Our view is often that there can be no purpose to being in dark places, and therefore our only goal is to leave them by any means necessary. But He is God of the Dark Too.
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Pastor Ben Willey Excerpt taken from “Even Here – Part 1”
Video Transcript:
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