Even Here – Part 1

Why Talk about Suffering?
The Weight of Christian Suffering
The Purpose of Christian Suffering

Sermon Transcript:

Good morning. It’s, beautiful to be with you this morning. It’s, I’m going to do a three week. Series mini series before we head into our next series and be this week next week in the week after on Christian suffering and I’m sitting there Watching this beautiful morning. Tim you notice was up here with a shirt tucked in Jesse Andrew and Doug were up front.

Of course, two of them are gone by now

But it’s a good morning a beautiful time and now I’m coming up and starting a series on suffering. Dude, read the room, right? When we talk about suffering, we’re gonna look at some different people within scripture, and then also, oh, there’s Jesse. Say hi to Jesse, he came back. Different people in scripture and also through church history, but when I thought about how do we talk about suffering, I went to my go to, Michael Scott, who’s the boss in the office.

Michael Scott went through, he’s, he lost his old boss and at first he didn’t care much until he realized the amount of sympathy he could get from caring that, this person had died. And so he went through and, had his own grief and then wanted everyone else to experience their grief. And so what he did is went online and looked through the, the pop psychology stages of grief, which he read were denial, anger, bar bargaining.

Depression and acceptance and then he said this he said and right now They are all denying the fact that they are sad and that’s hard and it’s making them all angry And it’s my job to get them all the way through to acceptance And if not acceptance then just depression if I can get them depressed then I have done my job So my job over these next three weeks is to get you nice and depressed a couple things I do want to say before we enter I’m going to do a longer introduction today And then we’ll get to two of our topics of suffering but we’ll get there in a minute, but I deeply want this place to be a place where You are seen it’s very important to me.

And the second is we’re When we talk about suffering, we’re not going to talk about it in cheerful terms because if you’ve been through suffering, it is just not cheerful. And so, I genuinely mean this. This is the Surgeon General’s trigger warning, if this is too dark for you. If this is too much for you, I, I understand and feel free, to, to go now or to go later.

we’re, I’m not willing to talk about suffering in a way that’s light because it’s dark. And so in that, I understand if, if people need to get some space or distance from this topic. Three things of why we do a series on suffering. Why? Why talk about suffering? There’s a lot of good things in the Bible.

There’s a lot of good things in life to talk about. God is a good thing. Why talk about a bad thing? First, suffering describes much of our human experience. A lot of us thought of new ways to enter this next year. And we thought of a lot of different ways we could advance towards flourishing. Flourishing of body, flourishing of mind, flourishing of relationships.

But the reality is, is even though that is our goal and our good goal for this upcoming year, there is also going to be a tremendous amount of suffering that we don’t even know that will come our way. It’s a book by Alan Noble who writes extremely honestly. about the suffering condition from a Christian perspective.

He writes, Despite the comforts of contemporary life and its promises of even greater peace and self mastery, life is terribly hard. A comfortable, pleasant life is not normal. And while we may hesitate to call getting out of bed courageous, it is undeniably true that day to day life demands a great deal of courage.

Suffering describes much of our human experience. And we don’t, so we need to talk about it. Secondly, suffering will develop much of our Christian faith. Charles Spurgeon who will be in and out of this series, experienced depression most of his adult life for most of his time in ministry. He wrote this, says, I’m afraid that all the grace I have got of my comfortable and easy times and happy hours might almost lie on a penny, but griefs is altogether incalculable.

Affliction is the best book in the minister’s library. C. S. Lewis, another person we’ll sit with, says this. Pain insists on being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. If we don’t understand and have a theology of suffering, we’re simply dishonest about what it means to live life as a Christian.

Suffering is involved in the Christian faith. The people who populated scripture The people who wrote scripture experienced suffering, predicted suffering, and found Jesus through the messy process of suffering. Third, why talk about suffering? If our faith cannot handle suffering, it does not deserve to exist.

There’s a profound book by Elie Wiesel. who lived, through, in a prison camp through the holocaust. He, he wrote that, if someone in the prison camp was having a nightmare, don’t wake them up, because what they’ll wake up to is worse than the nightmare itself. Our faith must make eye contact with holocausts, with traumas, with mental disorders, with poverty and estrangement.

Disease and death because they are a part of what Christians experience. They are a part of experiencing the Christian life. And if our faith cannot handle that, the gospel isn’t for everyone. I’d

like to share just a little bit of my story, snapshots that I’ve shared with you. At different times. I’ve spoken here about, use words like depression and anxiety, which have described different moments of my experience. And if you’re in Celebrate Recovery ministry I work with, or if I know I’ve had a chance to talk to you personally, I might have shared with you that for the majority of my life, I’ve struggled with obsessive compulsive disorder.

And I know for many of you that means like he must wash his hands and love vacuuming his car Not as much my experience Ocd is something that has racked my body Tortured my mind and taken me at different times past where I knew pain and despair could travel. If you look, if you’re neurologically normal, and you look at your brain under a CT scan, a brain scan, You’ll see the beauty of the human mind that the human mind is the most complex and beautiful organ in creation And the human mind is so tremendously powerful And and you can see how the mind creates how it finds order and you can see different parts of it light up under a CT Scan and that’s a normal neurological process of different parts figuring out different things different areas of the mind communicating to different areas of the mind If you look at somebody’s mind who has obsessive compulsive disorder, it looks a little more like Mario’s Rainbow Road, or a laser light show.

It’s very lit up. A lot of things happening. According to the World Health Organization, OCD is one of the top ten reasons people go on disability. Forty percent who have it are not able to work, and people who have it are ten times more likely to commit suicide. Anxiety, is often described as gnats or mosquitoes flying around the head, you know, that might, that, that distract and, and confuse and sometimes can, zap or zing you, making it difficult to sleep or experience, and anxiety is definitely something I experience.

But with OCD, when it gets real bad, those gnats and mosquitoes turn to angry, fire breathing dragons

threatening to destroy my family. My home, my children, our church. And OCD also has this, crazy theme of guilt. So, it feels like I’m responsible to slay every one of those dragons or answer the questions they are putting, screaming in my ear. Or all the harm that they do will be my fault. It can be utterly, utterly exhausting.

and torturous to live with. I’ve spent thousands of hours of my life feeling guilty for things I have not done. Tens of thousands of my hours confronted with thoughts of financial ruin or something bad happening to my family and it being my fault. I’ve created, these are not exaggerated numbers, thousands of ways in my mind that I could let the church down.

My family down, God down. I go through spikes, is what we call them, or episodes in the obsessive compulsive disorder world where things get much worse. And then there are times in between. During the spikes, life can be utter misery. And then there can be often times in between which aren’t, I’m not as affected by it at all.

This has been the greatest curse and the greatest grace of my life. It has remained, and I want you to hear this, unhealed. I am not here to talk about suffering in a past tense way. It may remain that way to the grave if he desires, and if I don’t come out of dealing with this. But through this unhealed mental disorder, God has taught me the meaning of Of living in his presence of needing his presence some of these, so this what happened this last summer I had pretty significant spike and or episode And during that time I reached out to actually many of you and I wrote an email to I don’t know 20 different people and I said hey I know you know god and i’m going to tell you a little bit what’s going on with me Can you talk to him about it?

And I ask for simply the word power. Can you pray for power for me not to experience this anymore? God less gave me the grace of deliverance this summer, but he more gave me the grace to write and to study about Christian suffering. And some of the deliverance would come later, but these thoughts that I’m going to share, I, I’ve recently written a book which is coming out soon.

And, these are some thoughts from the book. I went to Pastor Mark and I said, I, I can do a series. I did all this work already. so if you ever need a series, so I got popped in here in January. But some of these thoughts are from the book that I’ve written, although in a different format.

If I get them depressed, I have done my job. How we doing? This is heavy. This is going to be a heavy week. Forgive me if this topic or my own story burdens you. This is what has been on my heart right here. The last thing I want to do is to burden you. But the first thing that we must do is to not pretend that suffering is not a real part of our human experience and Christian faith.

In John 16, Jesus, eyeball to eyeball with his disciples, said, In this world, you will have suffering. Pray with me.

Lord, suffering sounds so much better when we explain it after it’s over. When the sun comes out and is shining, it’s so much easier to talk about storms. God of goodness, you have let, and you will let, us suffer. And we are not here to pretend that it does not hurt like fire. It is built on zings and zaps of anxiety.

It is filled with deep sense of loss that is not easy to shake or to slake. It has overwhelming memories of the past confusion, which is so close to suffering about the present and often despair about the future. It is not something that clothes our body. When we suffer, it is wrapped into our very bones.

For these three weeks, with my friends here, for myself, we don’t want to suffer anymore. If and when we do, help us to know what it means to be close to you. Teach us the treasures that are only found in the dark. In Jesus name, the suffering servant, amen. Okay, we’re gonna do five things as we go through this series on suffering today We’re going to talk about the weight of Christian suffering and the purpose of Christian suffering and then next week We’ll look at the stewardship of Christian suffering and then January 28th If any of you come back at that point We will talk about the treasure of Christian suffering and by God’s grace the end of Christian suffering Psalm 139 is where we’re gonna launch out of today.

Psalm 139 It is a precious psalm of David. Many of David’s psalms were, were written in lament. They are psalms of grief. They are psalms where we look and saying, How in the world did this one make its way into the Bible? Psalm 139 is a loud declaration, I believe, a biographical declaration of David.

Finding God’s presence even here in suffering. Psalm 139 says, Oh Lord, you’ve searched me and you’ve known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up. You discern my thoughts from afar. You searched out my path and my lying down. You’re acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, Behold, O Lord, you know it all together.

You hem me in behind and before. You have laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high. I cannot attain it. Where shall I go from your spirit? O where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you’re there. If I make my bed in Sheol, you’re there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell on the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.

If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me. And the light about me be night Even the darkness Is not dark to you the night as bright as the day for darkness is as light with you Five things I want to share about the weight of christian suffering first God is intimately aware Of our suffering and still allows it to take place There is this declaration of David is beautiful, you know, my thoughts from afar before word is on my tongue, you know it completely.

Oh, Lord, you know, my going out and my lying down. You are familiar with all my ways. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It’s too much. What God knows what God is aware of in our life is overwhelming. And we say if God is aware of everything that has such a comfort with it, but it also comes with a back end question if you know how much it hurts sometimes.

Why do you still allow it to take place? We cannot be just nice, put together church people that put on the right clothes to come in a climate controlled room with beautiful music and sound and they’ll crack open the scripture and say it’s all good when honestly, a lot of times, it’s not.

Christian suffering is real. And if we’re going to look into the face of scripture, We look into the eyeballs of a God who is sovereign. Who knows it all, and still allows, and even at times assigns, suffering to happen. There’s a prosperity gospel which, um, what we put it up as at least, is often like, if you follow God, follow all his wills, then God will financially bless you.

And that’s just not really In the new testament story a whole lot and and many of you would say yes, I don’t believe that if you follow god He’s an automatic blessing, you know, it’s not like well if you tithe 15 Then he will give no it’s not we understand. It’s not that transactional But there are times where we can make an inner prosperity gospel Of of if we do all the right following things Then we’re guaranteed to have peace and happiness and I don’t think it always works that way Anyway, second the suffering that god allows is often Agonizing and beyond what we thought he would second corinthians.

Jared spoke about this a couple weeks ago It’s one of the main passages of of someone in the new testament passages of someone in the throes of suffering Paul in second corinthians 11 goes through a list that I don’t think Anyone in history that I know of have read of can match this list. He goes through I’ve been shipwrecked this so many times.

I’ve been beaten this many times left for dead I’ve gone through and basically he’s like I almost died almost died almost died almost died It’s like a hardy boys episode, you know, like I almost died a million different times But God carried me through the language Paul used to describe that is almost objective like here It was boom.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. You get the second Corinthians 12 when it’s not just hey this happened and God rescued me He uses language of torture. He said I was given I was assigned the thorn in the flesh to Torment me three times. I cried out to God deliver me But God said my grace was sufficient. This person who had a very high threshold for pain, the thorn in the flesh overtook him.

C. S. Lewis, this quote means the world to me. C. S. Lewis is someone who I’ve always appreciated his mind. This, he speaks more biographically in this book, The Problem of Pain. He writes this, You would like to know how I behave when I’m experiencing pain. He’s saying, alright, I’ll talk about myself. Not just writing books about it.

You need not guess, he writes, for I will tell you, I’m a great coward. But what is that purpose? When I think of pain, of anxiety that gnaws like fire, and loneliness that spreads out like a desert, and the heartbreaking routine of monotonous misery. Or again, of dull aches that blacken our whole landscape.

Or sudden nauseating pains that knock a man’s heart out at one blow. Of pains that seemed already intolerable and then are suddenly increased. Of infuriating, scorpion stinging pains that startle into maniacal movement. A man who seemed half dead with his previous tortures. It quite or crows my spirit.

Then he writes this. If I knew a way of escape, I would crawl through the sewers to find it. But what is the good of telling you about my feelings? You know them already. They are the same as yours. I’m not arguing that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means. I’m only trying to show the old Christian doctrine of being made perfect through suffering is not incredible.

To prove it palatable is beyond my design. C. S. Lewis is the godfather of explaining everything, but does not have words to make pain itself palatable. There are journal entries, I’m a journal guy. When you have a lot going on in your brain, writing things down is helpful. A lot of journals where I’ve talked to God about a lot of different things.

But going through my journals, there’s a word that’s often repeated. And it’s simply the word, please. And there’s often times where, over and over on the page, Please. Please. Please. Please no further down. Please no further hard. I know you are aware. I know you can heal. Dear God, please.

Some of the most powerful lessons and graces, and I mean that graces of my life, is when I cried out, please, and he said, not yet. third, There are many way types and levels to suffering. I, I, I know I’m just knocking you one at a time, but I’m not willing to talk about the weight of Christian suffering and to do in a cheap way.

There are many light types and levels to pain. There are different things people experience. Beth Moore, who is a more of a cheerful person, and, she’s just written a memoir. It’s phenomenal. And she came out recently. and with her husband, they, they talk about how he experienced some PTSD, some major PTSD from an event that happened in his childhood and it has, it continued to impact them and their marriage into adulthood.

And her husband said this to her, he told me once, Elizabeth, life is harder for some people than others. I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to say how everyone had the same opportunity to be happy in Jesus. I want to ask him why the blessings of the present couldn’t make up for the curses of the past.

Life is harder for some people than others. Shadows follow me. Again, this is Beth talking. Often enough, but not incessantly. Not everywhere I go, I deal with bouts of anxiety and depression, but they don’t chase me down, like, constantly, like ravenous wolves after a bleeding sheep. Two wounds can cause the same amount of stitches and yet cause varied levels of pain.

There’s various levels of pain. I know when people read that there are some of you that are like Interacting with my own story and digesting that and then you do what we all do. We say well, where does the pain? I’m thinking of match up against Beth Moore’s husband or The pain I feel where does it match up against what Ben is describing?

I want you to hear this, please. Each person’s pain matters, and not one of us truly knows where our story ranks on the human misery scale. Please know that wherever you are, you and your story matter. When we’re talking about pain, it does not fit into clean categories, causes, or amounts of pain that can be put on a linear scale.

Two of the greatest lies of hell to those who suffer are these. Your suffering is too big for God to handle. Your suffering is too small for him to be bothered Number four

there is rarely a timetable given to the sufferer. There’s no aspects of time mentioned in this David is going through lots of different dimensions here. He’s talking about space. He’s talking about location. He’s talking about experience He’s talking about up and down and darkness light. He’s talking about all kinds of things, but he doesn’t speak of How fast how long?

And if you look at other psalms, you will hear him not speak of how long suffering is but beg God because it’s longer than he wanted. There’s a story in John 6 that I treasure, and it’s a story of a blind beggar who’s waiting beside the side of the road who’s a man. And the disciples come with Jesus, and they’re walking by, and the disciples see a blind beggar.

And they want to give Jesus a little theological shakedown, and they said, Is this because of his sin or his parents sin that he suffers in this way? It’s such an arrogant question. Sometimes you’re like, why did you ask that, you know? Like, it’s like calling into Dave Ramsey and saying, I’m thinking about going into 500, 000 in debt, what do you think?

So, is this his sin or his, that he suffers in this way? And Jesus says it’s not because of his sin or his parents sin. He’s blind because on this day, The glory of God can be revealed. And I read that two ways. I’ll be honest. The first I read that is like, dude, that guy’s been blind for decades, having spiritual people walk by thinking it’s his fault for decades just for this moment.

And then you read and say, but it is the unique glory of God that he would meet him on that day. One of the things that I talk about this with my wife like in our own versions of suffering We say what every one of us says I want to suffer in a different way. I’ll take a different cross, please Something this summer.

I said to my wife was like You know what? If I have this OCD cross and various other ones that I accumulate in my life, tell, tell the grave. And my only testimony is that God is still real to people with a mental disorder. If that is to His glory, then that is the best way that I can live. Hebrews 11 speaks of incredible promises of God to incredible people of God.

And it also says But it didn’t come when they thought.

Mother Teresa spent time with a bunch of different Christian saints. Mother Teresa and Charles Spurgeon were by far the darkest to me as I wrote the book. Mother Teresa, who had a deep desire and love for Christ. Faith built on Jesus Christ. Salvation on Christ alone. I really believed that about Mother Teresa.

But she went through decades of her life in ministry where she found it incredibly difficult to experience, the presence of God. And for her, there were long seasons of what saints have called the dark night of the soul or the cloud of unknowing. These works that she wrote didn’t come out till after she died because she didn’t want to discourage other people by how hard her faith was.

She wrote this to Father Joseph Neuner. It’s an undated letter, but believes to be written in April of 1961. She says this, The place of God in my soul is blank. There is no God in me. In the darkness, Lord my God, who am I that you should forsake me? The one you have thrown away is unwanted, unloved, I call, I cling, I want, and there is no one to answer.

No one on whom I can cling, no, no one, alone. The darkness is so dark, and I am alone. She also wrote this, after experiencing a long season. Of blank for the first time in this 11 years. I have come to love the darkness for I believe That is a part a very small part of jesus’s darkness and pain on earth You have taught me to accept it as a spiritual side to your work Five.

Suffering, and this is the most irritating of all suffering things, Suffering doesn’t feel very spiritual. Like you look at what David’s talking about. He’s not like, in the temple you are there! He does say on the good parts on the wings of the dawn. Yep can see God there He goes in describes these places the uttermost parts of the sea in Sheol You’re like, I’m not really sure what Sheol is But it sounds like a really bad thing what God wouldn’t want to be at right but in the most guttural Places that feel like God has no business there.

That part has nothing to do with God And suffering when it happens, it’s not If you’re walking through and you’re like, oh this is so hard, but I am so blessed What I would say is you’re not really suffering if like the blessing is so happy. It’s probably It gets worse than that. I promise It’s when we can’t make sense And there’s this marriage of of of confusion and suffering that often sit together for seasons of time my my friend, came up to me once and he and he said He had, he talked to me, talked to somebody else who’s experienced a bunch of depression in their life and he said you know I’ve never been I’ve never really been depressed, but he said I think I’d like to have a season of depression Just to like understand it and get all the spiritual insight that comes from it I wanted to punch him in the throat like are you kidding me?

I’ve shared that with a few people who know depression they always answer with one word Why? Why would anyone want to experience depression? It doesn’t feel noble, or interesting, or spiritual. We don’t need to glorify various levels of suffering as if there’s something so good about them. God does good with them, but they themselves are incredibly painful, and we can allow it to sit just like that.

The difficult parts of suffering as a Christian is it doesn’t feel very Christian. It just feels like a senseless death of a loved one. It just feels like a terrible sickness or diagnosis. It just feels like psychological torment or mental fatigue. It just feels like insecurity that cannot be satisfied with enough love.

It feels like an estranged son. It feels like an unresolvable relationship. It feels like joblessness and bankruptcy. Suffering is human. It is guttural. It is mental, physical, relational. When we talk about Christian suffering and those who have suffered, it doesn’t even feel very spiritual at all. And at times, with all that pain and seeming no spiritual reason, it takes a great deal of courage to get out of bed.

I’m going to move on to, very simply, the purpose of Christian suffering. And I want to be honest with what we’ve just done. We’ve talked about how bad it is. A lot. And I only have one point to say how God can use all of that bad and do something good. And I don’t have much time to do it.

Very simply, and we’ll touch on this each week. The purpose of Christian suffering is this, it’s union, it’s union with God. David says, where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? David wrote Psalms that were in deep suffering and confusion. How does he know that even here your presence is?

It’s because he had to go there. He had to go to Sheol. He had to go to various levels of Christian suffering and high points to find out that he can experience God even there too. In my own journey with darkness, here’s what I simply want to say. I fell past places I couldn’t see the light anymore. He brings something, at times, that’s different than light.

He brings companionship in the dark. He is God of the dark, too. When we find ourselves in the darkness of suffering, there is still the same God there. There’s not a new Lord that reigns. Even here in that place, He is present. He holds us fast.

I wrote about an experience in, in the book, and it’s one I, I never intended to talk about publicly, but then I’m like, yeah, but you’re writing it in a book, and I’m like, yeah, that feels like you’re just writing it to one person, I don’t know. But it’s an experience I had, last October, and I was processing a lot, and I like, was worried about it quite a bit.

It’s pretty normal for me. and went and spent time with God for a couple of days down in Spring Lake, New Jersey, which is a place where he often meets me. And I went down there for a couple of days just to pray and process and hear. And I just walked. And I walked and waited to hear from God. As I walked, clear as day, louder than audible, God said to me, Ben, what do you want?

I don’t remember God asking me a question ever. Like, he knows the answers, why would he ask, you know? Like, but he And I was sort of like, well, that sounds like you’re asking a genie question. I know you’re not a genie. Let’s go on. This is probably not God. But again, Ben, what do you want? What do you want?

And then I realized he was serious, and I’m like, whoa, this is, you know. Could I pray for the end of my OCD? Salvation of my children? The stability of my church that’s about to go through succession? All of these things came to me. But they weren’t the ultimate, young want of my soul.

And I’m sure he did this exercise just for me. But I told him, I said, I just want to be with you.

I’m willing to go to Sheol again. And I hate it there. I’m willing to experience whatever I need to experience. I’m just not willing to not be with you. If there’s anything Christian suffering has taught me is that he’s better than the rest. And it’s only when the cheap answers really stop working and all the ways we thought he would behave really, he doesn’t,

takes me to that guttural place of what do you want? Well, I really don’t want to suffer. But even deeper than that I want you

Paul says this I want to know christ Yes, even to know the power of his resurrection and the participation in his sufferings Becoming like him in his death and my goodness It feels like death and so somehow to attain the resurrection from the dead

God

There’s people in this room who have spent much time praying for me And seasons of suffering

I pray lord For those that are in suffering right now Who have tried to put good answers And apply goodness and stick thumbs ups But honestly, no, it is not that way right now My prayer Meet them Even here in Jesus name. Amen.

We’re going to close.