Christian Character, Jeff Kliewer

Christian Character and the Role of Suffering

Great job kids. Next time I think the adult should have to stand up here and perform for the kids. All right, let's let's go to the Lord in prayer. Father God, we hear the sound of these children and we thank you so much for them and we pray blessing on these kids Lord that they would grow in the wisdom of the Lord and the knowledge of the Lord that their character would be developed and that they would always walk with you until they see you face-to-face and then for all eternity to praise you.

We thank you for each one of them Lord and we pray for ourselves now that we would continue growing in you by your word in Jesus name, amen. Sydney McLaughlin-Lavrone, anybody know the name? Sydney McLaughlin-Lavrone, you should know the name because she was the World Athlete of the Year in 2022.

She is a winner and the reason that she is a winner is first of all that she won in life by getting saved. She put her trust in Jesus Christ and became a Christian and so her eternal life is secured in heaven.

But on earth, she's also been proven a winner as the best hurdler in history. She holds the gold medal, hold the world records and won the gold medals for the last two Olympics. The 400 meter hurdle is one lap around the entire track.

How many of you would just be out of breath just jogging that? Well, she runs it on a full sprint and she has to hurdle ten obstacles along the way. So this requires getting every single step right. It's actually stride for stride.

She knows exactly how many steps to take and she has set the record, but this is what she says about her world record. Records come and go. The glory of God is eternal. She says I don't deserve anything, but by grace through faith Jesus has given me everything.

If you were to go to Sydney McLaughlin-Lavrone's Instagram page. Young people, you know what Instagram is, right? Some of us don't know or don't do that. But Sydney McLaughlin-Lavrone has three words as the first thing you see when you go to her page.

Jesus is Lord. She preaches Christ through her life and through her words. She's also well discipled. Can anybody guess where she goes to church? This was interesting when I found this out. John MacArthur's Church in Los Angeles, Grace Community Church.

She and her husband attend there and he is a student at the Master's Seminary preparing to be a pastor. So she married this guy named Andre Lavrone who himself was an NFL wide receiver. So can you imagine how fast their kids are gonna be?

When they grow, wow! She is the world record holder in the 400 and he was an NFL wide receiver. They're just gonna be breaking records left and right. She talks about the record that she set at the Olympics.

She broke her own record, which she does every couple of years. And she said that when she did it was very painful. I want to talk this morning about the role of pain in our lives. She says that that last hundred meters of the 400 meter hurdle was excessively painful.

It really hurt and the reporter asked her what gave you the ability to push through? She had to face that in the Olympics, but guess what guys? Each one of you is running a race through this life. You are all running after a prize to be given when you get to heaven.

So, how do you push through? Here's what she said. Just understanding that God has given us the ability to do amazing things and literally every single workout, I pray God get me through this. Do you picture that when you see somebody winning the Olympics?

You don't realize how much work has gone into it that every day of the week when she goes to work, she has to pray God get me through this because I know in my own strength, I'm gonna quit. After the first rep, I don't want to finish this.

I'm gonna be crying on the floor. She says whatever it is a person does is an opportunity to glorify Jesus and that's really what pushes me. I'm not hurting for myself. I'm hurting so that when I cross that line, I have the opportunity to have that microphone in my face and I can glorify him.

Isn't that a motivation to work hard in this life, to accomplish things, that whatever platform God gives you, maybe not the world stage as an Olympic athlete, although some of you still have a chance, right?

Eric just became a rookie at 52 years old. Who knows how far he'll go with that? But whatever platform you're given, you can glorify him. That's the reason that you endure pain, that you allow your character to be built by suffering so that you can lift up the name that is above every name.

Contrast that with Megan Rapinoe. She, in the World Cup, missed the goal in the penalty kicks that would have given the US a chance to win it and then she went back to her soccer career for the professional team in Seattle and they were playing in the championship game and it was supposed to be her swan song, her last game.

All the media was there and six minutes in, she blew her Achilles tendon. I feel bad for her. You feel sad for her. But when she got to the press interview at the end, she blamed God. She said, if there was a God, this is proof that there isn't.

She took a victim mentality that the suffering in her life proves that there is no God. Contrast that with Sydney McLaughlin-Lavrone, who gives all glory to God and is willing to endure suffering for the sake of the name.

That is above every name. This country is in perilous times. We live in very perilous times and there are competing worldviews, one that of Sydney and the other that of Megan. The two worldviews, humanism and Christianity, are clashing and fighting for the soul of this country.

The winner will be the stronger of the two. The stronger of the two. So the question I have for you, what makes a Christian strong? Where does strength come from? Really, the Christian approach to suffering is the key to winning, not only this culture, but winning in your life.

Some people settle into what I call a victim mentality, where the world and the sufferings of this life become so overwhelming that a person is given to despair and blaming the culture or blaming others for the things that happen in this life.

And to be sure, there is blame to go around. People are victims of other people and of circumstances. But we're gonna see something in the text today about what we already have been given. The value of that in Jesus Christ and what that means for our ability to endure.

Because the suffering in your life is meant to bring about endurance. And when you endure suffering, it builds character. And as your character is built, your hope grows strong and you begin to rejoice, even in sufferings, and you become a winner in this life.

Does anybody here want to be characterized at your eulogy as a loser? No, get your hand down. No, no. We want to be winners, but here's the issue. The victory has already been won for us and given to us by Christ Jesus.

And now He, in this race that we run, will train us to win in the different trials to which we are called. Let's read it. Romans 5, 1 to 5. Christian character begins with obtaining a right standing with God, but it's built.

Character, Christian character is built by having the right approach to suffering. Romans 5, 1 to 5. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Through Him, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand. And we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces, what is it?

Endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Christians already have peace with God. But to appreciate that statement that there is peace with God, you have to understand that God had war in His heart against your sin. Romans 1, 18 talks about the wrath of God.

He has wrath. That is a strong, burning, intense anger and hatred against sin, against all the unrighteousness, ungodliness of men who suppress the truth and ungodliness. Exchanging the glory of God for a lie, they worship and serve created things rather than the Creator.

And all people are categorized this way. Someone who doesn't do what the pagans do in being given over to the lusts of the flesh and to unnatural affections is still guilty of sin for at whatever point a person judges another, they condemn themselves.

Meaning that the person who doesn't commit adultery, but only has adultery in the heart, is still guilty of the law, thou shalt not build. I mean, breaking the law, thou shalt not commit adultery. Paul establishes the sin of all humankind, and he teaches us that there is wrath against sin, that God is storing up judgment against that day of judgment, at which time His wrath will be poured out on the world of the ungodly.

It's bad news. The weight of this is heavy. God's heart is turned in wrath against sinners. But now, a righteousness is revealed from heaven. It is in Christ Jesus who turned God's wrath away from us by becoming a public spectacle.

Being hung on a cross, He took the wrath of God into His body on the tree. The wrath of God was unleashed upon Him and fully satisfied in His body on the cross. He atoned for our sin in His blood. So now, those who put their faith in Jesus are credited with Christ's righteousness.

Not their own sin, but the perfection of Christ is accounted to the sinner who believes in Christ. So now, Romans 5 .1, this makes sense. What Paul is talking about here, justification by faith means we have peace with God.

There's no more war in his heart. There is no wrath to be unleashed. There was war, now there's peace. And it's not something that we must earn, but look at the verbiage there. We have peace with God.

How many of y 'all know that having believed in Jesus Christ, you already have peace with God? You are eternally secure. You cannot lose this salvation. The peace was purchased by blood and the blood is perfect.

God accounts His righteousness to you on the basis of Christ's perfection, not what you're gonna do with it. Perfect peace with God. That is the best news we could hear. We have peace with God. It's in the past tense.

In the Greek, it's in the aorist tense, which means it's a one and done, as opposed to the imperfect tense, which is this continuing thing that begins in the past. This is a complete action. Done. Finished.

As Jesus said on the cross, it is finished. He has no more war in his heart towards you. That's gospel, isn't it? That's good news. But very often as we're reading through the text and we're familiar with these things, you've maybe heard this for years.

Peace with God through faith in Christ. We tend to gloss over the details of the text and we assume that once we've gotten that, that's all it's saying. Look more carefully at verse 2. Through Him, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand.

The temptation here is to gloss over and say, oh, Paul's just repeating what he said in verse 1, but I want you to notice again the verbs. You see that little word also in verse 2? And then halfway through verse 2, it says and.

Actually in the Greek, both of those words are kai. K-A-I. It just means and, but it's separating two independent thoughts. So the idea that you have peace with God is not all that you have. There's a second thing and then a third thing.

In verse 2, the second thing, the second settled reality that is already ours, is access. Do you see this? Through Him, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand. Not only is there peace with God, as in all of His wrath has been propitiated.

There's no more war in His heart. There's something more to say. Now you, Christian, have access to the Father. You stand in grace, we are told. Grace is this favorable disposition. It's not just that He doesn't want to crush you.

It's that He wants to bless you. He is there to hear your cry. A great way to make this differentiation is to think about the case of Absalom. Absalom, that wicked sinner, the son of David, who rebelled against his own father.

And so he was cast out until Joab got this woman to come and talk to King David. And she told him a parable a story where she basically made up a story about her two sons. She said, one of my sons killed the other in the field.

And now all the people want to kill the murderer and I won't even have an heir anymore. Isn't there any way for the murderer to be forgiven, to be brought back? And David said, we will forgive him. We will bring him back.

And then the woman said, well, what about your son, Absalom? You see what she did there? She set him up just like Nathan did with the story of the sheep when he had sinned with Bathsheba. Well, David got the point.

And he also knew who sent her to say that. Did Joab tell you to say this to me? And Joab is standing right there. Yes, it was Joab. The king seems to know everything. And then an interesting development happens.

David is willing to welcome Absalom back. To Jerusalem. He can be forgiven. David's not going to kill him. Let Absalom know the son can be forgiven. No more wrath. But, 2 Samuel 14, if you want to read this later, this is where the story comes from.

I'm just going to read a verse or two. So Joab arose and went to Geshur and brought Absalom to Jerusalem. And the king said, let him dwell apart in his own house. He is not to come into my presence. So Absalom lived in his own house and did not come into the king's presence.

No more wrath. The king's not going to kill him. He's safe. He's got a safe house. He can live right there in Jerusalem. But Absalom, David wants you to know you are never to go see his face. You are never to come into his presence.

You can only come this far. The point of Romans 5 too is to say, not only are you forgiven, the wrath is no longer going to be poured out. You are at peace with God. And Kai, there's something more. You need to hear this.

You have access to the king of kings. You have obtained access into this favor, this grace in which you stand. The king wants you to come to him into his very presence. Queen Esther was made the successor of Vashti, who is no longer allowed into the king's presence.

Ahasuerus or however you say that name. I always mess that name up. Ahasuerus. I can never do that. Maybe some of you can pronounce that name. This Persian king, he tried to show off his wife and Vashti had to come parade for everybody.

And because she refused to do that good on her, the king said, you're no longer allowed into my presence. And so he replaced her with replacement wife Esther. And the replacement wife is not allowed into his presence whenever she wants.

She can only go when he invites her. And it had been 30 days since the king had seen her. Yet wicked Haman was plotting to destroy the Jews. And she needed to go talk to the king about this. And so Mordecai tells Esther, you might be able to save your own life by laying low, but God will find deliverance for the Jews either through you or without you.

And maybe it was for such a time as this. And she finally says, if I die, I die. She goes to the king's presence without being invited, hoping that the king will extend the scepter to her. You remember this?

And when she goes to see him, the king extends the scepter and she comes and she touches it with her finger and she is allowed to plead before the king. And he has favor towards her. And so when she comes, he lifts the scepter.

The point of the story and the reason that this is so much repeated in the book of Esther, I think, is to set us up by a typology, by an example, that you Christian will understand that your king of kings, far greater than a Persian king, far greater than King David, who held his own son at bay, this king, in his blood, made propitiation for your sin and he welcomes you to come.

He has made a new and living way into the access, into access to the Father. You have obtained access into this grace in which you stand. What does that mean? That means when you wake up in the morning, you can talk to the king of the universe.

And when you begin to suffer and something is difficult in your life, you can go right into the throne room and speak to him. Ephesians 2 .18. Listen for the Trinity in this verse. For through him, that is Christ, we both, Jew and Gentile, have access in one spirit to the Father.

Ephesians 2 .18. All three members of the Trinity. Through him, we both, Jew and Gentile, have access in one spirit to the Father. We have access to God Almighty because of what God did in Christ Jesus, paying for your sin.

Isn't that great news? You can pray to the king of the universe at any point in time. Ephesians 3 .12. In whom we have boldness. Did Esther go with fear and trembling? You better bet she did. It looked like odds were she was going to die.

And yet here you are welcomed into the throne room with boldness, with confidence through our faith in Christ. Ephesians 3 .12. 1 Peter 3 .18 says, God made him who is righteous, let me quote it actually, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.

Bring us to God. He made access. All right, so here are two things that are settled. As you put your faith in Christ, there was no more war in God's heart. He had peace with you, one. Number two, he's granting you unfettered access to the throne of God.

Number three, you are given joy and hope of the glory of God. Look at the end of verse two. Romans 5 .2. This is the third thing. And then we have some instruction for our own lives. We rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

What does it mean to rejoice in hope? It means to have great joy because of some future thing that you already know about. You have joy because of the hope in your heart, but what is your hope of? It says the glory of God.

Now, this is not just a nebulous thing that you want God to receive glory. It actually refers to your being glorified in him. Your glorification. He is the one like the sun of the universe that shines its light, and you are the moon that reflects his glory.

And you share in that glory in that way. Turn a couple pages to Romans chapter 8, verses 17 and 18. Paul will expound upon this idea when he's teaching the spiritual life in Romans 8. And the motivation for the Christian here, the reason that you have hope and joy already, is that you're an heir.

If children, then heirs. Wouldn't it be great to find out that your parents are actually secretly rich? And one day you're going to be a multi-millionaire? That'd be pretty cool. But how much more? How much more if you're an heir of God and a fellow heir with Christ?

Provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. Verse 18, for I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

Back to Romans 5. That's the idea here. As Paul would write, I think Phil quoted it when he was leading worship, in 2 Corinthians 4 .17, these light and momentary afflictions are achieving for us an eternal weight of glory that far surpasses them all.

There is a cloud of glory awaiting us that we know about now, that we're going to share in our inheritance as the children of God that makes us hopeful now, joyful now. There ought to be no such thing in the world as a moping, despondent Christian.

It's an oxymoron. A Christian who mopes around and feels sorry for themselves with a victim mentality that life is so hard and it's true life is hard. And why are all these bad things happening to me?

You don't get to know the reason, but there is one. But to live the Christian life without hope and joy misses this promise. It's a settled fact that we have this glorious inheritance in Christ Jesus.

It's not always easy to be joyful in the midst of suffering. Sometimes we are victims. Did you know that? Go talk to Christians in Nigeria with Boko Haram chasing them down and chopping off heads and stealing their kids, imprisoning them.

Go to North Korea and stand for Christ. Often, the righteous suffering, Peter will say, what glory is it or what good is it if you suffer for your own sin and have to endure? But there's a kind of righteous suffering that produces character.

And now we move on to this point. Okay, listen. There are three settled realities that should already give you hope and joy. You have peace with God, you have access to God, and you have the glory of God promised to you as an inheritance.

Pretty good stuff, right? But there's something that could undermine this joyful hope that characterizes the Christian, and that is suffering. If you looked around this room and you really got to know each person here, and I know I think most of you, I know so many of your stories.

I can think about them right now. I know of some intense suffering that each of us have endured. Suffering in this life. And suffering can be so intense that you lose your joy. You become despondent. You begin to despair.

So what Paul does here, telling you to be joyful in hope, he then addresses that. Look at verses three and four. He says we rejoice. He's going to tell us how, and then he finishes it with hope. That's just where he left off in verse two.

We rejoice in hope. Now he says not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings for these various reasons, and it produces hope, and this hope will not disappoint us. So the big idea here is that your joy is resilient.

Your hope cannot be undermined by the enemy when you obey this text. So what is it? It is this mindset, this knowledge from the word, this you might not have known this, but this could change your life, that God intends your suffering for good.

Genesis 50 20. What the enemy meant for evil, God intended for good. Romans 8 28. God works all things together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. You following me?

So let's look at these verses. There's four steps, so to speak, and it's a natural process. This is what it will do on its own. It's not that you do it. It's being produced by God at each step. Picture it like a machine.

There's cogs in the wheel, and as the machine runs, this is what happens. The Christian who has these things will be trained by suffering, endurance, character, hope. This is how the machine works, but it's possible to take a giant iron rod and jam it into the machine and the wheels stop turning right.

That giant iron rod is called sin. That's how you subvert the process of God's working in your life. Here's the process. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings knowing that suffering produces endurance.

Isn't that true? Well, of course it is. If you're suffering, you got to endure it. You got to hang on and keep fighting, and endurance produces character. That's so missing in the Christian world today.

People of character that can stand on what is true, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Think of the first transaction. Suffering comes into your life. Do you pray for suffering? God, let me suffer? No, don't do that. We do not invite suffering into our lives. That's never our prayer, nor are we ever taught to pray that way.

What you're taught is that sufferings will come. In this world, you will have trouble, but take heart. I have overcome the world. Sufferings come, and they produce endurance. It's possible though for Christians by sin to escape suffering so that they don't have to endure.

There's a form of suffering that is waiting on a spouse, waiting on the good gift of God in marriage. And some young people might say, you know what? This suffering is too hard for me. I won't endure it.

And so they take matters into their own hands, and they sleep around with people who are not their God-given spouse. And the suffering of that temptation and the struggle to fight off temptation, you don't have to suffer that way, but neither did you endure.

And that cog in the wheel, that sin, doesn't require endurance. It's a shortcut. It undermines the process. It breaks down the machine, and there's no character built. See the problem? We went out witnessing in Philadelphia a couple days ago, Tim and Joe and I, streets of Kensington, and we saw people getting mugged over here and motorcycles on the sidewalk, and it was pretty intense.

But you look around at the breakdown of a culture, and you realize that what was lacking was fatherly discipline. A father to teach a young man or a young girl to endure suffering. Discipline is a form of imposed suffering.

It doesn't feel good at the time. Hebrews 12, it's painful, but enduring it, it results in character. In the same way, the next step in the process from suffering to endurance is endurance producing character.

This is God's design. That as you endure, you become stronger. Each time you undermine that process, you disrupt or interrupt what God has designed for the building of your character. You fall into sin, you're more likely to sin again.

Very often, the one who has endured suffering stops enduring, and they don't get the result of character, character building. Why? Because they quit. Sydney McLaughlin, every time she goes to that track, has to run her heart out, and every day she has to pray, Lord, get me through, because if not, she didn't have the strength in herself to do it.

She didn't have the character. She had to pray for that strength. She couldn't do it on her own. But the more times she does that, the more reps she puts in, day after day, the character is built, strength inside of her, she can overcome.

The one who quits doesn't build character. In fact, what is a quitter more likely to do the next time they're called to endure? Quit again. Quitting makes you more likely to quit the next time. And then lastly, the same process unfolding, character produces hope.

Hope is a disposition of, it's a future-oriented aspect of faith. You're looking at the future, and so your hope is in what God will do through this suffering. He's going to accomplish something with this suffering, and so you have hope.

But what if, rather than speaking about what God will do, a person interrupts that machinery, jams another iron rod into the machine, and instead starts complaining? What does complaining do in your life?

It undermines your hope. The person who starts to complain will complain again and again, and before long, they fall into that victim mentality, and complaining undermines the natural result of hope. But the Christian who knows this is trained by it.

That when you suffer, it's God behind it. Even if there's a victimizer, it's good to fight against that. You want to fight for righteousness and justice, of course. But whatever God calls you to endure is purposeful.

The struggle you might have at your workplace or at school, it gets so hard, or in your family, in a relationship. Why hang on? Because God is using the suffering in your life to make you endure in order to produce character, which only increases your hope.

Amen? This is God's way of building strength, making you a winner in life. Did you know that the Methodist movement was one percent of the United States of America in 1776? It was mostly Anglicans, and that was more in the South, and then to the North were the Congregationalists, the Puritans.

But Methodists were one percent. By 1850, they were 37 percent of the American religious landscape. How did the Methodists take over like that? One example is Francis Asbury, who traveled more than anybody in American history, prior to automobiles and planes, more than 300 ,000 miles on horseback.

He crossed the Appalachian Mountains 60 times to reach the frontier people. He was a Methodist. He said, go into every kitchen and shop, address all, aged and young, on the salvation of their souls. It was men of character, the Methodist circuit riders, who were willing to go out preaching the gospel to anyone and everyone.

Now, isn't it sad what's happened to Methodism? Now they sit out there and wave rainbow flags on their lawns and cry some victim story of social justice. Sad. Methodism has fallen. But the original United Methodists, the Francis Asbury's, even John Wesley, although I have some differences with him theologically, there's a man who would go pour out his heart.

He had character. These were men of character. Did you know that this country was built by the Protestant work ethic? It's what John Stuart Mill and so many of the economists that observed America and said, what makes America so exceptional?

It was that the Christians were willing to work. They had character. Hitler was not afraid of every soldier in World War II, but he did say that he trembled at the American soldier because of their heart.

These were people that fought. I'm afraid many Christians in America have lost that, lost character, and instead given into a spirit of fear. All this to say, this is God's plan. In the last verse, Romans 5 .5, hope does not put us to shame.

So we're circling back to where he began in verses 1 and 2. These settled realities because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. You have a down payment.

You already have the guarantee of your inheritance, Ephesians 1, 13 and 14. The promised Holy Spirit. Your heart is guarded by the love of God. Think of this. If the Father would give Jesus Christ on the cross to atone for your sins, how will he not with him also give you all things?

Everything that you need for life and godliness. He's got you. His love guards your heart. And yes, our God is a Father who disciplines us. He allows suffering in our lives. Even that is for our good.

And so in closing, I want to summarize three settled realities to take away this morning. You have peace with God. There's no wrath remaining on you. You might have guilt from things you've done when you were younger in your BC era.

It's under the blood. He is not against you. He is for you. And that's the second thing. You stand in grace. You can go directly to the Father at the drop of a hat. You don't need a scepter. It's always extended.

You can pray and walk into his presence and he will graciously answer your prayers in powerful ways. Change your circumstances. Or give you the strength to endure. You can go right to the Father. The third thing is you have joy and peace because of the future glorification that we have in Christ.

That's how you ought to live. As a joyful, peaceful, hopeful Christian. Now, three things that can interrupt that. What were they? Things like enabling rather than enduring the suffering. Quitting in the midst of the trial rather than enduring into character.

Or complaining. These kinds of sins, and not just those three, but any kind of sin introduced into the equation short-circuits the process. It jams it up and messes it up. But the natural default operation is this.

That when you're going through suffering, God is building your character and actually increasing your hope. So there ought be no despairing Christians. As bad as it gets and as hard as it is and everybody here endures suffering, God is building character through the sufferings he is taking you through.

I close with an illustration. My own uncle, Herbie. Uncle Herb was born just before World War II. And he grew up in those years without anything because the war had just destroyed Poland where they had moved.

His dad, Paul Klee, where my grandfather, got taken captive by the Russians, the Soviet Union. He was a German soldier, but a Mennonite, a pacifist. So he laid down arms and was taken into captivity and spent four years in a Russian gulag.

Can you imagine what he was like coming out of a gulag? Five out of a hundred made it back to Germany who went into the gulag. Ninety-five percent chance of dying. He survived it somehow. Came back to Germany, but he had mental problems.

PTSD, we would call it now. And he struggled greatly that way. When Uncle Herb was young, 1954 or something like that, my dad was four years old, so 1954, they moved to Washington State. Now imagine young people being a middle schooler coming into the United States of America from Germany after World War II and not speaking a word of English.

Pretty hard middle school years. Yeah, you can bet so. He was made fun of. He couldn't speak the language and eventually he dropped out of school and worked on a farm. He worked and he worked on the farm until in his mid-adult years around my age, he fell off the tractor and broke his back.

And he was paralyzed from the waist down. Never married. Now living in Linden, Washington, he was using his wheelchair to drive around town and every summer, every other summer, my side of the family would come back from Florida where we had moved and we would go visit Uncle Herb in Linden, Washington.

And I want to tell you this. Every time we saw him, he was the most joyful man you've ever met. So much hope. A broken back, struggling to make ends meet, wheeling around town. But you know what he did in his spare time?

He made handwritten copies of the Bible. He had so much joy, so much hope. And when I would go there, I was just amazed. I always wanted to see my Uncle Herb because here was a man who just made you happy to be around him.

Think of what he endured from living through World War II under Adolf Hitler. His dad impressed into the military. All of those struggles. Paralyzation. He endured. And yet it made him more and more like Christ.