet not a hair of your head will perish, but your endurance you will gain your lives. I want to show you something that I noticed in prepping for this that I'd never noticed before, so maybe you've missed it too. Jesus says in the same breath, they will put some of you to death and yet not a hair of your head will perish.

Did Jesus get lost and do a mixed metaphor in the middle of this? Or is he promising us all like a great head of hair in our casket? Or is this blessed will be the bald in spirit? No. This is Jesus pointing to the very fact that God is sovereign.

This is a callback to what he said a few chapters earlier in Luke 12. He said, our five sparrows not sold for 2 pennies and yet not one of them has gone unnoticed in the sight of God, but even the hairs of your head are all counted. Do not fear you are more valuable than a great number of sparrows. Some of you are worth at least five sparrows. Jesus is saying here that we may very well die for our testimony in Christ, But we can trust in the fact that it is not outside of God's sovereignty and that you will not experience the eternal perishing that we looked at last week when we were looking at the Tower Of Siloam in Luke 13.

If His plan is for us to die, we have to be able to accept it. And gosh, that's a hard truth, but it's biblical. The flip side though is actually a little bit more fun to think about, maybe a little bit more appealing to our Western sensibilities. It is a little bit of a tangent, but did you know that until God is ready to call you home, you're immortal? That's really cool.

So we don't have to be afraid when we're in a flight in turbulence. Or for me, I don't have to be afraid of closed spaces. Not like elevators, I'm talking like. We can relax when we're exposed to heights, but we don't need to prove this. We don't need to pop the exit door and go dance on the wing.

We don't have to go skydiving in order to prove our faith. But we can rest in the fact, like Jesus talked about in the Sermon on the Mount, that God is sovereign and that that trust in his sovereignty can cure all anxiety. It's kind of a life hack to use the modern terminology. Back to suffering. The big point here is that you can give yourself grace on how to respond in suffering.

You don't need to cast judgment on yourself in addition to everything else that's going on. For example, for better or worse, I'm a natural fixer. If you come to me with a problem, I'll give you three things to do, two books to read, one change to your spiritual discipline, then and we'll go ahead and set a calendar item on our phones for five days from now where you call me and thank me for changing your life. But Christian maturity is recognizing that that is my tendency, that that is unhelpful, and that it's actually sin. Because there's not just one type of suffering that needs to be solved.

Look at the heroes of the Bible for examples on this. David suffered multiple times in the biblical record. We'll look at four of them real quick. He had a hard upbringing of fending off lions to protect his sheep. I think we'd consider that suffering.

His experience of being physically attacked and attempted murder against him by Saul, the ruling king. He was disciplined in being chastened both by Nathan and by God for his adultery with Bathsheba. And his son, his very son Absalom, rebelled against his kingdom and tried to kill him. Now each of these things was different, and yet the thing that made David a a man after God's own heart was not the fact that David was always in pursuit of healing, but the fact that he was in pursuit of God. Do you see what David knew what was most important?

David knew to lean into God, to trust him, to be honest, to question him, to even be angry at God. David was faithful in that, and he was never ashamed to pray. So some of us feel like there are things that it's not okay to say to God. Or some of us hear people in suffering say things and we want to correct their theology right away. But if you look at Psalm 22, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from saving me from the words of my groaning? Can you imagine sitting with somebody and hearing them say this? I'd wanna correct them. And yet that first line is the very thing that Christ called out from the cross. Or Psalm 13, how long, oh Lord, will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me? These are honest prayers. And there's a bunch of other Psalms that are similarly helpful in times of sorrow. What I'm saying is it's okay to be honest with God. The key part is to keep going back to him.

If you feel like you can't pray, for example, pray that. Say, God, I don't know what to pray right now. Will you help me pray? And I'm telling you, God's going answer that one. My favorite prayer in all of the gospels is in Luke nine.

Mark nine, I'm sorry. When the father of the the dying girl says to Jesus, I believe, help my unbelief. When you're with somebody that prays that, you know their heart is vulnerable and you know that they are going to God and you encourage them in it. Here's one more. It's Psalm thirty four eighteen, where God is promising to be particularly near to us when we're in suffering.

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. Guys, you are so loved by God that he sent his eternal and perfect son to die for you and that changes everything even how we suffer. Because it's not the storm that makes you stronger. It is your response to it. And that's not me quoting like a high school football gym t shirt or something.

That's the glean from the biblical record. Because bitterness or greatness are basically your only options long term through suffering. I'll say it again. Bitterness or greatness are basically your only long term possibilities through suffering. This is from Jonah.

This is from David. This is from any other example in the Bible where people suffer. And that might be helpful for you to think about, or it might not. And that's okay. Because it's okay to mourn, and our culture does a terrible job of this.

We think it's okay to mourn and be sad for a week or so in suffering or loss. And then it's right back to hedonism or right back to productivity. And guys, there is no fixed timeline for mourning. There is no recipe in the Bible for how we are how long we are allowed to allowing ourselves to be sad. I heard of one family that lost a child said it took them six months to laugh.

And it took them another two years to not feel guilty about laughing. And these were faithful saints. They're called emotional scars for a reason. Because randomly, we're gonna be going through healing, and something's just gonna pull that scab up again. And then those scars will be there forever.

But it does get easier with time, and that's something we can remind our friends of. Okay. Now we need to talk about one of the hardest commands in scripture. But it's all over the place, so I can't talk about this and not ignore it or and ignore it. This is joy in the trials.

This is one of the most complicated things in the Christian call. And this is a common theme from Jesus, from James, from Paul, from Peter, from John. They all talk about it. What does this mean? What does it mean to have joy in the trials?

First, we need a definition of joy. And for a good Christian definition of joy, by nobody's surprise, I go to John Piper, which is that Christian joy is a good feeling in the soul, but it's so much more than that. It's produced by the Holy Spirit as he causes us to see the beauty of Christ in the word and in the world. This is not something that we can white knuckle our way towards or that we can just magically produce in the moment when we need it. This is something that is nurtured and brought into our lives through time and through discipline and through love.

You have to commit to joy right now so that in the crucible of suffering, you can keep a firm hold of it. And how do we get there? How do we produce this joy? Piper tells us, it's looking at the beauty of Christ and through the aid of the Holy Spirit. Here's the best way that I can do of illustrating it.

If I have the misfortune of having to run an errand in town during the summer, and I have to go park on Town Square, maybe somebody sees me and they walk up to me and they go, hey, Brad, I heard you preach and you stink. I don't know them. I don't know what axe they have to grind. It's going to bother me a little bit. And then I'm going to forget, I'm going to move on to something else.

But if one of you guys says this after the service, Hey, Brad, you stink. Hey, Slider, you stink. It's going to bother me a little bit more. Now what if somebody that I'm close to, somebody or maybe somebody that I have a ton of respect for or something. Like what if it's Ray or Carl or one of the other elders or one of my mentors?

Or worst yet, what if it's Natalie that walks up to me and goes, hey, that sucked. That's going to really hurt me. The same is also true with encouragement and with and with love. The point is this, that the higher I think of someone and the closer they are to me, the more I've given them license to correct me or to encourage me. Now what if the person that knows you the best in all of creation, the person that knit you together in your mother's womb, the person that knew everything about you before you were even born and is so powerful that he holds all of creation together by the power of his word?

What if that person said that he loved you? That would change some stuff. Or or better yet, what if he proved it to you by sending his son to die on the cross? Would that change you? That would change every facet of your daily life.

And it's the most powerful thing in the universe that Christ died for you and that he knew what he was buying on the cross. In spite of your sin and failure, in spite of the fact that we were enemies of God, Christ still died for you. And that's the gospel. And that's how we get joy. And every day, we draw nearer to the promised eternal unending joy with Jesus.

But, we're left here in the world in the meantime to do the work of the kingdom. So, we work in the day to day. We laugh. We suffer. We pray.

We worship. But, we do it rooting our lives in the joy that comes from the spirit and in Jesus. So we don't have to be pretend to be excited for the trials. When you or a loved one are hurting, you don't have to pretend to be happy. We can remember from last week.

Remember the shortest verse in the Bible? John eleven thirty five. Did anybody memorize it this week? Alright. We'll try again.

But the point is Jesus wept. He didn't pretend to be happy. Or like it says in Hebrews 12, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame. Jesus had grasped joy for eternity, and he would not let it go. Even though he went to the cross, he did it for you.

If I tell you to today that in a week or so, I'm gonna give you a billion dollars. Let's pretend I actually have a billion dollars. Then I'm gonna give you a billion dollars And then so I tell you today, you're driving home from church and your car breaks down. It's just not going to bother you as much. Or tomorrow Monday morning at work, boss calls you in, you have a chat, and you have a terrible work review.

In the back of your mind, you're sitting there going, I got four days left of this job. It's just not going to bother you. But if someone close to you gets really sick or a loved one dies, all the money in the world won't make that pain go away. And I'm I'm and a billion dollars is nothing compared to the joy that we have in Christ. I'm just using it as a simple example.

Or what about romance? Who can remember their first taste of romance? That first kiss, first phone call, first holding hands, or maybe the day that you exchanged your vows. Nothing could touch you. And yet the real tragedies of things that could actually happen, that would still bother you.

And an eternity with Christ is so much more powerful than a billion dollars and lasts so much longer than that fleeting moment of a first kiss that it can change everything about our lives. What I'm saying is that the promise of what is to come and the reality of a love experience has huge implications on how we do day to day suffering. What bothers us will change in light of having joy in the trials. It's the promise that we've received in Christ. That's how we get joy in the midst of trials.

It's not for them. It's in them. So that's the prep and application for how to deal with suffering. Recap takeaways when you're dealing it with for yourself. Everyone's gonna be a little different.

It's okay to feel distant and angry with God. Be honest with him. He can take it. He's God. Don't isolate.

Force feed yourself scriptures. The Psalms are a great place to start. Allow yourself to be helped. And remember that above all, you are never alone. Jesus is with you as he promised and we looked at last week in the great commission, Matthew 28, with you always.

And God is doing something in you even if we have no idea what I what it is. And like I said at the start, and this is attributed to my friend, Sam, that helps me edit this stuff. How you experience and relate to suffering is entirely dependent on how you experience and relate to the cross. Said another way, and we'll close with this, we need to never forget that there is another in the fire. This is Daniel three.

Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego replied to the king, Nebuchadnezzar, we are not in need of an answer to give you concerning this matter. If it be so, our God, whom we serve, is able to rescue us from the furnace of blazing fire, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, let it be known to you, o king, that we are not going to serve your gods nor worship the golden statue that you have set up. After Nebuchadnezzar heard this, he was thrown into a rage, had the fire furnace blazed four times the normal heat. He looks, has him thrown in, and he says, look, I see four men untied and walking about in the middle of the fire unharmed, and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.

I'll invite the band back up, and we'll close with this because your suffering will probably not be this spectacular. You're probably not going to be thrown into a blazing furnace. But even in your suffering, whatever it is, there is another in the fire with you. Jesus has promised to be with you even to the end of the age. The confidence of the three that were in the fire was not in their understanding of what God was going to do.

Their confidence was what was in who God is. Said another way, it wasn't in the expected gift, it was in the giver of the gift. For those of us that are in Christ, we can have confidence in what God has already done and his promises in to come. But Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, they had each other. And church, that's our job, is to be with each other.

We can and should do the same. First b, we've been promised there will be suffering in this world. The mortality rate of the human condition, of that diagnosis is still a hundred percent. But there is hope, and it's worth so much more than a billion dollars. It's so much more powerful than the fleeting moment of a first kiss.

We can be rooted in joy in the midst of trials. And it's not fake and it's not shallow. It's like being a tree planted by living water. So we suffer, we grieve, we experience pain and loss. But we live in light of the eternal life that Christ Jesus has promised us.

So we can go out those doors and we can live our entire lives of worship. And we can have a great week of worship. Thank you.

When I pass through the bed as I teach me to abide.

And can I leave you with, this verse here before we part? This one's from Corinthians one. It's blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the father of mercies, and the God of all comfort. The God of all comfort in our suffering. He comforts us in our afflictions so that we can comfort one another with the comfort we've received.

For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ also we share abundantly in comfort too. Amen.

Thank you, Lisa.