God's Grace and Your Sufferings

In an essay written by David Powlison titled God's Grace and Your Sufferings (in the book Suffering and the Sovereignty of God edited by John Piper and Justin Taylor) he made a couple of fairly profound statements that I thought I would highlight here.

"What makes it hard for us to hear [God speak to us through His Word]? There are times we have a hard time slowing down to listen. There are times we simply don't want to listen. There are times we are busy listening to ten thousand other voices, including our own. There are times we feel so weary and disheartened that we don't feel up for listening. But whatever the particulars, our essential problem is deafness to God's voice. We become absorbed in the world of our own experiences, thoughts, feelings, and opinions. The early church used a wonderful phrase to capture the essential inward-turning nature of sinfulness: curvitas in se. We curve in on ourselves. Sin's curvitas in se pointedly turns away from God. When you or others suffer, you experience or witness the strength of this incurving tendency. It's hard not to be self-preoccupied." p. 155

"But it is worth noting that Christians, as new creations in Christ, also live in an essentially different relationship to their own sinfulness. Your sin now afflicts you. The "dross" no longer defines or delights you. Indwelling sin becomes a form of significant suffering. What you once instinctively loved now torments you. The essential change in your relationship with God radically changes your relationship to remaining sinfulness. In Christ, in order to sin, you must lapse into temporary insanity, into forgetfulness. It is your worst cancer, your most crippling, disability, your most treacherous enemy, your deepest distress. It is the single most destructive force impacting your life. Like nothing else in all creation, this threatens your life and well-being.

"This is not to justify or excuse our sins. Your sin is your sin. When you get your back up in an argument, when you vegetate in front of the TV, when you spin a fantasy world of romance or eroticism, when you grumble about the weather, when you obsess about your performance in the eyes of significant others, when you worry, nag, or gossip, you do these things. No evil twin, no hormone, no satanic agency, and no aspect of your upbringing can take credit or blame for the works of your flesh. You do it. You wanted to do it . . . but you don't really want to, when you come to your senses. And you do come to your senses. The conflicted dual consciousness of the Christian always lands on its feet. You commit sin, but you are more committed to the Lord, because he is absolutely committed to you. Many psalms capture this tension that always resolves the right way. They confess the dark vitality of indwelling sin while confessing love for the triumphant mercies and goodness of the Lord." p. 163-164

"Grace means courage. When God says, "Fear not," his aim is not that you would just calm down and experience a relative absence of fear. He does not say, "Don't be afraid. Everything will turn out okay. So you can relax." Instead he says, "Don't be afraid. I am with you. So be strong and courageous." Do you hear the difference? The deep waters have not gone away. The opposite of fear is fearlessness. Fearlessness is active and enduring. It carries on constructively in the midst of stressful things that don't feel good at all. Courage means more than freedom from anxious feelings. Endurance is a purposeful "abiding under" what is hard and painful, considering others even when you don't feel good." p. 165

I have not read enough of David Powlison's writings.

The Sacrifice

As I've been reflecting on the sufferings that Jesus went through for us, I have received more and more peace about my journey. As it says in Romans 8:32, "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?"

Why should I complain? I haven't given up anything in this life. I mean, sure, the little things. Yet God gave his one and only Son that we might have life.

"For from him and through him and to him are all things." Romans 11:36

Why should we not live our lives for Him?

The Example of Job

I've been thinking about suffering lately.  Partly because it is hard to think about Sacred Road without thinking about the suffering of those on the Reservation.  Partly because as we've thought about Sacred Road it was hard not to think about how little we have suffered.

I've been reading an essay by Joseph P Lehmann titled "Believing in Hope: A Meditation on Hope, Expectations, and the Nature of Faith."  You can go here to purchase the article.  It's worth the $1.49.

The author brings up an interesting question.  In our modern American church "we are taught to expect only good from the hand of God; we have been told that in the times of our deepest troubles, God will tenderly carry us as a father carries his child or a shepherd tends to his lambs.  But sooner or later in all too many lives, these expectations are shattered by experience.  We find ourselves, like Job, asked by God to accept trouble from His hand."

Those of us that are Reformed in our theology are used to talking about the sovereignty of God and that He is in control of our circumstances.  But practically and daily, we focus on the promises we have in Scripture regarding our eternal reward and make our faith dependent on our expectations and how we expect God to deal with us temporally, in the here and now.

We live prosperous lives, we are technologically advanced, we've sanitized our life to a large degree to not have to deal with sorrow, death and pain.  We think that if God loves us we will live a life free of sorrow, death and pain.

"And so when tragedy strikes, when disappointment camps at our door, we are woefully unprepared. . . . In such situations, faith can wither as quickly as the hope on which it was built."  What happens when God doesn't answer our prayer?   What happens when he leaves us in despair, in pain, in depression?  Do we walk away from God saying that He must not exist?  Do we doubt that He is a loving God?

The author asks "why does God so seldom choose to act in the ways we expect Him to?" His answer is "while He often does grant us the desires of our hearts, and in ways far greater than we could ever have imagined, he regularly does so in ways which destroy (or at least seriously jeopardize) our hope that He will ever act."  What do we do when God is silent?  Not absent, just silent?

We have pastors on TV that tell us that we just need to have more faith and God will make us healthy, wealthy and wise.  Isn't that what Job's three friends told him?  You've sinned, you haven't tried hard enough, you need to do more, otherwise why would God do this to you?

When we try to fit God into our little bottle and expect Him to act like a magic genie granting all our wishes, we can expect God to answer like he answered Job:  "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me. . . . Will you even put me in the wrong?  Will you condemn me that you may be in the right?"  Job 38:2-3, 40:8.

We can only answer as Job did:  "I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.  Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know."  Job 42:2, 3b