Why did this happen to me? #6 - When Judgment is Hurtful
Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund explores Job 32-37, examining Elihu's powerful counter-statements to faulty theology about suffering. Discover how God uses hardship not as punishment but to mature, draw, and equip us—and learn to respond in ways that lead to growth rather than bitterness when life doesn't make sense.
Summary and Application
We all want life to be like a Hallmark Christmas movie—where problems get resolved in 90 minutes and everyone lives happily ever after. But as Kurt reminded us in his recent message on Job 32-37, "What you know and what I know is that isn't the world we actually live in. Because romance doesn't always work out. Sometimes the blizzard turns into something much bigger than just a storm in which we can sip hot chocolate and contemplate the future. Sometimes we get the health diagnosis and things don't turn around."
The book of Job forces us to sit with the uncomfortable question: Why do bad things happen to good people? And more importantly, what does God have to say about our suffering?
Enter Elihu: A New Perspective
After Job's three friends exhaust their arguments—all variations of "you must have sinned to deserve this"—a new character named Elihu appears. Unlike the other friends, Elihu isn't condemned by God at the end of the book. As Job 42:7 records, God says to Eliphaz, "I am angry with you and your two friends because you have not spoken the truth about me." Notice who's missing from that rebuke? Elihu.
Kurt explains that Elihu offers five counter-statements that challenge the faulty theology both Job and his friends held. These statements help us understand how to approach suffering without falling into the trap of thinking God is either punishing us or unjust.
Five Truths About Suffering
1. Hardship Isn't Punishment
The friends insisted Job's suffering proved he'd sinned. But Elihu pushes back on this idea. For those who trust in Jesus, Kurt emphasizes: "If forgiveness before God is in the person and work of Jesus Christ, meaning you are forgiven the moment you say, God, I acknowledge my sin and I need a savior, I trust Jesus Christ as my savior—when that moment comes, your sins past, present, and future are forgiven."
This means karma isn't a Christian concept. We don't get what we deserve—we get grace. "The idea in the Bible, the idea of faith, is that we get grace. We get what we don't deserve. Not, we get exactly what we deserve."
2. God Is Not Unjust
When we're suffering, we're tempted to question God's goodness. Job himself fell into this trap, essentially saying, "I'm righteous, so God must be unjust." But Elihu counters in Job 33:12: "But I tell you in this you are not right, for God is greater than any mortal."
Kurt acknowledges this is difficult: "Every time we're tempted to say, God hasn't been good to me, he hasn't been fair to me, what we need to do is come back and affirm that he's good no matter what it feels like today."
3. God Is Not Powerless
Job 36:22-26 uses the imagery of storms to illustrate God's power. Kurt connects this to our modern experience: "You think storms are powerful? God is more powerful." Even when circumstances seem overwhelming, God isn't unable to act—He's working in ways we may not yet perceive.
4. God Is Not Aloof
Perhaps Job's greatest complaint was God's silence. Yet Elihu responds in Job 33:14: "For God does speak—now one way, now another—though no one perceives it."
Kurt illustrates this with a story about a reporter on a plane who witnessed what seemed like radio silence between the cockpit and cabin, leading to an emergency landing. The lesson? "When you and I have what we perceive to be radio silence, we make bad decisions. What we need to understand is God is not done talking and speaking. We're just not perceiving it."
This is why staying connected to community, worship, Scripture, and teaching matters most when we're hurting—these are the channels through which God speaks.
5. Hardship Isn't Pointless
God doesn't cause suffering, but He does use it. Job 33:14-16 explains that God speaks through difficulty "to turn them from wrongdoing and keep them from pride, to preserve them from the pit."
Kurt is careful here: "I am not saying hardship is good because it leads to something for your good. But what I'm saying is God uses hardship and it isn't pointless."
What God Does Through Pain
Drawing from 1 Peter 1:6-7, Kurt shows how God uses trials like a refiner uses fire—to prove and purify our faith. He shares three specific ways God works through suffering:
God matures us. As Helen Keller said, "Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved."
God draws us. Job himself testifies in Job 42:5: "My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you." Suffering has a way of making God real to us in ways prosperity never could.
God equips us. Second Corinthians 1:3-5 explains that God "comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God."
C.S. Lewis captured this beautifully: "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
The Choice Is Ours
Kurt emphasizes that our response to suffering matters: "If you respond well to suffering, it can be helpful in your life. If you respond poorly, it can be harmful in your life."
Suffering is helpful when we turn to God for understanding and endurance, when we ask important questions, when we allow it to prepare us to comfort others, and when we let it open us to community. It's harmful when we become hardened, self-centered, withdrawn, or suspicious of God.
The cross itself demonstrates God's ability to take the worst evil and bring about the greatest good: "Jesus Christ, perfect, sinless, went to the cross, a horrible evil, suffered a great injustice. And what did God do? God took that and brought about a beautiful good where you and I can say, now all of my sin has been forgiven."
Application Questions
Where are you currently perceiving "radio silence" from God? What steps can you take this week to position yourself to hear His voice through Scripture, community, or worship rather than withdrawing from these channels?
How can you choose to respond well to a current or past hardship? Specifically, is there someone you could comfort with the comfort you've received from God, or is there an important question about your faith that this season is pushing you to explore more deeply?
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John Piper
Wrote the pamphlet "Don't Waste Your Cancer"
Quote: "this is an opportunity for me to take the promises of God and make them even more real, more precious in my life"
C.S. Lewis
Wrote the book "The Problem of Pain"
Quote: "The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are, the less their victim suspects their existence. They are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil. Every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt. We can rest contentedly in our sins and sufferings, but pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
Sheldon Vanauken
Wrote the book "A Severe Mercy"
Quote: "It is not possible to be incidentally Christian. The fact of Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing at all."
Helen Keller
Quote: "Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved."
Charles Dickens
Quote: "Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be."
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We had mentioned a few weeks ago that the videos you're seeing in this series are not videos we've purchased from somewhere. They are people who call this their church home. It's just a reminder that so many of us come through these doors and we carry something that's really hard, something that's difficult. So let's pray together that God will meet us in this time.
God, as we've gathered, there are many of us who come here in our journey in a place that is difficult. There are hard things happening. Maybe we're in a place of doubt or disappointment, discouragement, or just a place of pain. And I ask that you would meet each of us. God, I ask that my words would reflect your word in content and in tone and in emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus' name, Amen.
Introduction: The Appeal of Simple Stories
A couple nights ago, I was flipping through some of the TV options in search of an NBA game because the season had just started and the platforms have changed. I was trying to find a game I wanted to watch and I saw something that was very disturbing. Now, you might think it's a gambling scandal or something like that, but what I saw that was disturbing was there is a station that is completely devoted to showing Hallmark Christmas movies. And it is only October.
It's disturbing on at least two levels. One is it's October, and the other is it's a whole station devoted to Hallmark Christmas movies. So my question became, who watches these? Now, to be fair, I have seen enough of them that I know what the genre is. And here's what the genre is:
Usually a young person who has a big job in a big city somehow finds themselves in a small town—maybe the small town they grew up in, maybe a different small town. When they're in the small town, they meet somebody. Maybe it was an ex, maybe it's a new person. And romance is about to spring. But then a crisis hits—a blizzard, or they have a misunderstanding, they thought they heard something they didn't really hear, or an ex of the ex shows up. Whatever it is, it all seems like it's going to be lost, but then it is resolved within 90 minutes and everybody lives happily ever after.
So my question is, who watches this, at least at that level, and why? Here's what I came to after deep contemplation: the reason this is appealing on any level for us is because it is mindless, happy brain candy. Now, sometimes we need mindless, happy brain candy. This is not a slam on the genre. This is just an observation. And why do we want mindless, happy brain candy? Because sometimes we just want to live in a world in which there's no muck and everything works out.
What you know and what I know is that isn't the world we actually live in. Because romance doesn't always work out. Sometimes the blizzard turns into something much bigger than just a storm in which we can sip hot chocolate and contemplate the future. Sometimes we get the health diagnosis and things don't turn around.
Understanding Job's Story
Over the last several weeks, we've been looking at the book of Job together. As one person told me, it's a lot of Job. And I know, but as I have said, there are 42 chapters, and I think there are 42 chapters in part because God wants us to sit in the question: God, why is this happening to me? Why have I had to go through this? Where are you, God? Whether you're a longtime follower of Jesus who's going through something and all of a sudden it rocks your world, or whether you're somebody who's new in the journey of faith, or maybe not even sure that faith is your journey, you ask the question, God, why have you let this happen? Or what is the purpose behind this in my life?
The book starts with Job losing everything that seems to be important to him. Then there are these cycles—three of them—where his friends come and tell him why they think he's suffering. And we get Job's responses. We've looked at those over these weeks, where we go from basically Job chapter 4 all the way to 27, 28. Then last week, we looked at Job's summary defense of himself.
There's a lot of poetry and a lot of back and forth. Sometimes when you read the book, it's hard to get yourself placed in the story exactly where it is. So we've tried to just simplify it through a visual picture—a triangle. This represents the theology that was prominent in the thinking of the people of Job's day.
If God is just, and if a person (in this case, Job) is righteous, and the retributive principle is true, then the only reason you would suffer is because you sinned and you deserve it. This is basically the perspective of the three friends. So on the triangle, they say God is just, the retributive principle is true, but Job, you must have done something wrong. That is why you're suffering.
Now Job comes along and says, no, no, no, I'm righteous, I'm blameless. I haven't done anything wrong. So God is unjust.
What happens in the book is you're confronted with, how do we understand this? What we've tried to say is God is just. It isn't because of righteousness or a lack of righteousness that we suffer. It's because we misunderstand or we universally apply the retributive principle. Although there's something in the Bible about sowing and reaping and consequences, it is wrong in many ways to take it as an absolute. When we take it as an absolute, then we either are forced to say God is unjust, or I have somehow brought this on myself—both of which have destructive consequences.
Enter Elihu: A New Voice
When we come to Elihu, we come to a new character. The friends have had their say, and now Elihu comes along. Commentators, by the way, are fairly mixed on their take on Elihu. People who write books about this, many of them will say Elihu is just like the other friends. Then some say, no, Elihu is actually speaking very well.
Those who say he's off point to chapter 32, where it starts, and his allusion to his anger. Elihu, verse 2, it says, became angry with Job for justifying himself rather than God. So he's angry at Job because he said, God isn't just, I'm just, God is not. Then it says verse 3, he was also angry with the three friends because they had found no way to refute Job and yet had condemned him. So he's angry at Job, he's angry at the friends.
Verse 5: But when he saw the three men had nothing more to say, his anger was aroused. Some people read this and say, this is a young man, a proud man, an angry man. So he's in the wrong.
But a little later in the book, when God finally does speak, in Job 42, we see this. It says, "After the Lord had said these things to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite, 'I am angry with you and your two friends because you have not spoken the truth about me.'" Notice who he leaves out? Elihu.
I believe that Elihu in chapters 32 through 37 is actually challenging the wrong notions that the friends and Job held to and pointing them in the right direction, if imperfectly. What I'd like to do—and there's a danger in doing this and trying to summarize poetry in propositional statements—but what I think he's doing is giving five counter statements to the theology of Job and his friends that will help us understand how we can approach suffering.
Five Counter Statements from Elihu
1. Hardship Isn't Punishment
This is really something we've talked about in previous weeks, but it's important to state again. This has been the point of chapters 4 through 27 in these cycles of speech. The tendency a lot of times is to say, well, if I'm suffering, maybe I did something that brought that on. Maybe I sinned somehow and God is getting back at me in some way.
Here's where we see this. Job 33, verse 8 and following: "I am the same as you in God's sight. But you have said in my hearing—I heard the very words—'I am pure, I have done no wrong. I am clean and free from sin. Yet God has found fault with me and considers me his enemy.'"
So here's what he's doing. He's reciting Job's statement of saying you say that you're without fault. And he basically turns around and says, you are at fault in the sense of everyone has sinned. But he comes back around, if you read through the poetry, and affirms the idea that suffering is not punishment.
I want to repeat something I said last week because I think the text repeats it. What we need to understand is this: if forgiveness before God is in the person and work of Jesus Christ, meaning you are forgiven the moment you say, God, I acknowledge my sin and I need a savior, I trust Jesus Christ as my savior—when that moment comes, your sins past, present, and future are forgiven. What that means is if God punishes you today for something that has already been forgiven, he's holding you to double jeopardy.
The way I said it last week is karma is not a Christian idea. The idea in the Bible, the idea of faith, is that we get grace. We get what we don't deserve. Not, we get exactly what we deserve. This has been a lot of what this book has been about, but it's repeated here.
So hardship is not punishment. Some of us need that word today because when we're going through a hard time, we feel like maybe there's a punishment hanging out there for something I did in the past. But coming to Jesus means your sins are forgiven and it is not held against you.
2. God Is Not Unjust
I realize I'm stating this in the negative, but it's kind of the way he's stating it. Here the idea is challenging Job's thinking that says, God, why am I suffering if I haven't done wrong or if I'm forgiven?
Here's where we see this. Verse 10: "Yet God has found fault with me. He considers me his enemy. He fastens my feet in shackles. He keeps close watch on all my paths." Verse 12: "But I tell you in this you are not right, for God is greater than any mortal."
Here's his basic argument. He says, you think your suffering is unjust. You actually deserve worse. Now if you hear that, you say, okay. In fact, sometimes people who are in Reformed circles, and we kind of are as a church here, will say, we all deserve punishment for our sin, which is ultimate, and that means hell. So anything other than damnation is God's grace to us. And that's true. But can I just say, it's probably not helpful when you're talking to somebody who's going through a hard time to say, yes, you deserve worse.
It might be helpful ahead of time for us to get it in our heads that we don't deserve everything, but it's probably not helpful after. The way I equate this is if you have kids and you've ever tried to coach one of your kids through an athletic event or a musical performance, and they maybe have a less than stellar performance. Probably the time to tell them that they didn't crush it is not the moment when they're done. You know, if they hit a few flat notes and they're coming off stage, it's not like, hey, you hit a flat note. Do you remember how we practiced that?
That's a little bit like what it is when we say, well, you deserve worse. But if you try to say ahead of time, hey, watch out for this when you're coming to this part, then it can be coaching. So knowing this ahead of time can be helpful, even if it's not helpful after the fact.
What we need to really see here is that when we have a sneaking suspicion that God is not good, that God is not just, God affirms his justice and his goodness at every turn. Every time we're tempted to say, God hasn't been good to me, he hasn't been fair to me, what we need to do is come back and affirm that he's good no matter what it feels like today.
3. God Is Not Powerless
This is another temptation we sometimes run into when things are difficult. We say, God, if you're good and you're just, then why aren't you working? We see this in chapter 36, verse 22 and following and into 37. This is about this whole imagery of the storm.
Verse 22 of Job 36: "God is exalted in his power. Who is a teacher like him? Who has prescribed his ways for him, or said to him, 'You have done wrong'? Remember to extol his work, which people have praised in song. All humanity has seen it. Mortals gaze on it from afar. How great is God—beyond our understanding! The number of his years is past finding out."
The poetry talks about this storm, the imagery of weather, and then he says, but God is powerful. What I think he's doing is juxtaposing storms and the imagery of storms with God's power and saying, you think storms are powerful? God is more powerful.
Living where we live, it's hard to maybe relate to that, because although storms are powerful, rarely are we in places where we feel as if the elements will totally best us. But if you saw the story about the climbers around Mount Everest just earlier this month, when the big blizzard came in and there had to be rescue efforts—all of a sudden they were there saying, this is incredibly powerful. This can take our lives. But God is more powerful than the storms.
Sometimes we may be tempted to say, maybe God isn't so powerful. What we need to do is be reminded that God is powerful, more powerful than we think.
Several years ago, John Piper, who's an author and used to be a pastor, was diagnosed with cancer. Before he knew the outcome and that he would survive for years, he wrote a little pamphlet called "Don't Waste Your Cancer." In it he talked about how in the midst of his cancer, he could either become self-focused, or he could look to God and use it as an opportunity. At one point he basically said, this is an opportunity for me to take the promises of God and make them even more real, more precious in my life.
He points to these promises: Matthew 28:20—I will be with you to the end. Hebrews 13:5—I'll never leave you, I'll never forsake you. Romans 8:28—I will work everything together for your good. Isaiah 41:10—I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you. First Corinthians 15:58—in the Lord, none of your work is in vain. Philippians 1:21—to live is Christ, and to die is gain. Second Corinthians 5:8—to be away from the body is to be at home with the Lord.
What he basically alluded to is he said, in the midst of this, I had a new appreciation for the power and the promises of God.
Sometimes when I officiate a funeral, I will say to those who gather, you know, we do our best in this life to not think about death. But sometimes being confronted with the death of a friend or a loved one can be positive in our lives, even though the death itself is negative. It's positive if we allow it to help us grapple with the reality that it is our end as well, and that this life is not a solo event. There is something beyond that we need to grapple with. If we get to see the power of God in the midst of hardship, that can be something that comes as a positive out of a negative.
4. God Is Not Aloof
That is what Elihu argues for. Chapter 33, verse 13: "Why do you complain to him that he responds to no one's words?" Verse 14: "For God does speak—now one way, now another—though no one perceives it."
One of the complaints Job has had throughout this book is God, why aren't you answering me? The silence. Yet what Elihu affirms is, he said, God does speak, but you're not perceiving it. He speaks in one way, now another. You're just not seeing it in this moment.
I was listening to a podcast the other day from a reporter named Brian Windhorst who travels between where he lives and Los Angeles frequently. He said he went to get on an airplane to go to Los Angeles. He said, I've done this flight hundreds of times in the last couple of years. I always sit by the window.
He said, we took off, everything seemed normal. All of a sudden I noticed that we had made a U-turn and I could see that we were returning to the airport, but no word had been spoken. He said, I thought it was odd. I don't think any of the other passengers seemed to recognize it in this moment. So we're flying back. I thought, well, maybe there's a medical emergency on board, something like that.
He said, all of a sudden, the flight attendants all gathered in the front of the plane in front of the cockpit door. One of the flight attendants was a pretty good-sized guy, and he said it would take a lot to overtake this guy. I recognized he was just standing there like, I'm in front of the door. This seems odd.
As we had made the U-turn, we started our descent. Now everybody's aware that something's up, but nothing has been spoken. As that descent was being made, I heard the flight attendants knocking on the cockpit door. I could see it from where I was sitting, and they were trying to communicate through the door to the pilots. The pilots did not seem to respond. So I'm thinking, okay, something is going on. I just don't understand what it is.
As we approached the airport, I looked down and I could see a host of emergency vehicles all on the tarmac waiting for us. As we landed, as soon as we landed, police cars descended all around the plane. I realized it wasn't a medical emergency, but something else had happened. As this happened, it dawned on me that it wasn't a mechanical issue and it wasn't probably any kind of medical thing. There was some kind of incident they were concerned about.
What it turned out to be, after everything was said and done, was that somehow the communication between the cockpit and the cabin had been lost. So whether somebody left the channel open and they couldn't talk—the pilots assumed that somebody was trying to take over the back of the plane. When the knocking came on the cockpit, they thought they were trying to take over the flight. So they were following their protocol, going back to the airport, called in all the emergency vehicles, when none of that was going on.
Now you might say, why did you listen to that whole story and why did you tell me? Because when you and I have what we perceive to be radio silence, we make bad decisions. What we need to understand is God is not done talking and speaking. We're just not perceiving it.
In fact, this is why it's so important when you're in pain and your temptation is to say, I don't want to be in my group anymore, I don't want to go to church and worship anymore, I don't want to hear the word spoken anymore, I'm not going to read my Bible—you actually do the opposite. Because it's exactly in those moments where you need the voices of friends and people in your life, where you need to hear the word taught, where you need the affirmation of songs and worship, where you need to be reading your Bible. That is the only time when you will be able to hear the voice of God.
Without it, what you will do is you will make decisions that assume that God is aloof, when what God is doing is he is actually affirming his presence in your life, maybe even in ways that you're not able to see or understand. If you could see God's hand, how would it change your approach?
5. Hardship Isn't Pointless
Don't misunderstand me when I say this. I am not saying hardship is good because it leads to something for your good. But what I'm saying is God uses hardship and it isn't pointless.
We see this in verse 14 through 16 of chapter 33: "For God does speak—now one way, now another—though no one perceives it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on people as they slumber in their beds, he may speak in their ears and terrify them with warnings, to turn them from wrongdoing and keep them from pride, to preserve them from the pit, their lives from perishing by the sword."
Why is there hardship? And why does God speak? He speaks through the hardship to do something in our lives. Again, that doesn't mean that the hardship is good or that the answer to somebody is to say, hey, what you're going through is a good thing. But what it means is that if you will turn toward God in the midst of your suffering, God can use it for something good.
There's a book that was written decades ago now by Sheldon Vanauken called "A Severe Mercy." He got the title from a correspondence he had with C.S. Lewis. Lewis had lost his wife and had written "The Problem of Pain." As Sheldon Vanauken's wife had gotten sick and was about to die, they were corresponding with Lewis. At one point Lewis either wrote or said to him, "You are enduring a severe mercy."
It became the title for his book, because for Vanauken, that loss opened his eyes to who God was. He had been agnostic, atheistic before, but in the midst of loss, he began to say, there is a God. This God is maybe allowing a severe mercy for me to see who he is, but he is doing something in my midst.
At one point he says this: "It is not possible to be incidentally Christian. The fact of Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing at all." What he was driving at was saying that somehow in the midst of this, I realized that I couldn't just take my faith as something to be added onto my already comfortable life, but it had to be something that drove me. In doing that, he was acknowledging God's hand.
C.S. Lewis, in "The Problem of Pain," at one point writes an oft-quoted section. I think Bryce quoted this a few weeks ago and used it very well in his message. Here's what is often quoted: "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
That's pretty good. But let me read you the rest of this quote in context because it actually helps us see what he was really driving at, which isn't just God uses our pain to speak to us. He uses it to rouse something in us. Here's the rest of what he said:
"The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are, the less their victim suspects their existence. They are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil. Every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt. We can rest contentedly in our sins and sufferings, but pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
You see, God uses pain. That doesn't mean pain is good, or you should say to somebody, hey, God is going to use this for good. But it's a helpful thing to say. God sometimes will use the very things that are evil in a way that helps us, through a severe mercy, be aroused to his goodness in our lives.
I have said this over this series, but some of us will say, one of the reasons I have a hard time believing in God is because I'm suffering or because of the suffering in this world. But what I've tried to say to you is the very fact that you think things should be different is actually an evidence of God. Because if we are just a collection of molecules that spontaneously combust, why would we expect there not to be pain? It is the very existence of God that makes us say it should be different, it should be better. Pain is one of the ways that God helps us to see that.
What God Does Through Pain
So what does God do in pain? Last week we talked a little bit about why maybe God allows pain. This week I want to show you from some scriptures what God does through it.
God Uses Pain to Mature Us
This is First Peter chapter 1, verses 6 and 7: "In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed."
He says, do you know that God will use the hardship like a refiner uses fire to refine precious metal, to refine you so that you can be to the praise and the glory and the honor of God?
Helen Keller once put it like this: "Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved."
Charles Dickens said, "Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be."
The point is just this: when we see that God uses suffering to mature us—not that suffering in and of itself is good, but he uses it to mature us—it allows us to say, how am I responding?
You see, if you respond well to suffering, it can be helpful in your life. If you respond poorly, it can be harmful in your life.
It is helpful in your life when you use it to turn to God for understanding, for endurance, for deliverance in the midst of your pain. It is harmful for you when you become hardened and you turn away from God.
It is helpful in your life when you use it to ask important questions that you may not take time to think about or to ask in the normal routine, but it is harmful in your life when you refuse to ask questions and refuse to see what God might be doing.
Suffering is helpful in our lives when we allow it to prepare us to identify with and comfort others who suffer. But it's harmful in our lives when we become self-centered and selfish as a result of it.
Suffering can be good when it opens us up to helping others, being helped by others who are trying to follow God. It is harmful when we withdraw from others.
It can be helpful for us when we learn to see God as trustworthy and good and just. It can be harmful when we become suspicious of God in the midst of our calamity.
See, many of us don't think about the choices we have in the midst of it, but how we respond shows us a way forward. So God matures us in suffering.
God Draws Us in Suffering
In Job chapter 42 we see this impact. Verse 5: "My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you."
What he's saying here, very simply, is this: I knew about you, but now I've really seen you.
If we took time to go around this room or the rooms of our different campuses this weekend and say, what made the biggest impact in your spiritual life? Do you know what we would hear? We would hear there was a person somewhere who invested in me. We would hear there was a time when the Word became alive to me through the teaching or the ministry of the Word. But do you know what else we would hear? I went through a hard time. I went through a difficult time. And all of a sudden, my eyes were opened.
God draws us in our hardship.
God Uses Our Hardships to Equip Us
This is Second Corinthians chapter 1, where we get a little picture into what God wants for us in the midst of this. Verse 3 and following: "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ."
So what does he say? When you go through something, God may use it to equip you, to comfort others, to take what has happened to you and use it in a positive way.
Once again, I just want to say we need to be careful. This is not saying that when somebody's suffering your thing to do is to say, well, you know, I learned one weekend in church that God matures you, draws you, and equips you. Therefore, this is all— No, no, no. What you want to do is say, this is something to help me know that God can take what is a negative and use it in a way that brings about good.
If you think about that verse in Second Corinthians chapter 1 that says we share in the sufferings of Christ but also in his comfort—think about the reality of that. Jesus Christ, perfect, sinless, went to the cross, a horrible evil, suffered a great injustice. And what did God do? God took that and brought about a beautiful good where you and I can say, now all of my sin has been forgiven. So if I suffer, it's not because of my sin, because my sin is taken care of, my eternity's secured. That is a beautiful thing that comes from suffering. That is how God works. And he says, I want you to comfort one another with this, because in the midst of your life, that is how I will work.
Conclusion
I don't know how you come here today, the kind of hardship, the kind of story that you have, but I would guess just in a room this size, with this many people, that there are a lot of significant hurts and stories. I know that the book of Job doesn't give us a perfect answer. It doesn't tell us why clearly. It doesn't tell us exactly how God's going to work. But what it does through the poetry, through the winding, is it paints a picture of saying you don't need to bear the weight of the suffering, in that you have somehow done something that's brought it on yourself. You can affirm that God is good and just. We just don't totally get it. And in that, through the storm, we can keep taking steps forward.
I'm going to read a prayer to end the message here today from a man named Matthew Crocker that puts this together. Would you pray with me?
Heavenly Father, I pray that you would allow me to trust that the suffering I'm dealing with is your severe mercy towards me. Lord, I pray that you would comfort me in the midst of the season of life. Let me have faith to believe that in my weakness your grace is made perfect. I pray that you would help me to look towards Jesus, who suffered for my sake. Draw me closer to him through this. Lord, I pray that you might help me by the Holy Spirit to trust in the promise of Scripture that all things work together for good to those that love you. Father, I know there's no greater good than knowing you. Help me, Lord, in my suffering, to grow in my relationship with you. Amen.
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