February 26, 2019 Show with Andrew Rappaport and Coleen Coren Sharp on “Sanctification Through Suffering”

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and the Theme of Suffering

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. Now here's.

Our host, Chris Arnson. Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 26th day of February 2019. This program today is very important to me because I am no stranger to suffering.

Many of you know that my precious late wife, Julie, went home to be with the Lord in 2011 after nearly 20 years of marriage, and today we are going to be discussing sanctification through suffering, and I have two guests to do this, one per hour, who will both be speaking at the same conference coming up on the theme sanctification through suffering.

The first is a returning guest. His name is Andrew Rappaport. He's also an old friend. He is founder and president of Striving for Eternity Ministries. He is the establisher of Spread the Fire evangelism training and outreach events, most notably Jersey Fire and NorCal Fire in California.

He's an instructor at Striving for Eternity Academy, an online school teaching hermeneutics and systematic theology, and he is the author of What Do We Believe? A Systematic Theology for New Believers and a Quick Reference Resource for Mature Christians and What Do They Believe? A Systematic Theology for Major Western Religions.

And coming up in the second hour, we're going to be joined by a friend of Andrew's, Colleen Sharp, producer and co-host with Ashley Glassic of the podcast Theology Gals, who is going to be on the speaking roster at the sanctification through suffering conference.

Andrew Rappaport on Discipleship, Podcasting, and the Conference Theme

But first of all, for the first hour, it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Andrew Rappaport. Well, thank you very much for having me. I realize now that I got.

To update my bio. I realized that I didn't put anything about my podcast up there. Yeah,.

You're right. You didn't. Well, why don't you tell us about your podcast? And I have another.

Book that I contributed to. I have a couple of podcasts. One is called Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report. That's a weekly hour-long show. One of the more recent ones, I think we just dropped on with Todd Friel on discernment, which is good.

We got one coming up with Amy Spearman dealing with the issue of New Happenstock Reformation. Then I do one daily, Monday through Friday, two minutes. That's called Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report Daily.

Two minutes a day, Monday through Friday. Right now I'm going through every book of the Bible in two minutes, just giving a quick overview. So I'm currently going through with that. And then I have a podcast called Apollo Jack's Live, where a friend of mine, Matt Flick, and I open up the phone lines, kind of, on the internet, and we do a two-hour live show.

And I just never know what we're going to get. We've been getting a lot of Eastern Orthodox, Catholics, Atheists coming in, so that becomes a podcast as well. And then I started a new one called So You Want to Be a Podcaster for anyone that wants the podcast, because I'm the executive director of the Christian podcast community, and so we've been encouraging Christians to do good podcasting after that, and that's why we.

Created that podcast. So, yeah. You used a key word. You're encouraging Christians to do good.

Podcasting. Okay, so here's a little thing that you may not realize when it comes to podcasting. If you look at Apple, iTunes, you have the top category is religion and spirituality, of which Christianity makes up most of that, and a lot of that's because of things like sermon audio.

A lot of sermons out there. And so that makes that category twice as large as any other, but if you go and you look in religion and spirituality, number one, who do you think comes up? I'll give.

You a guess. Who do you think would be number one? As far as podcasts? Yep. You? Nah. Joel Osteen is number one. No, that's horrible news. Horrible, horrible, horrible news. Exactly. And.

Often followed by a whole bunch of other people that you'd think horrible, horrible. You have to get down quite a ways before you get to someone like MacArthur or Sproul that you could say, well, they're solid.

So we want to try to encourage Christians to produce some good content and encourage good quality so that people would be anxious to listen to different podcasts.

Yes. Well, I have no idea where I am on that list, but I do know that my audience is growing every day, and I'm so thankful to the Lord that people are discovering Iron Trip and Iron Radio globally and contacting me nearly every day, and it gives me more joy than I can describe in the English language.

And also, I think an interesting note about you is you are a Calvinistic Jew,.

Which makes you as rare as a Bigfoot sighting. Probably, yes. Last time you and I were on the radio, though I don't think it's aired yet, but I was interviewing you. Yes. And I'm excited to talk to someone about that.

That, for your listeners, would be great, because I don't think I've ever heard you open up as much as you did, and for people to get to know you, that was.

Enlightening to me as well. Yes. Those were the interviews at the G3 conference that just took place in January in Atlanta, Georgia, and my webmaster, Eric, who is my volunteer webmaster. He does it absolutely free of charge just because he loves the program.

He is hopefully going to get around to getting all of those interviews conducted at the G3 conference so that they can be aired during the live segment of the show, even though they'll be pre-recorded, of course.

But hopefully that will happen soon, because I conducted a lot of interviews, and that was a fun one being interviewed by you, because that doesn't happen a lot.

Yes. You said he does it because he loves the show. I thought he was a glutton for punishment.

Oh, gee. Maybe I have it all wrong. That's one of the reasons why the show on suffering today is important, because so many people suffer when they listen to this show. Tell us more about striving for eternity ministries.

For those of our listeners, especially, that don't know about you or the ministry and haven't heard your interviews on this show or your podcast, etc. Yes, sure. I appreciate that.

Striving for Eternity is a discipleship ministry, so we try to do discipleship in a lot of different ways. The conference that we'll talk about is one of them, and we do it through our academy. We have an online academy.

We make money by offering it for free. Wait, no, that doesn't work out right. We actually offer the courses for free on YouTube. Well, for that, because we get to train people literally around the world, and especially in places like China where they can't get seminary training, and this is some of the training that they get, we have our disciple podcast, like in our Facebook podcast community, Facebook group, and we don't let everybody in, but if they answer the questions and say they're a Christian, we let them in pretty much, and the interesting thing is we have some folks that might not really agree with their theology completely.

We have some folks in there that may not be completely Reformed, but as Colleen is the executive, there's the administrator for the community, and she works with folks, and I work with folks. We've been seeing some people kind of cleaning up some of their theology as we talk about that.

It's neat to see that, you know, you think you were just talking podcast and technical stuff, and yet in there we get to help some folks with their theology. So it's another.

Way that we seek to disciple people. Great, and you have an upcoming event that I mentioned, which is also under the same theme as our discussion today, Sanctification Through Suffering. What was the catalyst, because you have a lot of different kinds of events, what was the catalyst of you choosing that specific theme this time around?

Yeah, I mean, most people think of us because of the evangelical events, you know, the Jersey Fire, Ohio Fire, North Cal Fire, and which we are renamed to be Equip Jersey, because ever since the Strange Fire Conference, everyone thinks those conferences are just charismatic, so we renamed them the Equip Conferences.

But the real catalyst is that I came to realize that not too many people really talk about the issue of suffering within Christianity. There's a lot of people that I end up counseling, others end up counseling, that struggle with depression, anxiety, living with an unfaithful spouse, living with a difficult spouse, living with children that are rebellious.

And for the most part, within Christianity, people want to keep that under wraps, and they feel ashamed, and they don't want to talk about the struggle. And we have one of our speakers at Striving Fraternity, Pastor Frank Mullis, who is a professional counselor, and he ends up his specific area of expertise, which no one would want, is counseling sexual abusers.

So we wanted to bring him in, bring Justin Peters in, as you know very well, Justin struggles with Cerebral Palsy, and you could tell me if you've ever heard him complain, but I have never heard Justin Peters ever complain about anything,.

And yet he struggles so much. Unless you mean someone might think that he never rebukes, or chastises, or warns other media people who are heretical. I mean,.

That's one thing he definitely complains about. I mean, I complain about his situation, and so many people have Cerebral Palsy. He literally travels the world, goes into third world countries, where he can't bring his scooter, so he's walking in his crutches on dirt-run floors, and I've seen him in places where he sleeps on someone's floor, and he's okay with it.

You know, I've been with him where, you know, he gets to go somewhere, and they put him up at a hotel, but they forget that he's handicapped, and he can't climb into a tub, and he's like trying to shower, and that's, you know, this is one of the most humblest guys, if not the most humblest guy I ever met, and if we're going to talk about suffering, I was like, this is the guy to do it, because struggles every day, I mean, things we take for granted.

Some brothers got together and blessed him with a shirt that has magnet buttons, and people don't think about that. Think about what happens if you can't use your hands with the dexterity just to button your shirts, and he used to have a device to help him do that, and now he's got these shirts that have magnets.

That's great, but most of us take for granted that we can button our shirts and tie our shoelaces and things like that, and so Justin's going to come in, and we're going to, he's going to talk about the truth about trials from James chapter one.

If you haven't ever heard him preach scripture, most people know him for, he's outstanding at executing scripture.

Yes, and I'm looking forward to getting him back on the show. It's been a while, and I would love to have him promote your conference soon, because it's coming up very soon, but so you have Justin Peters, you have Frank Mullis, and you have Colleen Sharp, who is our second guest today.

Tell us more about Colleen, even though we'll have her say a little bit about herself when she comes on, but tell us about Colleen. Yeah, so Colleen, she's going to do a breakout.

Session just for the ladies. She's on the roster to do breakout sessions, more that. She's someone who, as a mother, people often don't think about what it's like when you're a mother and you can't do everything that you might like to do, and your kids and your cousin goes to work, you do what you have to do.

And it's, she has a ministry that she ends up in her Facebook group, she counsels a lot of women, dealing with a whole range of areas. And so she's going to really be trying to give comfort from God's Word in suffering.

It's her topic, really.

Well, I'm looking forward to having her on for the first time, and I'm glad that you pronounced her name, because I would have mispronounced it. You said Colleen,.

That's the way you pronounce it? Yeah, don't worry. If you pronounce it Colleen, and you tell her, I told you that was the proper way, you'll be fine with her. Because it took me a long time to pronounce it right, and it was a running joke for a very long time.

Anytime anyone got it wrong, she'd kind of blame me.

Well, I'm glad I know ahead of time, because I would have called her Colleen, and assumed that's what it was. All right, and tell us about Joe Suozo.

So Joe Suozo is a pastor here in New Jersey. It's the church where I attend. And Joe was a missionary to India. That was really where he really wanted to be. But his health in India where he got very, very sick because of the environment there, and he had to return home.

And when he returned home, he became a pastor, but it wasn't really where his desire was. And he actually went into a depression for a while. People may not think of could actually suffer with depression, and he did.

And you know, he talks about that often. And so he wants to provide, he basically looked at Genesis 3 and Romans to provide a biblical basis, and he has a lot of person. The only person that we have that's speaking that isn't like dealing with ongoing or an elongated period of suffering would be Pastor Mark.

Wow, and in the job that he has, he doesn't experience depression, counseling sexual.

Offenders? Well, you know, maybe you should ask me, Mark. I think maybe because of his jujitsu, he gets the aggression out with his students.

That could be, hopefully not the people he's counseling in the parking lot.

You know, you think about it in someone like in Frank's line of work, I cannot imagine sitting and talking to six or 700 guys a week, and hearing and having to counsel them with the stories that they end up doing.

Wow, that many.

Yeah. Wow.

Yeah, he is one of Georgia's leading experts on this area. And one of the things we're thinking of doing, we haven't put this in the schedule, we're going to see how time goes. We have the schedule, we're going to end with a question answer time.

But what we may do is take the four speakers and break them up into different rooms and do, you know, basically do like a small group counseling or where people can get into more in-depth questions, or maybe allow for some more one-on-one.

We haven't figured out how we can work that out. But I'm sure that when you deal with a topic like suffering, you're going to get people who, a lot of different areas, and some of it they don't want to make public, but they don't know where else to go.

And that's really what we're trying to gear this conference for, is people who just don't know where else to go, they've been struggling, and they want help. And this is not a topic people speak about in church.

Often, or definitely not in conferences. And by the way, folks, this Friday, God willing, March 1st, Frank Mullis will return to Iron Trip and Zion Radio as a guest to promote this very same conference, Sanctification Through Suffering.

And so mark your calendars, 4 to 6 p .m., Frank will be back on the show, looking forward to that. Always enjoy interviewing Frank. Well, before I forget to mention it later, if anybody wants more information on this conference regarding Sanctification Through Suffering, go to strivingforeternity .org, strivingforeternity .org, and then forward slash conference-on-suffering, forward slash.

That's strivingforeternity .org, forward slash conference-on-suffering, forward slash. And what do you think, Andrew, is the primary thing that Christians, Bible-believing Christians, get wrong about suffering?

What do you think from your experiences in talking to people and evangelizing, the wrong, inappropriate reactions that Christians have to suffering? Because obviously, unbelievers have all kinds of wrong reactions, although sometimes we all sit in amazement that we as Christians, when non-believers endure unspeakable, torturous suffering, and they have a positive attitude and all this, and I just don't understand how these things occur without the Lord.

Tragically, that will not benefit them in any way when they perish if they don't have the Lord. But tell us, in your opinion, what are some wrong ways people react to suffering?

You know, I did a podcast with Amy Motivati on the issue of dealing with the problem. I think that we both came to the conclusion, I think this would be the biggest thing that Christians especially do, is they suffer alone.

They don't go to the Church, which is there to do all the one-anothering that we see in Scripture. And people end up struggling alone, mostly because they're ashamed to let anyone know that they struggle, or they just think that they shouldn't let anyone know, they should deal with it by themselves.

Or they somehow, and I think some of this is bad teaching, but this comes in from some of the Word of Faith and whatnot teaching, where people think that if you're a Christian, you shouldn't struggle.

So if you go to your church and say you're struggling, what are they going to think of me? Are they not going to let me serve in ministry? Are they going to think less of me? Are they going to think I'm not saved?

And so for a lot of different reasons, people do not access the community that God has.

Given us. Yeah, I can fully understand why people involved in the Word of Faith movement, or even some of the more extreme Pentecostal and Charismatic movements that Justin Peters has dedicated his life to expose for their falsehoods.

But I can understand, in fact I know someone, haven't seen him in years, but I know someone who developed a liver problem, and it was a very terminal problem if he didn't have it rectified. In fact, I think he was either the first or one of the first liver transplants in the United States.

And he was a member of a Pentecostal church. I don't know how far into the Word of Faith movement they delved into, but when it was discovered that he had this ailment, he was basically vilified in the congregation as someone who was lacking in faith.

And that is a really, not only heretical problem, but that's like, that is a dangerous problem. It's a slander of God Himself. Don't you think that this is actually a monstrous way of looking at things?

I think it's sort of real problematic, because what it is, is it cuts off the very, that's really what God has given us is His Word, His Holy Spirit, and one another. And most people end up, when they get to this point, because they're trying to do it alone, they ask the question that Frank's going to answer in the conference, why does God allow them to suffer?

And it turns into, often for many, a depression, which is the other topic Frank will deal with in the conference. And it turns into a depression because we don't feel like we can't turn to anyone. And then we feel all alone.

And we don't get out of it by staying by ourselves. And often what people do, they stop reading God's Word, they stop, and they're cut off the very things that God has given them. To come alongside. You know, there's some people that suffer with physical things, and it's, I mean, just coming alongside them and doing something for them can make all the difference.

Making a meal for someone that struggles with dealing with young kids that, we know of a family who has a whole bunch of us used to just get together and make a meal or bring a meal over every once in a while.

That mother had a break, one less thing she had to do that day, and would have a chance to kind of, you know, there's so many things. In seminary, I used to go over, we had a woman who had a, her daughter had cerebral palsy, and it was never, much worse than what Justin has.

She would never have a mind more than a six-year-old.

Wow.

And I used to just go over and read scripture to the daughter so that the mother could get a break. So the mother can just, because she was a full-time caregiver while working. She used to have to work and come home, and she only got a few hours, you know, where she wasn't working, and then she'd be right with taking care of her daughter.

And so just having those few hours that I would give her to go out, go food shopping by herself, that meant so much. And people can do that, and, you know, just go and read a Bible with someone. That doesn't take a lot of work.

But I'll tell you something about that girl. I tell this story, she taught me more about living by faith. I thought I was teaching her. I thought I was coming over, help the mother out. I would read the scriptures and try to disciple this.

For me, what it meant to live by faith. Here's a girl who just, everything, she trusted God in everything. And I remember seeing her cousin as Dion Sanders. And her cousin came there, and she had no problem going,.

Cousin Dion, when are you going to repent of your sin?

Wow.

And I think no one ever spoke to him that way. I mean, I didn't know who he was when I met him.

Didn't Dion, wasn't Dion a professing Christian? And I emphasize professing.

I have heard, yeah, I have heard that. And I believe that if he is a professing believer, it is because of prayers of a girl who would never have the mind of more than a six-year-old.

Wow. You know, she prayed for him regularly. I mean, this is not really the same thing. It's not as moving a story as you just described. But it just made me remember when I was a brand new Christian.

And I don't want everybody who is a man with long hair out there to be upset with me, because I'm speaking about myself personally. But I was a new believer, and I bumped into a member of the church that I was attending in a 7-Eleven.

And she was with a tiny girl, probably no more than five or six. And the woman said to this little girl who was her niece, oh, this is my friend Chris. He comes to church, the same church that I go to.

And the little girl looks up at me with my long hair, my motorcycle jacket, and my t-shirt that probably had a graphic from my favorite rock band. And I just didn't really look like your typical churchgoing person.

And this little kid says, he doesn't go to church. And the woman said, don't say that. That's very rude of you. He goes to church. The little kid says, no, he doesn't. She goes, why do you say that? And this little kid said, he doesn't look like he goes to church.

And because of that, I got my hair cut. This was before my baptism. I've never had long hair again, because I don't want anybody, especially a little child, second-guessing my faith just because of the way I look.

And I think that people who don't care about that, and they say in defiance, I'm going to keep my hair long, or whatever it is, if you're a man. And of course, if you're a woman, it might be, I'm going to keep shaving my head completely bald or whatever.

But if you don't care about what people are thinking about you in regard to your faith, that may immediately disregard anything that you have to say about Christ and his gospel because of the way you look.

That's a very trivial thing that you are holding on to as an idol, isn't it?

Yeah, but I would love to see the picture of you in the long hair. What do we have to do to get that picture?

You probably have to go to my sister's house and go through her photo albums in the basement.

Okay, so I think we need to get all of the listeners to donate money to Iron Man's Iron, so that we can get this photo released. Everybody, don't go out to Iron Man's Iron right now. Okay, okay, you guilted me into it.

I will release the picture.

By the way, I do need our listeners to send in donations anyway, whether you get the picture or not. And as I said, I don't want people to think I'm giving a hang-up to men out there who have long hair who are Christians.

This was a personal conviction of mine because of this young child, and it stuck with me, and I still remember it regularly. But we're going to our first break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Andrew Rappaport about sanctification through suffering or anything else in regard to specific details about his ministry and or his personal testimony, our email address is chrisarenson at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. That's C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Don't go away. We'll be right back with Andrew Rappaport. Chris Aronson, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, announcing a new website with an exciting offer from World Magazine, my trusted source for news from a Christian perspective.

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Questions About Suffering, Shame, and the Church

Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in today, our guest today for the first hour is my old friend Andrew Rapoport, founder of Striving for Eternity Ministries, coming up in the second hour, his friend and fellow speaker at an upcoming conference.

Actually, you're not.

One of the speakers, are you, at this conference? Correct. I would just emcee the event. We chose, Striving for Eternity, we chose to highlight Frank Mullis, who's at one of our... But.

Colleen's going to be, or Colleen, as I was corrected before, she is going to be on the roster along with Frank Mullis, Justin Peters, and others. And if you want more information, in fact, I don't even think I remember to give the date of this upcoming conference, but the conference is going to be held in just a couple of weeks, March 15th through the 16th in New Jersey at the Chinese American Bible Church in Freehold, New Jersey.

And again, as I said earlier, go to strivingforeternity .org for more details. Strivingforeternity .org forward slash conference dash on dash suffering forward slash. If you'd like to join us on the air today, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

Chrisarnzen at gmail .com. And please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA. We have an anonymous listener from Pennsylvania who asks, I have had at least two friends who were suffering and in fact dying with terminal cancer.

And yet, even though these were Christians, they never told any about it, anybody about it until it was too late. In fact, their closest friends who knew about it were sworn to secrecy. I find this quite strange, but I know that people are unique individuals and have their reasons for certain things they do.

Do you think that this is ever a wise or recommendable thing for a brother or sister in Christ to do? No, it's not. It really isn't. We,.

And I'm going to say this, so I don't seem like I'm just saying this. I had a period of time where I struggled. I was actually homeless. And at the time, I actually was a deacon in the church in charge of the deacon fund where we had about $5 ,000.

And my pride and that and I know what it was, I was not going to let anybody in the church know that I didn't have any more money. A company I worked for went bankrupt and it was back during the early nineties when we had bad economic times.

And I just, I ended up going, being homeless rather than, you know, let anyone in the church know that I had a need. Now, is it always for pride? Well, I don't know that it's always pride. In my case, it was.

I think for a lot of people, what it is is they're struggling with this shame issue. For some people it might, there may be a pride issue. There's also one other thing that I see a lot with people, especially if it doesn't sound like a terminal cancer or a terminal issue.

And I've seen people that feel so uncomfortable with people helping them out that they just don't want anybody to know. Now you could say that as a form of pride. There may be a pride issue for others.

It's an issue where they just know the reaction people are going to have. And if they conclude that there's nothing anyone can do, they don't want to cause anyone to worry. And so there could be a couple of different reasons for it, but I would say that for themselves to not be a burden, we think that we're going to be a burden, but the reality is, is when the church comes together and works together as the church, we end up seeing that we can all be more in the image of Christ.

And maybe me suffering and someone coming alongside me will actually help them in their spiritual walk. Now there's a reason so many of us fear that, and it's because we all know people that are, right?

They always have something wrong. I know a couple of individuals in my life that it would be, it almost, you have to start to wonder if all the stories of what happened to them are true. I know one person that told me in a course of one month, he has five cars.

All five of them were broken into in one month. We all know that person who once they have your ear is never going to let go. And this is the difficulty in counseling and the difficulty in want to have that person who's just, they don't want to actually get better.

They actually don't want to change. They just want to talk and they want you to feel bad for them. And it's a hard balance which between those two, because that's, I think a reason that a lot of people feel that no one wants to hear what they have to say, because there are so many people who just want someone's ear.

They don't want to change. They just want you to feel bad for them. And they want all the attention on them. And that ends up having an effect on the rest of folks who actually wouldn't want to go out and talk to folks and get someone to just share their burden with.