Transcript
Perhaps many of you know that I have been through the hardest year of my life. If I were writing my story, I would have never written this year into my story. It's been very, very hard. Physical issues of a level of seriousness I thought I'd never deal with. Five hospital stays, four surgeries, and the drama continues.
Suffering Will Enter Your Door
It's reminded me of something that I knew theoretically, but I now know personally. Somehow, some way, at some time, in some location and in some circumstance, suffering will enter your door. If you're not suffering now, just live. It'll come. If you're not suffering now, you're near someone who is.
Now, that suffering is not a shocking thing. In fact, it's something that the Bible talks very robustly about. I love what it says in in Romans 8, which is verses 18 through the end of that chapter -- a bit of a treatise on suffering -- that the whole world groans, waiting for redemption, crying out. Even physical creation is broken, not operating the way it's supposed to operate. If you live in a world that is not operating the way it was intended to operate, then somehow, someway, that brokenness will come into your life.
There are phrases that Paul uses in Romans 8 to capture that suffering and he uses the phrase "in bondage to decay". Things around us die, bodies die, flowers die, hope dies, relationships die. What a sad reality. The Bible talks about it. Romans 8 talks about "in throes of frustration", that sometimes we are dealing with things that are incredibly frustrating.
Simple things don't work the way they're supposed to and important things fall apart in ways they don't seem like they can be fixed. It's frustrating. And then Paul uses the phrase of "in pains of childbirth". That unique, focused pain that is actually giving birth to something. We all have all of those experiences.
God Is Not Surprised
Now, here's what you need to understand. God is not surprised, taken back, discouraged by that reality because it was His choice to leave us in this broken world. There are ways in which we'll never understand that. We just understand that somehow, it is for His glory. Somehow, it is for our good.
But hear this, the best theology in the world won't remove suffering from your life. The best theology in the world won't remove the mystery of suffering from your life. Suffering is the universal, inescapable reality of everybody living between the "already" and the "not yet".
And here's what's important to understand. God meets us in our suffering. We never suffer alone. He's with us and He's for us and He's in us. And that won't remove your pain. It won't make suffering go away, but it has the power to dramatically change the way that you suffer.
