October 2, 2015 Show with Decherd Stevens on “‘Conflict & Triumph’ by William Henry Green” PLUS Paul D. Wolfe on his book “My God is True!”

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August 6, 2016

on: Conflict & Triumph by William HenryGreen Guest #2: PAUL D. WOLFE Associate Pastor of New Hope Presbyterian Church, Fairfax, VA

00:01: Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown
00:08: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,
00:16: Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
00:23: Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.
00:32: Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, 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.
00:46: 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.
00:57: Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon
01:07: Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are living, who are listening via live -streaming.
01:16: This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Friday on this second day of October 2015 and we have a very important program today and I advise you if you know anyone who is suffering with cancer, where they have loved ones who are, rush to the phone, call them up or email them or text them and tell them to listen to today's program at ironsharpensironradio .com,
01:46: ironsharpensironradio .com. For the full two hours we are going to be speaking about surviving cancer and we have two cancer survivors, one for each hour, to discuss this situation and both men are in the
02:03: Presbyterian Church of America, one of the largest of the Bible -believing Presbyterian denominations that remains thoroughly reformed and faithful to the scriptures and our first guest is
02:16: Deckard Stevens who is pastor of the Calvary Presbyterian Church in Greenville, South Carolina and we're going to be today discussing how he was enormously helped and encouraged and blessed and comforted through the book of the 19th century
02:34: Princeton theologian William Henry Green titled Conflict and Triumph and this is a book that has been brought back into print by Banner of Truth and it's our honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Ironsharpensiron, Deckard Stevens.
02:52: Thank you very much Chris, looking forward to this time and pray for the Lord's blessing upon those who are able to listen in.
03:00: Great, well first of all let's hear something about Calvary Presbyterian Church in Greenville, South Carolina.
03:08: I think everything about my experience here has been fairly unusual.
03:16: I was a seminary student at Greenville Seminary 1987, took me 10 years pretty much to get through and they refer to those first 10 years as Deckard's decade at Greenville Seminary, but I was visiting around and preaching at different churches as just pulpit supply and I happened to visit
03:42: Calvary Presbyterian Church which was just eight miles from my home at the time. On the night the present pastor stood up and resigned effective immediately.
03:55: And I remember going home that night thinking, I don't know what's going on there, but I don't think
04:01: I want any part of it. But when I got home, I got to thinking,
04:08: I said, well if that was as abrupt as it sounded, maybe they need a supply pastor.
04:13: So I went back on Wednesday night and basically offered my services, and that was
04:20: October of 1989, and I've been there ever since.
04:26: Well, praise God. And the Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways.
04:32: He does, and that was a real interesting, I can't give you all the details of it in the time allotted here, but it was just a very interesting time in my life of learning about God's providence and His Sovereign Wisdom and direction.
04:49: It was not what I was planning, but He opened the door and I walked through, and the
04:54: Lord has blessed over the last 26 years. Yeah. Well, it somewhat reminds me of Spurgeon's conversion when he was walking through a blizzard and went into a primitive
05:07: Methodist church for shelter, and the pastor that was normally going to be there today, that day, wasn't, and just a member of the church and ordinary members started repeating a verse of Scripture over and over again, and that was what broke the heart of stone of Charles Haddon Spurgeon and brought him to salvation.
05:29: So God's providence is quite remarkable indeed. Yeah, it is. And let's hear something specifically about, briefly, about the
05:41: Presbyterian Church in America in general, your denomination, for our listeners who are unfamiliar with that.
05:46: A lot of folks that listen to my program, although they would be in a minority, some of them are
05:52: Catholic, some of them are even Muslim, some of them are a member of no church, so they may be just familiar with the mainline, typical liberal
06:02: Presbyterian Church down the road from them. Tell us something about how the PCA, as it is known, is different.
06:09: Well, I have a lot of people that come through our doors, visitors, and they want to know, well, what exactly is the
06:16: PCA? And probably the best way, and the simplest way I can describe it is by saying, we're the
06:23: Presbyterians that believe the Bible is the Word of God, without apology.
06:29: Amen. And so yes, the liberal Presbyterians, as a matter of fact, when
06:34: I got married, my wife was from Wisconsin, and she said, please don't tell my family you're
06:41: Presbyterian. Because up there, the
06:47: Presbyterians were very liberal, they didn't even have a PCA church in Wisconsin. Was she
06:53: Missouri Synod Lutheran or Wisconsin Synod Lutheran? They were actually in the
06:58: Evangelical Free Church. Oh, okay. Or that was the one they were attending at the time, so that was an interesting little twist that she said she really would not understand.
07:12: Yeah, the PCA, of course, subscribes to the Westminster Confession of Faith and historical
07:21: Christian documents and creeds and confessions, and so we are very conservative and still believe the
07:29: Bible is the Word of God, and what the Bible says is what we want to do. Well, that is very good to know, and I just want to, before I forget,
07:38: I'm going to give you a church website for our listeners. It's calvarypca, which stands for Presbyterian Church in America, calvarypca .com.
07:48: Very easy to remember website, calvarypca .com. Alrighty, well, tell us something about when you discovered that you had cancer and how that happened.
07:59: Well, again, the doctrine of providence was just very much at work.
08:06: My wife and daughter at the time had had some health issues that year in 1989 or 2000.
08:18: I'm sorry, I'm getting things mixed up here. They had had some health problems, and so they had met our deductible for our insurance, and my wife said,
08:26: You can get a physical for $20, go in, and you haven't had one since we got married.
08:32: So it was quite a few years, and I went in, and the doctor did his typical exam, and he started to leave the room, and I said,
08:43: Well, are you going to do one of those other exams? And he said,
08:49: Not at your age. He said, Are you having problems? I said, No. And he said,
08:55: But since you're here, let's go ahead. And he worked a little bit, and he said,
09:01: You know, I'm going to send you downstairs for a PSA, just a blood test, and don't worry.
09:09: He said, I don't think it's anything, but just want to be safe. And he said,
09:15: Call me in three days to get the results of the test. Well, the next morning, when
09:21: I went into the church, there was a message on the answering machine that said,
09:27: This is Dr. Grubbs. Call me. And I thought, Well, that doesn't sound too good.
09:35: Yeah, it does not. He tried to reassure me. He said, Now, listen, I don't think it's anything, but one of your numbers was kind of high.
09:44: He said, I'm going to send you to a urologist, and I'm just going to get you checked out. So we did a biopsy, and everything came back negative.
09:54: And they said, We'll check it again in three months. And so in three months, we checked it, and the number had risen.
10:02: The PSA number had risen a couple points or three points. And the doctor said,
10:09: Well, you know, I think we need to do a second biopsy. So we did a second biopsy, and it came back negative.
10:18: And then he said, Come back in three months. I came back in three months, and the number was three and a half points higher.
10:25: So he said, Something's going on, and we've got to find it. And so they kept checking and everything.
10:34: And, of course, in the interlude of all these tests and everything, exams that were being done,
10:42: I was also going to an alternative doctor trying to deal with this, what we suspected to be cancer, alternatively with natural medicine and vitamins and so forth.
11:01: And then the other interesting aspect of it is I was preaching through the book of Job that year.
11:10: And so what was interesting was, as Job's situation got worse, mine got worse.
11:20: And it was like with each blow that came in the life of Job, the doctors were giving me one more piece of bad news.
11:30: And it was finally about August of the year 2000 that the doctor called us in.
11:39: He put an ultrasound on the desk in front of us and circled a section of it, and he said,
11:45: Right there is your cancer. And so he said,
11:50: You have multiple options to consider, but this is very treatable as long as we get it before it comes out of the gland, the prostate gland.
12:04: And he said, All I can tell you is the day that cancer breaks out of the wall of that gland, your prognosis goes down 85%.
12:13: Wow. So while he said this was not a real critical thing to go into immediate action, it was urgent, and he wanted us to begin dealing with it.
12:30: And the book really came into play. And before that, before you even had the routine exam,
12:38: I'm assuming since you were just doing it for a routine exam, that you were not experiencing any symptoms at all.
12:45: No, that was the whole thing. If my wife and daughter had not satisfied the deductible, if I had not wanted to get a physical that I hadn't had in 22 years, if I hadn't gone in, if it hadn't been that doctor, if it hadn't done that test, me asking about it, none of this would have been seen or heard from until probably it was too late.
13:12: Yeah. My mother, who is now in glory with Christ for eternity, my mother in 1995 passed away from pancreatic cancer, and she passed away within six weeks of being diagnosed.
13:27: And she was given by the doctor six months to live, and she passed away within six weeks.
13:36: And another friend of mine, an associate pastor on Long Island, Bobby Lloyd, who
13:42: I have interviewed in my program in the past when I was on Long Island, he had a very similar circumstance to you, where he went for a routine exam, and they caught pancreatic cancer in him at a very early stage, which is very, very rare to happen.
14:00: And they were able to successfully remove that tumor from his pancreas, and that was probably over a decade ago, and he's still alive and well.
14:11: And it's just amazing, because that is almost always a certain death sentence when you get pancreatic cancer.
14:18: Yeah. And so I just wanted to throw that in there, that was an interesting similarity with Bobby Lloyd and yourself.
14:28: So I want to tell our listeners about this book, Conflict and Triumph, the
14:34: Argument of the Book of Job Unfolded by William Henry Greene. This is a book that ministered to you greatly during this time, and I'll let our listeners know a little bit something about William Henry Greene.
14:47: He was a 19th century Princeton theologian. He held the chair of Biblical and Oriental Literature at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1851 till his death.
14:59: As one of America's foremost linguists and an outstanding Old Testament scholar, he opposed the conclusions of the higher critical movement and did more than any man, any one man, of his time to rally and steady the church under the shock of a sudden and mighty assault of the trustworthiness of the scriptures.
15:22: And this is a book that has been brought back into print by the
15:27: Banner of Truth. And tell us something, how the Lord providentially also used this book in your life when you not only discovered you had cancer, but as you continued to battle it.
15:42: Well, there's just numerous ways in which the book impacted my life and more so my understanding of what
15:52: God was doing as he used this particular trial and this particular reflection.
16:01: One of the things that Greene brings out that I had never come across was the whole issue of Job's wife.
16:12: And we give, as a lot of commentators acknowledge, she gets a pretty bad rap.
16:22: Luther called her Matrix Diabolos, the mother of the devil.
16:30: And some of these others, I think Calvin even called her the handmaid of Satan.
16:37: These are pretty strong words, and it all has to do with the phrase, curse
16:43: God and die. But Greene set me on a path by his words when he brings out that this woman never complained as she lost all her possessions alongside of her husband.
17:00: She lost all of her children. She knew what it was to stand by ten freshly dug graves.
17:08: We never hear a single word of complaint from her. She stays with her husband, not only to this point, but all the way through his trial.
17:21: And we never have any complaint of Job in regards to her.
17:26: When we think about this woman being the wife of the godliest man, probably on earth at the time, it's hard to imagine her being, as I frequently will use the expression, the wicked witch of the east.
17:47: She is not presented that way, and it all has, or all develops because of that phrase translated in our
17:57: English translations as curse God and die. But it was Greene that set me on the path of discovering that that same word, curse, is translated in almost every circumstance as bless.
18:15: Really? And so, the only place that it's translated curse is in the first two chapters of Job.
18:26: Other places, the same exact verb is used as bless.
18:32: And it wasn't Greene, but because of the way he treats her and says we need to reassess this, we need to consider the other thing is the pointing of the
18:46: Hebrew allows for it to be a question. And so suddenly, curse
18:52: God and die becomes, will you continue to bless
18:58: God even if he kills you? Wow. Now, I had heard from,
19:05: I don't know if it was a pastor, but it was so many years ago, I can't remember where I heard it. And I don't know if William Henry Greene offers this as a possibility, but I had heard that someone,
19:19: I had heard someone say that in compassion for her husband,
19:25: Job's wife said, curse God so you will die, so that God will strike you dead and you'll be put out of your misery.
19:33: Not that she wanted him to die because she hated him or was mad at him, but because she wanted him to be put out of his misery.
19:39: I don't know if you've ever heard that before. I did come across that in studying. I just think that when
19:46: I read this about Job's wife, it changed everything for me.
19:52: And I began to look at her here as a godly woman who stays with her husband throughout his trial and has ten more children by him and raises them.
20:02: And God does not rebuke her as he does his friends.
20:08: So there's just a lot there. Now, obviously, even will you continue to bless
20:13: God was not the height of spiritual insight because Job says you're speaking not like yourself but like one of the foolish women.
20:25: So even to question at that stage whether or not his blessing
20:31: God and praising God was acceptable is not a good thing.
20:37: But what I learned through that particular instance, and I learned it personally when
20:44: I was diagnosed and officially when the doctor, especially in the afternoon, the doctor said, here it is.
20:50: This is your cancer. And for anybody who's ever heard those words,
20:56: I believe they will understand exactly what I'm describing. But I learned in a very poignant way, we are emotional and psychological creatures.
21:12: And, brother, I have to tell you, when I heard those words, I practically came unglued.
21:22: I mean, I went home, and my five -year -old daughter walked out on the deck, and I just started bawling because I will never live to see her grow up.
21:32: Now, listen, I knew Romans 8, 28. I've been a firm believer in the sovereignty of God for over 35 years.
21:47: I know all the verses. I know the theology. But I thought the world was coming apart at the seams.
21:56: And it took me two solid weeks to get my feet back on the ground after that.
22:07: And so I learned to deal with people and give people a lot of latitude, especially when they have some devastating or catastrophic situation occurring in their life.
22:20: Because if I had been counseling myself, I would have said,
22:26: Brother, you're not dealing with this in a very spiritual way. Let me give you some verses. And I think sometimes we need to just sit by them and let them know we care about them and we're praying for them and with them, because you just don't think straight when you're facing that kind of thing.
22:49: And so when I think about Job's wife, here's this woman in abject agony, and now her husband is in excruciating pain, and she's watching him go down little by little each day.
23:03: And so that's one of the primary lessons, I think, that I learned, was learning to realize we go through these emotional stages, and we're not always going to be right on point when we're struggling through these things.
23:24: And I believe God gives us some time and ministers to us through His people and His Word and His Spirit.
23:32: And He uses various things. How old were you when you were diagnosed with the cancer?
23:42: Well, it would have been 2000, so I would have been... I went to public school, so...
23:52: I would have been about 40, 45 years old. Okay.
23:58: Yeah, that's too young to hear that you may very well die. And by the way,
24:03: I want to let our listeners know, I have a surprise for them, that if they email us a question, if you're among the number who email us in time and your question is good enough to be read on the air, you can't just write,
24:21: Can I have a free book, as somebody jokingly did a couple of days ago. But if you write a question on this topic for our guest,
24:31: Deckard Stevens, Banner of Truth has given us some copies of Conflict and Triumph, The Argument of the
24:38: Book of Job, Unfolded by William Henry Green. They've given us several copies to give away for free to you.
24:46: And I already have a listener that had emailed us prior to me announcing this.
24:54: And let me tell you that the email address is chrisornsen at gmail .com,
25:00: by the way. chrisornsen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com
25:09: And please give us at least your first name and the city and state where you live, and the country where you live if you live outside the
25:16: USA. And I do have some bad news for the Canadian and overseas listeners.
25:21: I'm sorry we cannot give you free books. One of my sponsors, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, out of the kindness of their hearts, sends out these free books.
25:31: And since we give out so many of them, they would be strapped with a really huge shipping charge every month because of the fact that we do have a number of overseas listeners that seems to be growing every day, especially
25:45: Australia for some reason. But we thank you for your listening to our program.
25:53: And we would love to hear from you nonetheless with a question, but we can't give you a free book. But Shane from Birmingham, Alabama, writes,
26:02: Praise the good God you survived a horrible disease. How did your faith in our beloved Lord, if you experienced it at the time, help you deal with the diagnosis and the different treatment options that you may or may not have had?
26:19: Well, if I understood the question correctly, they're just asking how did the
26:26: Lord help in dealing with the diagnosis. And that largely, let me come back to the book in regards to that.
26:37: And I would just recommend to anyone, it doesn't have to be cancer, but any trial or heartbreaking difficulty that you're going through, this is just an exceptional book to study.
26:52: And what I've watched as Job's situation progressed, and mine progressed, and we came to this point to where all of a sudden the doctor says,
27:04: Here it is. On that particular week, I was reading the section where Elihu comes in and begins to correct
27:15: Job's thinking. And that's perhaps the greatest benefit is the way
27:21: God corrected my thinking. Now, Job had already come to the point where he recognized the sovereignty of God.
27:30: And he says, Though He kill me or slay me, yet will I trust Him. And he says,
27:37: I know that one of these days I'm going to see God. I'm going to be with my
27:43: Redeemer. So he's confident of glory. He's confident of God's sovereignty.
27:51: But he still thinks God has done him wrong. And it's
27:57: Elihu who comes in and completely turns everything upside down.
28:03: Job's friends have been saying, You've sinned. That's why God is mistreating you.
28:09: And they viewed affliction as punishment. Elihu comes in and says,
28:18: Job, not only is God sovereign, but His affliction of the righteous is not punishment.
28:28: It's for blessing. It's for your good.
28:35: And, of course, we have Romans 8 -28 and Hebrews 12 -11.
28:42: Job didn't have that. But Elihu is there as God's messenger to correct
28:50: Job's way of thinking about affliction. Interesting enough, we heard a message yesterday at the seminary chapel at Greenville Seminary on not despising the chastening of the
29:04: Lord. And yet that's exactly what we do. When God brings affliction, we chase and we rebel and we walk out as quickly as possible.
29:17: And God says, I sinned. And I did it for your good.
29:24: And there's so many benefits. We don't have time to go through them. But God uses afflictions.
29:31: This is what the writer of Hebrews tells us in 12 -11. No chastening for the present seems to be joyous.
29:38: We're not stuck with our head in the fan saying, oh, praise the Lord anyway. It's painful.
29:48: But afterwards, it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness.
29:56: And that's what Elihu teaches Job. This is for your good.
30:02: This is not an expression of God's anger. It's not because he's mad at you. It's not because you've sinned.
30:09: That's not even on the table for Elihu. And Job acquiesces.
30:17: He doesn't argue. He doesn't respond in turn to Elihu the way he did his other friends.
30:23: He listens. And then the next stage comes when
30:31: God speaks. In fact, can we pick up where God speaks after our commercial break?
30:38: We can certainly do that. Yeah, that's a good time to break here. And if you'd like to join us on the air, as Shane in Birmingham, Alabama did, with a question of your own about cancer, about our guest,
30:52: Deckard Stevens' bout with cancer and victory over it, about William Henry Greene's book that helped him,
30:59: Conflict and Triumph, the argument of the Book of Job unfolded, just send us an e -mail.
31:13: Please give us at least your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence. If you live outside the
31:20: U .S .A., and as I said earlier, only our U .S .A. listeners can receive a free book.
31:26: And if this is a personal, private matter that you do not want to, if you don't want to disclose your name because it's such an intimate and private situation, we will respect your privacy and let you remain anonymous.
31:45: chrisarnson at gmail .com chrisarnson at gmail .com
31:50: Don't go away. We're going to be right back after these messages. Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said,
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35:27: Welcome back. This is Chris Arns. And if you just tuned us in, our guest is Deckard Stevens for the first hour of the broadcast.
35:35: He is the pastor of the Calvary Presbyterian Church in Greenville, South Carolina.
35:41: And we are discussing his bout with cancer and his triumph over it and how the book,
35:48: Conflict and Triumph, the argument of the Book of Job, unfolded by William Henry Green, how this book specifically ministered to his life.
35:57: If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com chrisarnsen at gmail .com
36:04: And we do have a couple of listeners already waiting in the wings, but I want to return to where we left off first.
36:11: And by the way, Deckard, Shane in Alabama says, you are awesome!
36:17: With about five exclamation points. And interestingly, Shane is blind and he is going to try to, he wants me to try to get him a digital copy of this book.
36:30: And if we can't, he can just obviously give the book to someone who can read it to him. But if you could, pick up where you left off,
36:38: Deckard. Okay, well we were just talking about the ways God helped me through this particular trial, and primarily it was a matter of correcting my way of thinking about things.
36:54: Not just believing in God's sovereignty, Job had come to that point, and not just believing that God does this for our good, which is where Elihu comes in and instructs
37:08: Job in that particular. But then God speaks, and beginning in chapter 38 of the book of Job, and says, okay, now
37:18: Job, prepare yourself. I'm going to ask the questions, and you're going to give the answers.
37:27: And as Derek Thomas so adeptly said, you know instinctively this is not going to be a fair fight.
37:41: But Job is on the hot seat. And what God does with all his questions, with, tell me
37:50: Job, where were you when I hung the world on nothing? How broad, how wide?
37:57: Give me the measurements of the earth. Surely you know these things. Why don't you go out to the ocean and lay your hand on the great
38:06: Leviathan and see what happens. You'll never do it again.
38:12: And the Leviathan was like a dinosaur, was a giant sea monster. Right, right. And so this fearful, awesome creature.
38:22: But what God is doing is, he's not just demonstrating sovereignty.
38:28: And when he brings afflictions, it's not just for our good, though that's a very valuable lesson to learn.
38:35: But I think what Green brings out in an extraordinary way is that God is sovereign, he can do what he wants, he does what he does for our good, but he also does it for specific spiritual fruit.
38:57: This is not just some arbitrary demonstration of God's power and control.
39:06: God is after fruit. In Job's case, it was humility.
39:15: And when Job says, I'm going to put my hand over my mouth,
39:20: I will not say another word, I repent in dust and ashes. When Job is humbled, everything changes for him.
39:33: And God restores him and renews him and blesses him once again with more than he had before.
39:39: Now, I'm not saying God's going to do that in every case for us, but when we grasp the concept that God is working and he uses affliction to bring forth spiritual fruit.
39:57: Now, we all pray, well, I hope we all pray, Lord, make me more holy.
40:04: But brethren, when you pray that, understand that one of the most effective instruments to make you holy and humble and happy in the things of God and not the things of this world is affliction.
40:22: And God uses it to bring about fruit. And I mean, I just can't tell you how that changed my life.
40:31: And I realized at that moment that no matter what happened,
40:36: God was in absolute control. I was in the palm of his hand and Satan couldn't touch a hair on my head without God's permission and direction.
40:51: I like the way Luther says, even the devil is God's devil.
40:56: Amen. Amen. Yes, it's much better to know, it's ironic that many
41:04: Christians who are not Reformed, who do not believe in the sovereignty of God, they think it's cruel and horrible to tell people that God had something to do with their tragedy, whatever it is.
41:18: And it's ironic because isn't it much better to know there's a purpose, a good purpose, a godly purpose, a wonderful purpose for the infliction, than it to be some kind of haphazard, meaningless, purposeless trial that you're going through?
41:33: I don't even understand the logic behind Christians wanting to separate God completely from the illness or the trial that they're going through.
41:43: Right. Well, I can't remember who said it now, but I remember
41:50: Ian Hamilton quoting it numerous times, I think it was Warfield, who said, every man is a
41:56: Calvinist on his knees. Because we pray that God will intervene, that God will change, that God will control, or God will...
42:06: Yeah, I read J .I. Packer quoted the same individual, I believe. Yeah. We do have another question from your neck of the woods.
42:14: We have a question from your neck of the woods in Greer, South Carolina. Maria says, you mentioned it took you two weeks to feel on your feet again.
42:25: What, besides this book on Job, helped you remember the faithfulness and goodness of God the most?
42:30: Were there specific scriptures, times of prayer, or special support shown by family?
42:38: Well, I think it's a combination of things. And I would just encourage people, especially when you're going through difficulties, make use, don't recoil, from the ordinary means of grace.
42:57: The Word, prayer, Bible reading, preaching of the gospel, the sacraments, and just make use of what
43:08: God... God has given us a church family to support us, and our church family was astounding.
43:17: Beyond that, my wife was just by my side, and she was a constant encouragement to look to the
43:28: Lord, to trust the Lord, to let me know that she was there, and that I had
43:36: Christian friends that were reminding me, look, God is bigger than this, and He is going to accomplish
43:45: His purpose, and those are His promises, and He will do it for our good.
43:52: And so I had multiple avenues, I guess, of just encouragement, and I had a former pastor that used to say, things are seldom as they seem, and his point in saying that was, you look at the person on the pew in front of you, and it looks like they've got everything going for them.
44:18: They've got a good job, they've got a wonderful family, they drive a nice car, they wear nice clothes, they seem...
44:26: it seems like everything is great, but the fact is, you have no idea.
44:31: What that person is going through. You have no idea what they're struggling with, and the trials and the difficulties that they may be facing at that moment.
44:44: So I would also encourage people to slow down and learn to listen, and encourage one another, and comfort one another with the
44:56: Scripture, and pay attention, because there's a lot of hurt out there.
45:04: And as you learn to... if you give people half a chance, they'll open up.
45:12: But most of the time, we greet one another in the aisle, or in the parking lot, how are you doing, how's it going, fine, good, we'll see you next week.
45:21: And we just don't get involved in people's problems and people's needs, and I think the
45:27: Body of Christ has a great role to play in encouraging the people of God.
45:35: Amen. And by the way, Maria in Greer, South Carolina, please send us your mailing address, because you're also going to be getting a free copy of Conflict and Triumph, the
45:45: Argument of the Book of Job, unfolded by William Henry Green. You did not give us your full mailing address when you emailed your question, so we look forward to getting that and shipping that out to you.
45:55: We have another listener, Abby, another listener in Alabama.
46:01: Abby writes, as you went through the many ups and downs of remission, side effects, helpful and maybe not so helpful advice from people who wanted to do something for you, how did the love of Christ again, if you experienced that at the time, help you to deal with this issue?
46:22: Well, thankfully I didn't have a lot of difficulty in the post -surgical.
46:31: I was able to arrange, and again, it was the providence of God that directed this.
46:39: I did my own research. I found that Johns Hopkins had the best means of treating this cancer and dealing with it.
46:48: It was going to cost me an additional $10 ,000 to go outside of my insurance network, but for me,
46:55: I thought it was worth it. So I called and asked to speak to Dr. Walsh or to get an appointment with Dr.
47:02: Walsh who pioneered this special procedure that they used. And she said, well, call me back in two years.
47:09: I said, lady, I don't have two years. And she said, well, Dr. Walsh trained six doctors in this procedure.
47:18: This is all they do. They do 250 of these operations per year per doctor, and if you're willing to take one of those,
47:28: I could probably get you an appointment. I said, that'd be fine. And she came back on the phone a few minutes later and said,
47:35: Dr. Ballantyne Carter quit taking patients six and a half months ago because he was so backed up.
47:42: He came into my office this morning and told me I can start booking patients. You're the first one.
47:48: I can give you an appointment in two weeks. And inside a month,
47:54: I was on the operating table. It was just unheard of.
48:00: I mean, everybody that was on the floor had been waiting for months and months and months, but the
48:05: Lord opened up that door, and my recovery was fairly quick.
48:13: It was very emotional, and I think that's fairly standard for people who have major surgeries.
48:24: So I'm not going to say it wasn't difficult, but the Lord was just very gracious, and probably in about two months,
48:31: I was preaching again. So the Lord just really, really blessed, and just the support of family and friends.
48:43: That $10 ,000 that we were going to have to raise to pay in addition to our insurance, when
48:51: I got ready to go into the operating room, we sat down and listed the churches. There were over 50 churches praying for us around the world.
49:00: Wow. And I think we had to pay a few hundred dollars of that $10 ,000.
49:08: People just were so generous and helped us during that time, and it just all demonstrated that God was in full control and guiding every step of the way.
49:22: We have an anonymous listener who says that when going through a crisis, the friends in her church and elsewhere seem to respond to her more like Job's friends that had negative things to contribute to his life.
49:44: Can you give us some of your insight into Job's so -called friends that were detrimental to his experience?
49:56: I think Job's friends certainly meant well. I mean, when you get right down to it, he probably had a lot more than three, but only three came.
50:09: They took the time to come and sit with their afflicted friend. I don't want to be too hard on his friends.
50:20: Obviously, they didn't understand. They didn't understand what was going on.
50:25: They, too, needed to learn. And as you study the whole scenario, you realize that these were aged men.
50:35: These were the wise and respected leaders of the community. Elihu was the young guy, and that's why he waited to speak until the end, because they didn't come up with a solution, but they were looking at it all wrong.
50:53: And that's where I think if you go through a trial or a difficulty like this, and you learn, you learn from the experience.
51:08: It's what Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians chapter 1 when he says, God comforts us so that we can comfort others.
51:19: And if we've been comforted, if someone's ministered to us, if we've learned these things,
51:26: I mean, this has changed my ministry. This has changed the way
51:31: I sit beside people dying of cancer. If I can throw in, this is not a banner book, but many of you will recognize the name of Richard Baxter.
51:46: And Baxter, in his Christian directory, over 2 ,000 pages of print that was done without a word processor is amazing.
51:59: But he has a section in there called How to Have a Comfortable Departure Out of This World.
52:07: Yes, I've heard of that. And he lists a number of things to do while you still have a measure of health, and to know that if God does not intervene, you're going to be passing into glory before long.
52:22: And it's just a wonderful section, and I've used it time and time again. Let me throw one more quick thing in here that when
52:31: I heard you speak of your mother passing away, I much prefer the way
52:37: Samuel Rutherford says, that our loved ones who know the Lord have passed before us.
52:45: Not away. Amen, amen. Great point. So it's...
52:51: I would just encourage people, read, read, read. The Puritans were masterful illustrators at applying the
53:04: Scriptures, and just learn and study the Scriptures and meditate. It's a lost art today.
53:11: Yeah, I'd like to throw in a plug of my own, Jerry Bridges' book, Trusting God Even When Life Hurts.
53:16: Yes. And R .C. Sproul's Surprised by Suffering. Yes. Very good books for those kinds of things.
53:24: We have Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania asks, Are you totally cancer -free, and do you know of a percentage of folks who are cancer -free after your cancer was successfully treated, where it returns?
53:41: This particular type of prostate cancer typically comes back after 10 years.
53:50: And it comes back, they still call it prostate cancer, even though you don't have a prostate, but it typically comes back in the spine or the brain.
54:03: To God's praise, it's been 15 years, and we've had no further complications, no difficulties, and we're just thankful for the
54:15: Lord's continued use. I did have a heart attack in 2009 and survived that.
54:23: I have six stents, so everything that can be stented is stented.
54:30: Obviously, God's got something for me to do. Maybe He wanted me to do this radio broadcast first.
54:38: He's kept us going, and He's just been so faithful, and I just give all the glory and honor to Him for the way
54:47: He's sustained us and my family. Christian in Carlisle, Pennsylvania asks,
54:54: Sorry if you have already said something about this, but are there lasting effects from this cancer now in your life?
55:02: And the answer is no. There have been no detrimental effects whatsoever.
55:09: So the Lord, again, has just blessed. And if anybody wants to contact me about this particular type of cancer and the treatments that are out there,
55:21: I have a boatload of information for them. And what contact information specifically would you like to give?
55:28: They could just contact me by my email, which is pca, as in Presbyterian Church in America, pastor at bellsouth .net.
55:40: pcapastor at bellsouth .net. pcapastor at bellsouth .net. That's very easy to remember.
55:46: Well, we thank everybody for sending in your questions. We're out of books now. At least we're out of the book,
55:54: Conflict and Triumph. And even our anonymous listener, we have your address, so we'll ship that out to you.
56:00: I'd like you to spend the next four minutes, Decker, to really give our listeners what you most want etched on their hearts and minds before they leave the program.
56:11: Well, what I would say is study the Scriptures. Especially concentrate on learning how
56:21: God uses affliction in the lives of His people to bless them, not to hurt them.
56:28: God's not trying to destroy us. He's not trying to make us miserable when He sends difficulties.
56:34: James tells us to count it all joy, because it produces patience.
56:41: And we live in a racket -paced world that we want everything yesterday.
56:48: When we think about pain and we think about suffering, we want out. And even the
56:54: Apostle Paul prayed three times that God would take away the thorn in the flesh, whatever it was.
57:01: And God said, I'm not going to take it away. I gave it to you. And I gave it to you to make you weak.
57:10: Because when you're weak, you'll look to Christ. And brethren, we need to be looking to Christ and leaning on those everlasting arms and trusting in Him for everything.
57:26: It's everything in our lives. We think we can handle it, and we can't.
57:32: And so often God has to humble us and show us our need of Him.
57:39: And He's provided us with a Redeemer in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden.
57:49: And we need to go to Him. We need to go to Christ. We need to be on our faces before Him and ask
57:58: Him to guide and direct our lives. I don't know if I've got time to get this in, but I think of Jacob at the end when the sons are getting ready to go for the last time down to Egypt to get food.
58:15: And he said, all these things are against me. Everything's against me.
58:21: God's against me. I've lost Joseph. Now Simeon's in prison in Egypt.
58:28: Now we're dying of famine. And all these things are against me when in fact every single thing that had happened to him was for him, to keep him and his family alive in famine by taking them down to Egypt where there was food.
58:48: And if we could learn to see with spiritual eyes and the eyes of faith and believe the promises of God, then
58:58: I think we're going to be able to weather the storms that come and be able to trust the
59:05: Lord and honor Him. Amen. Well, I thank you so much, Deckard Stephens, for being on our broadcast today.
59:12: And I definitely want you back in the near future to address either the same issue at greater depth or another topic that may be burdening you to speak about.
59:24: And I know that your website is calvarypca .com, calvarypca .com.
59:32: And I know that the phone number of your church there in Greenville, South Carolina is 864 -294 -0895, 864 -294 -0895.
59:43: And once again, if you could give your email address for our listeners. Okay, it's pcapastor at bellsouth .net.
59:53: Well, thank you so much, Pastor Stephens. Thank you, Chris. And I hope you enjoyed this past hour as much as I did.
01:00:00: Well, it was my pleasure. So thank you for the opportunity, and may the Lord bless the listeners and your ministry.
01:00:07: Great. Well, God bless you, brother, and we'll be talking to you soon, God willing. All right. Thank you. Bye -bye now. And if anybody would like to join us on the air now with a question for our next guest, our next guest is
01:00:21: Paul D. Wolfe. And Paul D. Wolfe is also a cancer survivor and the author of My God Is True, Lessons Learned Along Cancer's Dark Road.
01:00:33: And that is also published by Banner of Truth. And our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,
01:00:40: C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. So for the next hour, we will be interviewing
01:00:47: Paul D. Wolfe on his own triumph over cancer. And we've got some books waiting for you for the first several people who email us questions.
01:00:57: Our email address again is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, chrisarnsen at gmail .com.
01:01:02: Don't forget to give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the
01:01:11: USA. And if you're among the first several listeners, give us your whole address so we can ship you out a copy of the book.
01:01:18: We'll be right back after these messages, so don't go away. Hi, I'm Chris Arnsen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.
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01:04:00: Lindbrook Baptist Church on 225 Earl Avenue in Lindbrook, Long Island, is teaching God's timeless truths in the 21st century.
01:04:08: Our church is far more than a Sunday worship service. It's a place of learning where the scriptures are studied and the preaching of the gospel is clear and relevant.
01:04:15: It's like a gym where one can exercise their faith through community involvement. It's like a hospital for wounded souls where one can find compassionate people and healing.
01:04:23: We're a diverse family of all ages. Enthusiastically serving our Lord Jesus Christ. In fellowship, play, and together.
01:04:29: Hi, I'm Pastor Bob Walderman, and I invite you to come and join us here at Lindbrook Baptist Church and see all that a church can be.
01:04:35: Call Lindbrook Baptist at 516 -599 -9402. That's 516 -599 -9402.
01:04:43: Or visit LindbrookBaptist .org. That's LindbrookBaptist .org. Welcome back. This is
01:04:48: Chris Arnzen. If you've just tuned us in, our whole program today, the whole two hours, has been dedicated to survivors of cancer.
01:04:57: And the first hour, we already interviewed Deckard Stevens and his struggle and victory over cancer and how the book,
01:05:07: Conflict and Triumph, the argument of the book of Job unfolded by 19th century Princeton theologian
01:05:13: William Henry Greene, how that ministered to his life. And upcoming now, for the next hour, we are going to be interviewing
01:05:21: Paul D. Wolfe, who is the author of My God Is True, Lessons Learned Along Cancer's Dark Road.
01:05:28: But before we go to our guest, I just have a brief announcement from one of our sponsors,
01:05:33: Pastor Bruce Bennett and the Word of Truth Church in Farmingville, Long Island, New York.
01:05:39: I invite you to join them at their sixth annual Bible conference tonight and tomorrow. This year's topic will be
01:05:46: Eschatology, a biblical examination of the four major end times views.
01:05:52: They are pleased to have Pastors Chris Pandolfi, Pastor Dave Corson, Pastor Mark Grimaldi, and Pastor Rich Jensen presenting one of the four views each.
01:06:03: The conference will have five sessions. Session one will be tonight at 7 p .m.
01:06:10: as Pastor Chris Pandolfi defends premillennial dispensationalism. Session two will be tomorrow morning at 10 as Pastor Dave Corson defends historic premillennialism.
01:06:22: Session three will be tomorrow at 1115 a .m. as Pastor Mark Grimaldi defends amillennialism.
01:06:29: Lunch will be served after session three, and session four will begin at 1 .30 p .m.
01:06:34: tomorrow as Pastor Rich Jensen defends postmillennialism. There will be a dinner served, and Anthony Uvinia will be hosting a roundtable discussion where all four pastors will address audience questions.
01:06:49: The conference is absolutely free of charge, and they are accepting a love offering. Word of Truth is located on 1055
01:06:56: Portion Road in Farmingville, Long Island, and can be reached at 631 -806 -0614, 631 -806 -0614, or at their website, wotchurch .com.
01:07:11: W -O -T, which stands for Word of Truth, church .com. Well, it's my honor and privilege now to welcome for the very first time
01:07:19: Pastor Paul D. Wolfe, who serves as an associate pastor at New Hope Presbyterian Church in Fairfax, Virginia.
01:07:28: And as I said earlier, he is the author of My God is True, Lessons Learned Along Cancer's Dark Road, and he himself is a cancer survivor.
01:07:38: And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever on Iron, Sharp, and Zion, Paul D.
01:07:44: Wolfe. Well, Chris, I appreciate the invitation. It's good to be with you today. Well, tell us something about how you came to Christ, and also something about the church where you are the associate pastor.
01:07:59: Sure. Well, I grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a church -going family.
01:08:11: We were faithful participants in our local congregation, but sadly, looking back on those days,
01:08:17: I think I was fairly clueless about the gospel. And so I headed off to college in that state of cluelessness about Christ, and it wasn't long after I got to college at the
01:08:33: University of Virginia, there in Charlottesville, Virginia, it wasn't long after I got there that I made friends with Christians in my first -year dormitory, and they were a wonderful witness to me in those first few weeks and months of our first year.
01:08:50: And it was really as I got to know them that I got to know Christ, and they helped me to understand what the gospel was about, explain the gospel to me in a way that I'd never really had it explained to me before.
01:09:05: And it was in the course of getting to know them that I came to know the Savior. So that was soon after I got to the
01:09:11: University of Virginia for my first year. And when I graduated then, four years later,
01:09:18: I made my way from Charlottesville, Virginia, where I'd gone to college, up here to the northern
01:09:23: Virginia area, the suburbs of Washington, D .C., and it was in the course of meeting people and looking for work that I heard about this
01:09:34: Presbyterian church out there in Fairfax, Virginia, one of the northern Virginia suburbs. So it would have been the summer after I graduated from college that I walked through the door of that church for the first time, and 22 years later, here
01:09:50: I am, serving that congregation as an associate pastor. So I was a member of that church for several years, and they supported me during my seminary studies, including my experience with cancer.
01:10:03: And then when I graduated from seminary, they called me as their associate pastor, and I've been serving in that capacity ever since.
01:10:11: Praise God. And tell us something now about New Hope Presbyterian Church in Fairfax, Virginia. Yeah, well, we're a congregation of the
01:10:18: PCA, the Presbyterian Church in America, and we're just coming up on our 25th anniversary as a congregation.
01:10:28: So we were officially organized a few years before I got there. We were officially organized late in 1990.
01:10:34: So we're coming up on the 25th anniversary of our congregation.
01:10:42: We're one of the many churches, it seems these days, that don't have their own building. We don't have our own building.
01:10:48: We meet on Sundays in a local fire station where they have a meeting hall, and we rent that hall from them, and we gather morning and evening on the
01:10:59: Lord's Day to worship God and to gather as his people and then seek to live out our faith as best we can here in Fairfax and beyond.
01:11:07: There's something very appropriate about a church meeting in a firehouse, isn't there? That's right. And I should say that the young children especially enjoy going to worship on Sunday because they know they might get to see a fire truck.
01:11:21: So it's exciting in a host of ways. How often are your services interrupted by the screeching sirens of a fire engine leaving the facility?
01:11:32: Well, I'll tell you, it is an operational fire station, and every once in a while we do feel the rumbling of the garage door going up as we're sitting in our hall on the third floor.
01:11:42: But they typically wait until they get out on the street before they start blaring their sirens.
01:11:47: So it's a minimum of interruption to our service. Great. Well, I want to let our listeners know that we are accepting e -mails.
01:11:57: If you have questions for our guest on his book, My God is True, Lessons Learned Along Cancer's Dark Road, and I know that I have personally been recommended this book a number of months ago because I providentially had several close friends who had developed life -threatening and even terminal cancer and inoperable cancer.
01:12:23: So I had purchased a number of these and gave them away, and I'm trusting that the
01:12:29: Lord will bless them. I know it did certainly bless one particular individual who was struggling with cancer for quite a bit, but who is now, thanks be to God, cancer -free.
01:12:40: Well, tell us about that day you discovered that you had cancer. Yes, well,
01:12:46: I can tell you right away. It was April 23, 1999, and most people who have had cancer will tell you that you never forget the date.
01:12:58: That date is emblazoned on my mind, April 23, 1999. And, in fact, whenever April 23 rolls around,
01:13:05: I think of it as my personal D -day, D as in diagnosis, because you remember the date.
01:13:11: I had been experiencing a variety of strange symptoms for months leading up to that date.
01:13:20: At that time, I was a student at Westminster Seminary north of Philadelphia, and I had just gotten married the year before.
01:13:28: I'd been experiencing a strange set of symptoms.
01:13:34: It was back pain at first, and that seemed relatively innocent.
01:13:39: We all thought I just pulled a muscle or something, but the back pain wouldn't quit. And the back pain turned into side pain, and the pain moved around, and some days it was intense, and some days it wasn't too bad.
01:13:52: Then, around about early April of that year, early April of 1999, things took a strange turn.
01:13:59: I began to feel a numbness in my feet and in my hands that over the course of several weeks began to move up my arms and legs, and that's when we especially grew concerned.
01:14:13: I never felt sick, but there were these symptoms that just didn't seem right.
01:14:20: And so, finally, April 23, 1999, it was a Friday, and by that point
01:14:27: I could hardly walk. I went in for an MRI, and I went into the building that morning thinking
01:14:34: I just had a bad back, that maybe I had a herniated disc or something that was pressing up against my nerves.
01:14:41: That would account for months and months of pain. Maybe that would account for this strange numbness in my arms and legs.
01:14:50: So I was persuaded in my uneducated, uninformed way that I just had a bad back, and I would go in for an
01:14:57: MRI, and the MRI would confirm that I had a bad back, and maybe I'd have to have surgery, but in a matter of months
01:15:04: I'd be playing tennis again and we'd move on. So I went in for the MRI that Friday, April 23.
01:15:11: They did the MRI, and the doctor then is studying the films and finally calls us in so that he can talk to us.
01:15:20: It just so happened that my parents were in town that weekend, so it was the four of us, my parents, my wife and I, who went into his office.
01:15:29: They wheeled me in because I was in a wheelchair by that point. He puts the films up on the screen and turns on the light so you can see the scans, and my untrained eye starts looking for the disc that's herniated or out of line, but everything seems to be lined up, and that's when he takes his pen and he circles a white mass that he says isn't supposed to be there, and he starts talking about what it almost certainly is, and though he hasn't yet used the word cancer, it became very clear that that's what he was talking about, and I remember quite vividly when that became clear and my wife
01:16:14: Christy said, I need to sit down. Wow. At that point, that was our 11 -month anniversary, if you can even call it an anniversary when you haven't reached one year.
01:16:27: We married 11 months that day, and in an instant she's wondering if she's going to be a widow on her first wedding anniversary.
01:16:35: So that was April 23, 1999, and that's how the whole saga got started.
01:16:41: And what specifically were you diagnosed with in regard to cancer? It was non -Hodgkin's lymphoma, and it was a tumor that was on the inside of my vertebrae.
01:16:56: So it was on the inside of my spinal column, pressing up against my spinal cord, and that explains all of those symptoms.
01:17:06: That's why I was having back pain and the side pain. That's why my arms and legs started going numb.
01:17:11: It wasn't a herniated disc that was pushing up against my spinal cord.
01:17:17: It was that tumor. Now fortunately we learned within the first few weeks that it had not spread and that that one tumor was pretty much all we were dealing with.
01:17:30: Now those were some nervous weeks because you're waiting on test results, and at first you have no idea if it has spread and if it has, how widely it has spread throughout your body.
01:17:43: So those may have been the hardest weeks of the whole experience, but we eventually learned that it hadn't spread and that one tumor was all we were dealing with.
01:17:53: And how old were you when you got the diagnosis? I was 28. Wow. 28 years old, yeah.
01:17:59: And I have a friend, Jack, from New York who had non -Hodgkin's lymphoma, and he also survived that and is alive and well and healthy and strong today.
01:18:11: Wonderful. So tell us about the emotions that ran through you, the fears.
01:18:19: I know that not all Christians, just like not all people in general, respond identically alike.
01:18:27: Everybody has their own unique situation. Obviously when news like that hits you, your age is going to be very relevant to how you react.
01:18:39: But even those with the strongest faith can be put through scary trials that strike fear within their hearts.
01:18:47: Tell us something about what you went through. Yeah, I think shock is the best word to describe our initial experience because,
01:19:00: I mean, the thought that it was cancer, I think I can speak for Christy, my wife, as well, that never even crossed our minds.
01:19:10: And I'd had a number of medical appointments at that point, and that was never even raised as a possibility.
01:19:17: Now looking back, maybe that was naive on our part, I don't know.
01:19:22: But I think that's why that day, April 23rd, was such a shocking day because, as I say,
01:19:28: I rolled into that MRI facility thinking I just had a bad back, and when I rolled out, I was going across the street to the hospital to start treatment for cancer.
01:19:36: It was just a kick in the gut. I mean, it was so unanticipated for Christy and me both.
01:19:47: And no doubt we wrestled with the why questions.
01:19:55: As you say, all sorts of Christians and non -Christians wrestle with, why is this happening to me, even when you know
01:20:03: God and believe in God and believe in the sovereignty of God and in the purposes of God, you still wrestle with why
01:20:10: God, why this, why now, what's in store. And so there was a good bit of fear, there was a good bit of anxiety.
01:20:22: I think I can say this, and maybe we can talk about this more later, and I mention this in the book.
01:20:28: I'm very grateful, looking back, for the preaching ministry of our church and how that ministry, in ways that we hadn't even realized, was preparing
01:20:42: Christy and me for that day when we found out that I had cancer. Because when
01:20:47: I went in that day for that MRI, so we're in April of 1999, I had been a member, and Christy with me, we'd been a part of New Hope Presbyterian Church for six years or so.
01:21:01: And week in and week out, we were hearing the word faithfully preached, including what the
01:21:07: Bible teaches about trials, suffering, fears, anxieties.
01:21:13: So we'd been hearing over and over again, in a wonderful, steady, clear way, that the
01:21:21: Lord reigns, and that nothing, absolutely nothing that comes to pass is an exception to the rule of His reign.
01:21:30: He's brought it to pass, He's brought it to pass for your own good, even if for a time, perhaps for a lifetime, you can't see why or how it's for your good.
01:21:42: But you trust that it is. You walk by faith and not by sight. So week in and week out, for years we'd been hearing that.
01:21:49: And I do think, Chris, looking back on it, and looking back on April 23, 1999, that in a very powerful way, it was as if all of those years of the word preached came back and embraced us.
01:22:06: It was as if those gospel truths that we'd been hearing all those years reached out and grabbed us in those first fearful moments.
01:22:16: So that's not to deny that they were fearful, that we felt like we were falling apart, that we were discouraged, all of that.
01:22:26: We felt all of those things. But I think it's fair to say that in the midst of all of those things, we also felt a peace that comes from the word that we'd been hearing for years and years.
01:22:41: And to this day, I'm grateful for David Coffin.
01:22:47: David is the senior pastor of our congregation. He's the one who's been preaching the word to us all those years.
01:22:53: And those are my impressions, anyway, remembering that day.
01:22:59: And we do have an anonymous listener in New Mexico who says, should you always be honest and tell a person with a terminal disease who has been diagnosed with a short time to live, should you always let them know about that, or is it ever right to be merciful and keep them in ignorance about that prognosis?
01:23:32: Well, I might want to know a little bit more about what the person has in mind by the question.
01:23:39: I wonder if, are they referring to people in the medical profession? Are they professionally obligated to reveal, say, test results?
01:23:51: Perhaps just give the answer for all of that, for the medical professionals and also for the family, the friends.
01:23:58: Yeah, well, I mean, I would think those in the medical profession are professionally bound to reveal test results, however discouraging those results may be.
01:24:14: You know, I don't think that our, the doctors with my own mother who had pancreatic cancer, she was told exactly what she had, but I don't believe they ever told her that she only had six months to live, in their opinion, and she passed in six weeks.
01:24:31: We let her know of the dangerousness of the illness and the fact that it was inoperable and all that.
01:24:40: In fact, the doctor did tell her it was inoperable, but she knew. In fact, she was actually asking me every day.
01:24:47: She had become a firm believer in the gospel during her experience dying, and she every day would say to me,
01:24:56: Do you think Jesus has taken me home today? I sure hope so. That was a blessing to me not to hear,
01:25:03: I don't want to die, I don't want to die. It was the opposite. She was like, I can't wait to go home to Jesus, Chris.
01:25:09: Do you think he'll come today for me? Yes, that's a wonderful testimony. So if a husband or wife or adult children know about the certainty of this person's death,
01:25:23: I mean, barring a miracle, of course, should they let the patient know? I have a hard time imagining a circumstance in which they shouldn't let that person know.
01:25:37: I mean, obviously, there are a host of things that would have to be said about how that news is communicated, how it's handled.
01:25:47: But I think I would need to be persuaded that there's a circumstance in which that information is best withheld.
01:25:57: Unless, I suppose you might have a patient who, for one reason or another, has already declined so significantly mentally that they may not be in a position to grasp the significance of what they're being told.
01:26:18: So maybe we would allow for that. But beyond that, I don't know. I'd have to think some more about that,
01:26:24: Chris. Sure. And our anonymous listener in New Mexico, we have your address.
01:26:29: We thank you. And you are going to receive a free copy of My God is True, Lessons Learned Along Cancer's Dark Road by Paul D.
01:26:37: Wolfe, our guest today. And this is also due to the kindness and generosity of Banner of Truth.
01:26:43: And you should be getting that, God willing, in a short while. And our thanks to Cumberland Valley Bible Book Services in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for shipping our free books.
01:26:55: And their website is cvbbs .com, cvbbs .com,
01:27:01: Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service. And we thank them for not only sponsoring our program, but for shipping out these books.
01:27:10: We do have another listener, Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who says,
01:27:17: Have you experienced anyone from the Word of Faith Pentecostal movement telling you that the reason you had this cancer was because of a lack of faith?
01:27:30: Or do you know anything about this group? And how would you respond to someone from this group, should they say something like that to you?
01:27:40: Well, I'll say that I didn't encounter that message personally.
01:27:48: I did encounter somebody that day I was diagnosed, April 23, 1999, somebody who was working in that radiology facility, who turned out to be a sister in the
01:28:00: Lord, who approached me not too long after we got news of the diagnosis to tell me that she had received a word from the
01:28:11: Lord for me that I would be healed. And I don't doubt she meant well.
01:28:19: I don't doubt that she actually believed that she'd gotten a word from the Lord above and beyond Scripture about my healing.
01:28:27: But to be perfectly honest, I didn't believe her then, and I don't believe now that people receive personalized revelations from the
01:28:41: Lord above and beyond His written word in Scripture. Amen. And she meant well.
01:28:49: She meant to comfort me. But it wasn't comforting at all, because there was no way for me to know, just assuming that what she was claiming was true.
01:29:00: I mean, there'd be no way for me to know that it was a word from the Lord. And so, in effect, she's representing
01:29:06: God, my God, my Father, as the kind of God who would hold out a word of comfort for me without giving me any ground of confidence that it's actually true.
01:29:19: And that struck me then and strikes me now, looking back on it, though she meant well, as cruel instead of comforting.
01:29:26: And I think there's a world of difference between what we might call a rational medical confidence and a presumption that a person has a word from the
01:29:40: Lord above and beyond Scripture. If she had just said, you know, we've got reason to believe you can beat this, and the
01:29:49: Lord is on your side, and He's for you and not against you. To all of that, I could have said, and I would say,
01:29:54: Amen. But as soon as she adds a thus saith the Lord, at that point,
01:30:00: I think she's really crossed a line. And now, as it turns out,
01:30:06: I was healed. But I don't think that vindicates her claim that she actually got a word from the
01:30:11: Lord that day. Has she ever said, I told you so? Well, I haven't had any interaction with her since that day.
01:30:19: So that's a long -winded way of saying, in answer to the question, no, I never encountered anybody from that movement or of that view who told me that I was suffering because I didn't have faith.
01:30:34: But I did encounter a similar view that first day
01:30:43: I was diagnosed. And to the person who actually makes that claim,
01:30:49: I would just say, well, brother, sister, you show me in Scripture where that comes from.
01:30:56: The suggestion that faith is somehow, or that illness is somehow the direct result of a lack of faith.
01:31:09: And maybe what I'd say is, you need to listen to Chris's interview with Deckard Stephens. Turn back to the book of Job and learn a thing or two from Job about the so -called righteous sufferer.
01:31:25: And not just Job, but read the Psalms. Yeah, I can't believe that there was a couple, a husband and wife on a radio station
01:31:34: I worked for for 15 years, who were word -of -faith Pentecostals, name -it -and -claim -it kind of Pentecostals.
01:31:42: And the wife actually said on her show, when Job said, the
01:31:47: Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, that Job was in sin when he said that.
01:31:55: Even though the Bible itself said that Job did not sin. Right. So, utterly amazing.
01:32:02: But anyway, we have to go to a break right now. And if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,
01:32:11: C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. And if you have a question and you're among the few that get the question to us in time, and it's good enough to be read on the air, you will receive a free copy, compliments of Banner of Truth, of our guest
01:32:28: Paul Wolf's book, My God is True, Lessons Learned Along Cancer's Dark Road.
01:32:33: Please give us your mailing address when you shoot your email out to us. If you live in Canada or overseas, we apologize, but we cannot include you in these winnings because of the fact that our client or our sponsor,
01:32:47: I should say, who ships out these books free of charge for us, would certainly have huge shipping costs every month if all of our overseas listeners were to get free books.
01:33:01: So I hope you understand. But we would love to hear from you anyway, if you live in Canada or overseas, at chrisarnsen at gmail .com,
01:33:09: chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Paul Wolf and a discussion of his survival of cancer and his book,
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01:35:09: Welcome back. This is Chris Arns. And if you just tuned us in, we are interviewing at the moment Paul D.
01:35:15: Wolfe, who is the author of My God is True, Lessons Learned Along Cancer's Dark Road.
01:35:21: And before we return to our interview, I just want to thank another one of our sponsors, Providence Baptist Church of Norfolk, Massachusetts, where Pastor Mark Lukens is the pastor.
01:35:32: And we thank them from the bottom of our hearts for seeing Iron Sharpens Iron as a worthy way to spend some of their money from their monthly budget to help keep this program on the air.
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01:36:06: O -R -G. And we thank them so much for sponsoring this broadcast.
01:36:14: The situation that we are in right now is that you have discovered that you have cancer, you're only in your 20s, you're married less than a year, and all of these things are racing through your head.
01:36:30: Tell us something about any kind of life expectancy the doctors may have told you about when you received this news.
01:36:40: Yeah, well, as I was saying before, at first there was a great deal of uncertainty because they were conducting tests and we were waiting for test results to learn if the cancer had spread and if it had, how widely it had spread.
01:36:58: Within a matter of weeks, the news was relatively reassuring that the cancer was that tumor within my back and it didn't appear that it had spread.
01:37:13: And by that point, I'd already undergone surgery. I underwent surgery, in fact, the very next day after they found it.
01:37:21: I was diagnosed on a Friday. We drove literally across the street to George Washington University Hospital.
01:37:27: I was admitted that Friday night, and the next morning they wheeled me in for surgery to remove as much of the tumor as they could.
01:37:36: Now, thankfully, because it was right up against my spinal cord, they were very careful with their scalpels, and they knew then that they were only going to be able to remove so much of it and they'd have to leave some of it.
01:37:47: And so after surgery, that week we started our first round of chemotherapy.
01:37:54: So the treatment was well underway. When we started to get good news that it appeared that the cancer hadn't spread.
01:38:03: So it was never a situation in which
01:38:08: I was told, look, you've only got weeks, months to live, that kind of thing.
01:38:15: So, you know, I refer in the subtitle of my book to the fact that it was a dark road that we walked.
01:38:20: I'll freely admit that many have walked darker roads than the one
01:38:26: Christy and I had to travel down. We were never given really, really bad news like,
01:38:32: Mr. Wolf, you need to get your affairs in order because it's not going to be long. So it was hard, no question, but we were never dealing with that kind of bleak prognosis.
01:38:47: Our friend Shane, again from Birmingham, Alabama, says or asks, what have you learned about suffering that you could impart to someone who may be going through what you have gone through?
01:39:02: And what does the redemptive work of Christ on the cross mean to you now? Yeah, yeah.
01:39:11: Well, I suppose it depends upon this person who's suffering. Do they know the
01:39:16: Lord or do they not? Let's assume for the sake of discussion that they do. And I think what
01:39:23: I'd want to communicate, I suppose, is what
01:39:29: I was saying before about what Christy and I had been hearing week in and week out for all those years from the pulpit, that the
01:39:35: Lord reigns and this is a time to hold on to Him.
01:39:42: Even if you feel like all you can muster is a weak grip of faith, hold on to Him with that grip.
01:39:51: And trust that He's holding on to you with a grip that isn't weak at all. And trust that He has brought this to pass and has brought it to pass for your good even if you can't understand why or how right now.
01:40:06: But then I'd also say, follow the example of the psalmist and cry out to Him.
01:40:13: But believing in the sovereignty of God, believing that He's brought this to pass for your good doesn't mean that this now becomes easy.
01:40:20: It's still a trial. It's called a trial for a reason. And talk to God about it.
01:40:27: Feel free to cry out to Him. Feel free to fall apart in His presence.
01:40:34: Feel free to groan. Sometimes you can hardly manage a prayer. All you can do is groan.
01:40:40: And I think that's important. We understand that we need to deal patiently and graciously when others are suffering.
01:40:50: I think we can forget that we need to treat ourselves that way too and understand, look, this is going to be hard.
01:40:57: And you need to give yourself space to struggle. And if you're married, you need to give that space to your spouse as well because he or she is going to be struggling along with you.
01:41:12: And I could go on at length, I suppose, about things I'd want to communicate to somebody in that situation.
01:41:18: I'd say, don't be afraid to ask for help. Not just receiving it, but even asking for it.
01:41:27: This isn't a time to pretend that you can handle it. Admit that you cannot.
01:41:33: Because if you pretend that you can handle it fine on your own, you are effectively depriving your brothers and sisters in Christ around you of opportunities to bear your burdens and to fulfill the law of Christ.
01:41:48: Wow, that's a great point that for some reason I really haven't thought about much. That's an excellent point.
01:41:54: So don't try to be a hero. You're not honoring Christ that way. You're not doing yourself any good.
01:41:59: And as I say, you're actually cutting off opportunities for your brothers and sisters in Christ to serve you.
01:42:07: One way of thinking about it is the golden rule. When you are close to somebody who's suffering or somebody in your church is suffering, you want to be able to serve them.
01:42:17: You don't want them to push you away with a false heroism.
01:42:24: You want a place of service in their lives. Well then, if you want to be treated that way, let other people in and help you too.
01:42:34: And then the other part of the question, what does the redemptive work of Christ on the cross mean to me now?
01:42:39: What did it mean to me then? It meant everything. And it still does. His death and resurrection gave me all the comfort in the world.
01:42:50: It freed me up to say, this cancer could kill me. And it freed us up together,
01:42:58: Christi and me together, to confront my mortality. And for that matter, hers. I mean, we're all going to die.
01:43:05: And to know that he died for me, sins fully paid for.
01:43:10: To know that he was raised for me, death completely conquered.
01:43:16: The sting of death has been taken away. That freed us up to face what we were facing with gospel courage.
01:43:25: That the work of Christ guarantees not just that I'm going to go to be with Jesus right when
01:43:33: I die, but even more than that. It guarantees that at the end of the age, he's going to come back. He's going to renew the world.
01:43:38: He's going to raise the body. And I will be clothed forever and ever in a glorious resurrection body where cancer has no foothold.
01:43:52: And Shane from Birmingham, Alabama just sent another email saying how blessed he has been from your excellent answers.
01:44:00: We have John in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, who says,
01:44:06: I understand that you already have dismissed the word of faith movement, but what do you say to people that we should always pray, expecting our prayers to be answered with certainty, such as a healing, that to do otherwise is to doubt
01:44:23: God? How do you answer that question? Well, we should pray, and we should pray with a sense of expectancy.
01:44:32: And I think we can say that we should pray with a sense of expectancy that he hears and answers prayer. But the real comfort is that the answer, be it yes, no, or not for now, will be just the answer that it ought to be, and not necessarily the one that I think it ought to be.
01:44:55: And that isn't to bail out on prayer. That isn't to qualify prayer or to diminish prayer.
01:45:03: That's to bring real comfort to it. Do you know how paralyzing it would be, how terrifying it would be, if I thought that God would say yes to everything
01:45:14: I asked for? That would be absolutely terrifying. That, in effect, puts me on the throne of the universe.
01:45:22: And by the way, at that point, the throne gets really crowded because every Christian is sitting on it.
01:45:29: Because every Christian who knows to pray is now in charge of the universe. And anyone who has the slightest sense of self -consciousness about his own folly, his own liability to misunderstand, his own limitations, the limitations of his wisdom and power, will freely admit, the last thing
01:45:51: I'd want is for God to say yes to everything I ask for. And I thank
01:45:57: God that He reigns and I don't. But as I say, that doesn't diminish prayer.
01:46:03: That's what actually makes it comforting to pray. Otherwise, I'd be afraid to open my mouth and ask for anything.
01:46:11: Amen. And we have about 13 minutes left, so if you'd like to ask a question of our guest, chrisarnson at gmail .com.
01:46:19: chrisarnson at gmail .com is the email address. So are you completely cancer -free today?
01:46:27: And what is the expectancy, if at all, that cancer may return? Yes, I am cancer -free, diagnosed in 1999.
01:46:37: It was around 10 years after that. I think it was 2010, so a little over 10 years after I was diagnosed, that I went in for a check -up with my oncologist and he said, you're done, you don't need to keep seeing me.
01:46:56: That was, I think, March of 2010. So, that was my last appointment.
01:47:04: No scans since then, no concerns since then. And I think even by then, the possibility that my cancer would return was very, very remote.
01:47:19: So, for the most part, just in terms of my medical condition, I've moved on, but anybody who's ever had cancer can tell you there's a sense in which you never really move on.
01:47:31: I mean, you take with you the scars, whether physical or metaphorical, you take with you, hopefully, lessons learned.
01:47:40: But I no longer have the rhythm of check -ups and scans that marked my life for years afterward.
01:47:49: I'm assuming that since you were such a young man when you went through this trial, that it matured you more rapidly, especially in regard to the faith, than you may have matured otherwise.
01:48:02: I mean, that's a guess on my part, but if you could tell us something about that. Yeah, well,
01:48:08: I was an unusual patient in the cancer ward.
01:48:15: We got the sense pretty early on that the doctors and nurses that we were dealing with didn't deal with a lot of patients my age.
01:48:28: Now, of course, there's the whole world of pediatric oncology, which is just heartbreaking.
01:48:33: But that wasn't our world in the world of adult cancers. I was relatively young at 28, and I think, just medically speaking, that worked in my favor in terms of the strength and capacity of my body to handle the chemo and the radiation and all the rest.
01:48:59: I mean, those things certainly threw me for a loop, but I was in pretty good shape to handle those things.
01:49:10: But to be sure, at that age, and as a seminary student, the real impact was the lessons that were impressed upon us going through it and how that set the stage for my becoming a minister.
01:49:26: I've never quite put it this way until now, but I suppose it was a kind of lab class in seminary, because here
01:49:36: I was in my third year of seminary when I was diagnosed, I suppose, without ever signing up for it, and believe me,
01:49:44: I wouldn't have. It turns out I'd signed up for, what, would we call it Cancer 101 or something? But that became one of my field classes in seminary, so that by the time
01:49:55: I graduated, I had not only the four years of coursework, but cancer experience to season it all.
01:50:06: And I do think that those lessons were deeply impressed upon Christi and me and that we've taken them with us ever since, lessons about God's sovereignty, lessons about the
01:50:19: Gospel being our real comfort and so forth. I will say that I had to learn in my pride that suffering, even going through cancer, does not automatically make you instantly holy.
01:50:38: You can go through something like that and think, oh boy, I've got it made now,
01:50:43: I've had cancer, I'm going to be so holy for the rest of my life. The Lord has forged me in the furnace of affliction.
01:50:52: I've paid my dues, I've met my quota, I won't have to suffer again, because this past year has had quite a bit of it.
01:50:59: I'm in the clear. And then as soon as that thought crosses your mind, the next moment you sin.
01:51:06: And you realize that just going through something like that doesn't mean that you're not going to wrestle and struggle anymore.
01:51:14: The fact is you do, you wrestle, you struggle with sin, and in fact, you wrestle and struggle to hold on to the lessons that you learned.
01:51:22: There's nothing automatic about taking with you the things that were impressed upon you in the experience.
01:51:28: And it's a work of grace, it's a work of the Spirit that you press on with those lessons in hand and not leave them behind.
01:51:38: Before I forget, I just wanted to, I don't know if you've read this, but I wanted to quickly also highly recommend a little booklet that you could get very inexpensively from Chapel Library, and that's
01:51:51: Sickness by J .C. Ryle, which has been very helpful to me going through trials in my own life, whether they involve sickness or not.
01:52:01: And also, it's a very easy thing to give away to people on large scale when they are ill because of the brevity of the booklet and also the very inexpensive cost of the booklet.
01:52:18: And you could get that at chapellibrary .org, chapellibrary .org.
01:52:24: J .C. Ryle was a 19th century Anglican bishop, low church bishop, and had a lot in common with the theology of our guest today.
01:52:35: Just out of curiosity, has Bishop Ryle spoken to you from the past at all in any significant way?
01:52:41: I have read some, Ryle. I haven't read that particular booklet, but it sounds wonderful. Oh, it's excellent.
01:52:47: And so I really want you to leave our listeners with what you most want etched in their hearts and minds before they leave the program today.
01:52:57: Well, I think I might go back to what you asked before, to what our listener asked about the redemptive work of Christ.
01:53:07: I suppose that's the preacher in me. I always want to bring it back to him, that in Christ there is the hope of eternal life.
01:53:20: There is the hope, the certainty that he's going to return at the end of the age and renew the ground we're walking on and raise our bodies and reunite us body and soul.
01:53:31: And that is our real hope. And that's a hope that sustains you no matter what you're going through.
01:53:42: And it strikes me, Chris, how regularly the New Testament points us all the way to the end of the age as the stuff of our hope.
01:53:52: The Bible does give us glimpses and hints about going to be with Jesus right after we die.
01:54:00: But where the Bible really points us is all the way, all the way to the end of the age, when
01:54:07: Christ is going to come back and clothe us with bodies that are glorious and imperishable and powerful and honorable like the body he has right now.
01:54:18: And we want to make sure that we have a hope that goes that far. Don't settle for a short -circuited hope.
01:54:25: And then I guess I'll add one more thought if we have time. Yes, we do. Which is don't wait to think on these things.
01:54:37: The day you're told you have cancer isn't the first time that you ought to be thinking about, gee, does the
01:54:44: Lord really reign? Is the gospel really true? What does the redemptive work of Christ mean to me?
01:54:51: Now is the time to be thinking about that. And now is the time to be practicing that with respect to minor inconveniences and frustrations when you go out to start up the car and the car doesn't start because the battery is dead and so you're going to miss this or that appointment.
01:55:09: The question is how do you handle that? Are you practicing in the little things these truths?
01:55:18: The Lord reigns, this dead battery in some way is for my good, I'm longing for a new world in which if there are batteries they'll never die, that sort of thing.
01:55:28: Don't wait for some major crisis. But think on these things now with the help of a steady, faithful ministry of the word at your church week in and week out.
01:55:42: Imbibe these things now. Practice them in the little things. And that will pay off in spades if the big things come.
01:55:54: Yes, and although the Word of Faith Pentecostals may be in serious heresy with their insistence that you will definitely be healed on this earth if you have a strong enough faith, if you place your trust in Christ, something better will happen.
01:56:12: You'll be eternally healed. Absolutely. And that's with certainty. That's right, and that's a great response to all those claims.
01:56:20: You know, these Word of Faith claims, what I want to say is, that's all you got? That's nothing.
01:56:26: Because what I've got is the resurrection of the body at the end of the age, and there's no question about it.
01:56:34: Amen. Are you available for speaking engagements at conferences and things such as that?
01:56:40: I am, yeah. I've spoken at a number of conferences and retreats. I'm happy to serve in that way if I can.
01:56:48: Well, I know that your church's website is newhopefairfax, that's F -A -I -R -F -A -X dot
01:56:54: O -R -G, newhopefairfax dot O -R -G. Any other contact information you care to share?
01:57:02: Well, let's see. I have a website that sheds a little bit more light on my two books, the one we've talked about today and another book on the subject of heavenly mindedness, and the web address is paulwolfpage .com,
01:57:16: so P -A -U -L -W -O -L -F -E page, P -A -G -E dot com.
01:57:23: Great. Well, I definitely want to have you back to discuss your other book. Oh, I'd enjoy it.
01:57:28: I've enjoyed our time today, Chris. I'm so grateful for the opportunity. Well, I'm grateful for you being on, and I know that our listeners are grateful, especially those who have already written in.
01:57:41: We do have a listener that has a question that we don't have time to bring up because of the time running out here, but since you gave us your address and it's a good question, we're going to ship out a book to you, and that's the last book, actually, that we have left.
01:57:56: And definitely, Paul, perhaps even in another minute, if you could say a farewell to our listeners with some jewel that they may have pressed upon their hearts today.
01:58:07: Sure. In about a minute, if you could do that right now. Oh, yeah.
01:58:13: Well, the gospel is true, and Christ's grip on his people is strong, even when your grip feels so weak you're wondering if it's still there.
01:58:29: And, you know, when you're sick with cancer, you can look at your hand and it looks so weak, and you can barely pick things up, and sometimes that's a picture of what your faith feels like.
01:58:41: But the good news is that the real grip that matters isn't yours on Christ, but Christ's on you, and his hand is strong.
01:58:53: And in the world to come, Christian, you will be able to see just how strong it was all along, even if you can't see it right now.
01:59:00: Amen. And we want to thank everybody who listened today, especially those who took the time to write questions.
01:59:07: I want to thank you again, Paul Wolf. I'm eagerly looking forward to your return to our program to discuss your other book.
01:59:14: And I want to remind our listeners that next Tuesday we have Todd Freel of Wretched TV and Wretched Radio.
01:59:22: He's going to be our guest for the very first time on Iron Sherpens Iron, so I'm looking forward to that. And in a couple of weeks we have
01:59:28: Ken Ham, the world -renowned creation apologist. But I want you to have a blessed and safe weekend, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater
01:59:39: Savior than you are a sinner. God bless, and we look forward to seeing you next time on Iron Sherpens Iron.