Christ Scourges his Children

All right, we are going to pray.

We're going to get started.

Those of you online, if you have questions, this would be the time to actually put them into the chat window because now that I've joined in, I

won't, they won't disappear.

So, and you guys have no audio.

Let me unmute you.

There we go.

Can you all hear me now?

There, there we go.

Okay, good.

All right, let's pray and we will get started.

Lord Jesus, again, as we open your word, we ask that through your Holy Spirit, we may rightly believe, confess, and do

according to what you have revealed there.

All to the glory of your name, we ask in Jesus' name.

Amen.

All right, I know we have at least one potential follow -up question as it relates to the

sermon.

You'll note I spent a large amount of time in Psalm 107, which is one of these fascinating

texts because Psalm 107 is telling us to think on, to meditate on the

steadfast love of the Lord.

But there's this pattern that happens in scripture.

We see it in very small little vignettes in Psalm 107.

It's practically the entire story of the book of Judges.

And I think if we argue correctly, it's actually the story we find ourselves in.

Have you stopped to think about it?

And that is that we are all, to one degree or another, and it seems like a

lottery.

We've all won prizes in a really bad lottery.

So for me, dealing with a slow metabolism, it doesn't matter if I

exercise, by the way.

It's just so annoying.

My wife put me on keto and all it did was make me hungry.

So I struggle with weight issues.

And I'm being polite by calling it.

Let's just call it what it is.

I'm fat, okay?

And I hate it and I want to see my feet again.

But all my efforts at this have just resulted in just things getting worse.

And even when I have lost weight, as soon as I go back to eating normal, which

for me is not a lot, I really just don't eat a lot of food, I still start to climb the

charts.

And then, of course, I talked about my anxiety and the fact that I struggle with depression.

My first bout with clinical depression was when I was in fifth grade.

And I didn't know it at the time that that's what it is.

Somebody had to help me recognize that fact.

And then I always keep pointing this out.

I look at all of y 'all and it's like, whoa, what's happened to you?

You guys are way worse, right?

And so the idea then is that oftentimes what we try to do is we try to play

that Pharisees game where we try to figure out the particular sin

the way in which we didn't specifically follow what God told us to do.

We didn't have enough faith.

We didn't tithe.

We didn't whatever.

And somehow connect the current trouble that we're having to that.

But unless, and I like to point this out, it's very rare that you see anything like that.

So unless you've robbed a bank, it always cracks me up the story of the guy who in

Minnesota on a summer day robbed a bank by driving up in a

snowmobile.

On a warm day, he drove up to a bank, parked in the parking lot, left the snowmobile running,

had a mask on, robbed the bank, and they caught him because snowmobiles are not

exactly known for their great agility when it comes to outpacing the law.

And then of all things, when he got out of prison, he did it again.

He pulled up to the same bank on a snowmobile, and that time, they didn't even wait for him

to rob the bank.

They called the police as soon as he pulled.

Into the parking lot,.

Because they knew what he was gonna do.

And you know, look it up.

You can Google it.

It's actually, it's a story.

I'm thinking, what a moron.

Okay, so there he is.

He's sitting in prison, and there's a real reason why he's sitting in prison, because he's stupid,

okay?

You know, and had he been shot, like let's say that bank robbery number

one had resulted in him discharging a weapon in order to defend himself, and he got shot in the leg,

and he now walks with a limp.

If that had happened, you could sit there and go, all right, the reason why his leg is janky

and he walks with a limp is because he was robbing a bank when he got shot in the leg.

But when things show up in our lives, it usually starts with the annual visit to the

doctor.

By the way, it's real simple.

If you don't want to have anything go wrong in your life, don't go to your annual visit.

This is a solid logic, right?

You know, this is the reason why I'm so healthy.

Okay, but it starts with you going for your annual checkup and the

doctor goes, interesting, right?

I hate that word.

Okay, when a doctor says interesting, it's not interesting, it's gonna be expensive.

Okay, the first words out of his mouth are, how good's your insurance?

You know, this is gonna cost a lot of money.

And then they put you on meds, you have surgeries and all this kind of stuff.

This is when we first find out about these things.

And there's not a specific thing that you can point to that says, all right, so that time that I

called Bruce Burns a booger head, that's the reason why I now have cancer.

You know, it doesn't work this way, right?

Bruce, you're here, so I just had to tease you.

It's all right, but instead, the idea then is that

the collective consequence of our sin, and you have to go back to Genesis 3.

And this is really the big, if you would, kind of the big overarching,

if you would, governing text on this in Genesis 3, when God is handing out his punishments to

Adam.

All right, so we start with the serpent, work our way up to Eve, and now we get to Adam.

To Adam, he said, because you've listened to the voice of your wife, see,

this tells me, God, I'm not supposed to listen to my wife.

Okay, all right, no way that may be an overreach.

Okay.

I said useless.

Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry, I was reading it in a different problem than the one being addressed.

Because you've listened to the voice of your wife, and you've eaten of the tree of which you commanded, you shall not eat of it.

Curse is the ground because of you.

In pain, you shall eat of it all the days of your life.

So you'll know immediately, planet Earth itself is put under a curse.

The land is cursed, and so I always point out that when it comes to garden weeds,

somebody actually corrected me.

You remember a few months ago, I was talking about, I'm one of the most gifted weed farmers in all of North Dakota.

Somebody thought I was talking about cannabis.

It's like, what?

Yeah, I, wow, okay,

no, I'm not growing cannabis in my yard.

These are dandelions and wildflowers and things with prickly burrs and stuff like that.

You know, so you gotta be careful what you say.

But the reason why all of this exists is due to the fact that we're under the

curse.

So the Earth itself, if you would, is fighting us.

The Earth itself is fighting us, and then you'll note that the toil and the labor that

results in us being able to put food on the table, thorns and thistles, it shall bring forth for you, and you

shall eat the plants of the field by the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread until you return to the ground.

For out of it were taken, for dust you are, and dust you shall return.

That we learn from other passages, like what I preached from Psalm 107, that the toil that we

engage in harms us.

It wears us out, all right?

One of the things that I never had an appreciation for until I got here is

just how deadly, how deadly not only hard labor

is, but exposure to the sun on a day -to -day basis is.

There are some folks that live in this area who, no joke, they may have

five to 10 years on me as far as age, but they look like they're in their 80s or 90s.

They're just weathered, cracked, leathery, because of all of that constant exposure to the sun and

the hard work that they've done as farmers, right?

You know, I've been lucky.

I've had a desk job for like my entire life, and it shows, but, you know, in other

ways.

But the thing is is that having a desk job doesn't wear my body out the same way other people's bodies are worn out

by doing hard physical labor.

And then we learn then that there's a method to all of this, and so God has

allowed these consequences to occur.

And then you'll note, we all break down differently.

Although we're made of the same stuff, we're all breaking down.

So, you know, you might know somebody who's, you know, they've gone to be with

the Lord, and the last years of their life, you know, were spent fighting cancer or something

to this effect.

You know, I remember when I first got to Kongsvinger, there was a woman who was, I had met the year before, and

she was a lovely lady, and she was perfectly healthy.

And right before I came to Kongsvinger, her mother had passed, and

she was emptying her mother's house after the funeral, and she slipped on a patch of ice

and broke her hip.

But it shattered it in such a terrible way that it started creating health

complications for her.

And one of the health complications that she, as kind of a weird ancillary effect, it wasn't the direct result of

her breaking her hip, but that because she was having complications, one of the complications created in her

that she was getting these cauliflower growths on her heart valve.

And so, you know, she was in a dire situation where she needed her body to

become strong enough so that she can have a surgery on her heart valve because,

you know, the domino effect of her slipping on the ice resulted in this problem.

And when the deadline came for her to, for the doctor to say, we're either gonna go

with the surgery or we're not because they didn't wanna kill her on the table that way, the doctor said, you're

not strong enough, you're actually getting weaker.

And so the doc, I showed up, you know, that was the day that I was visiting her at the hospital, and I showed up,

and she had just been given the death sentence by her physician.

You know, she didn't have much more than a few months to live after that, and the first thing she said to me when I walked in is, I don't wanna die.

It's the first thing she said.

And I asked her what the doctor said, and I said, well, then, you know, this is above my pay grade.

My job here is to prepare you for your death.

And so, although you do not wanna die, and I understand that, today you are alive, and today we are going to

prepare you because in a few short weeks you're gonna be with Christ.

And she was.

First funeral I did here.

And so the idea then is that, you'll note that,

I'll say this kindly, Kongsvinger is not a place for the bright, shiny pennies.

You fit right in, Bruce.

Yeah, not wrong.

Just from the pastor all the way down, right?

We have the tongue in there.

Yeah, right.

Okay.

And the thing is, is that each and every one of us being made to suffer the way we have, God has

worked that.

There's a logic to it.

So when we get to Psalm 107, so we'll take a look at that, Psalm 107, all

right?

And I'd love to kind of work back through this.

Is it encouraging us to think on, to meditate on the steadfast

love of the Lord?

And it's defining it in ways that make you sit there and go,.

Say what?

And I knew it was coming.

There's Bruce's hands.

Right, but scripture interprets scripture.

Yes.

All right.

So Psalm 107 talking about God bringing these desolations and hard times

is difficult, but it's only difficult, it's more difficult if you look at it alone, and it's much

easier to understand if you look at it as things are related to us in God's word, particularly in the new covenant in

Jesus Christ.

This is why I tried to connect it to Bartimaeus today.

Well, so I'd say like Hebrews 12,

Hebrews 12, five and six.

All right, hang on a second.

Describes being in it.

There's a lot of connection to Psalm 103, which kind of describes the salvation that is the end product.

And then knowing the method from Hebrews 12, the end result in Hebrews 103, we can get to

Romans five and rejoice in our suffering.

I'm going to ask you to get a whiteboard and diagram that out.

There's a reason I've got three.

I see that, I see that.

Okay, so Bruce Burns is here, by the way, in case you haven't figured that out.

I'm sorry, guys, I didn't come here to disrupt everything.

He's apologizing and he shouldn't.

Okay, so you'll note that what he wants to see here, and this is a

good right and salutary thing, and I'll even add some more text to yours, is that

when we looked at Psalm 107, obviously we looked at it in connection with blind Bartimaeus,

why?

Because this is a fellow who had to suffer the life of a blind person.

And yet at the same time, he has this confession of who he believes Jesus is, and it's

spot on, it's fantastic.

And he ultimately receives from Christ his sight back.

He does receive a miraculous healing, but more importantly, the thing that blind Bartimaeus received from Christ

is salvation, right?

And hence the words of Christ, your faith has saved you.

That's exactly what the Greek says.

It says your faith has saved you.

And so as we consider some of the bigger issues as it relates then to suffering, Bruce

Burns has thrown his hat in the ring and said we might want to consider something from the book of Hebrews.

So Hebrews chapter 12, which verses?

I think three through six.

Three through six, all right.

So here's a different spin on it in adding more biblical data to the concept

because over and again, the person who says, well, the reason why you're suffering is because you haven't tithed or you don't have enough faith or

because you have unforgiveness in your heart.

It's a sign you're not elect, God has judged you.

Yeah, right, yeah, that sounds like, are the Calvinists now like faith

healers?

You know.

I've been dealing with Baptists all weekend on Facebook.

Got it, okay, you've been dealing with Baptists on Facebook.

Why, why would you do that to yourself?

Because it's really fun presenting it with scripture.

Okay, all right, and before we get to the passage, yes.

Yeah, yeah, so that does come up then, the question of, well, does my long -term suffering

prove that I'm not saved?

And the answer is no, absolutely not, absolutely not.

And so I always remind people that in the gospel, in the New Covenant, the promise we have are,

we have the promise of the forgiveness of our sins and we have the promise of an inheritance in the new earth.

We also are promised suffering and persecution and Christ hasn't set

us free from dying in the sense that our, you know, Christians have been dying for two millennia,

but instead, Christians, their death is different, qualitatively different than the death of somebody who's

an unbeliever.

So we'll note that, but that doesn't mean that Christians don't suffer.

So the text says, consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself

so that you may not grow weary or faint -hearted.

And that is a major theme in scripture.

It's like practically the entire theme of the book of Revelation, patient endurance.

Don't grow weary, don't grow faint -hearted.

In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

I did get a paper cut one time.

Well, nevermind, I would just, okay.

And you have, and have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?

And so my son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the

Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him, for the Lord disciplines the one he loves,

and he chastises every son whom he receives.

Yes?

Can we dig into the Greek of mestigo in verse six?

All right, hang on a second here.

Let's get this to a state where I can actually read it because that is too small for my

old eyes.

All right, verse six.

Hangar, agapa curios paideu eis.

Mastigoi.

All right, so, mastigas.

It's a whip, it's a scourge.

Yeah, flog with a cat of nine tails.

Yes, all right, so.

That's not a friendly spanking.

Yeah, right.

So you're gonna know, in the context then, the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and listen to the

Greek word, he scourges every son whom he receives.

And you're right.

Now, here is where I wanna add a different text.

One that speaks and uses this exact language.

So we saw then in Psalm 107 that God will use

deserts and difficult circumstances for the purpose of bringing somebody to their senses.

And for the Christian then, these difficult circumstances are exactly this.

They are a mastigas.

They are a scourging.

It's a disciplining.

God is disciplining us through them.

It seems kinda odd, but that's the right way to put it.

So there is a fantastic cross -reference to this.

Give me a second to pull that up.

Our fantastic cross -reference, I think it's in Mark 5.

Let me see here.

Yeah.

Yep, this is our text.

And when I preach this, I always like to point out kind of the interesting wordplay that's

in here.

But when Jesus had crossed again in the boat, he had just, by the way, cast out the legion of demons out of the demoniac of

the Gerasenes, sent them into a herd of pigs.

You shouldn't be, pig herding in Israel.

And then they went over a cliff, died in the Sea of Galilee, and then the insurance guys are still working the

claim out to this day.

But when Jesus gets back, so Jesus has crossed, so he's crossed over the top part of the Sea of

Galilee, came back to the northwestern shore there where Capernaum is.

When he had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered about him.

He was beside the sea.

Then came Jairus, one of the rulers of the synagogue.

And I love the way the Greek works here because the Greek is so insanely vivid.

This is like 8K high -def television when you read it in the Greek.

And it just seems like it's happening in the moment the way the verbs are working.

So then came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by name, and seeing Jesus fell at his feet and

implored him earnestly saying, my little daughter is at the point of death.

Come and lay your hands on her so that she may be made well and live.

And again, if you were to just kind of fill in just a little bit of the backstory because it helps in kind of

humanizing Jairus.

Jairus is going to be the fellow who when this woman shows up who's had the issue of blood for 12 years,

he's the guy who's the head of the synagogue who says, nope, you're still unclean.

Nope, you're still unclean.

Nope, you can't come to the synagogue yet.

Nope, nope, nope.

That's part of his job.

It's kind of a gross job, but it's part of the job.

So you'll note that's part of what's going on here, but he's got a 12 -year -old daughter.

And those of us who are parents know exactly just how difficult this is going to be.

We all remember those times when our kids have gotten sick.

It's horrifying because what ends up happening?

While they have a fever, you are literally standing guard.

I mean, your entire mental life seems to be brought down to a very sharp,

narrow focus on your child.

And you're checking their head.

You're making, they're dobbing your head, making sure they're taking care of, you've got their meds, that they're not endangered

and stuff like this.

And in this particular case, we can tell by the details that this girl was also throwing up.

And we know that from the details.

So she's got some kind of something serious going on.

She's probably running a fever.

She can't keep anything down.

And there's just kind of a few things that this could potentially be.

But we're not told the exact details of what she had, just that she's near death.

And so while Jesus is gone, taking care of the demoniac of the Gerasenes, he's looking at his

sundial, thinking, I don't have a lot of time here.

Has, have any of you seen Jesus?

Oh, he left this morning or he left yesterday.

He, we saw him in a fishing boat and the guy knows that Jesus can heal.

So his time is running out and Jesus lands while his daughter is still alive.

And he's, you know, rushed to find Jesus.

And he comes out of nowhere, immediately gets on his face and says, you know, have, you know, my

daughter is at the point of death, come lay your hands on her so that she may live.

And Jesus, you know, without skipping a beat, you know, went with him.

So a great crowd followed him and thronged about Jesus.

So they're all crowds around him and said,.

Oh, we're gonna go see a miracle.

Cool, Jesus is gonna heal somebody again.

So there was a woman then who had a discharge of blood for 12 years.

If you know your Mosaic covenant, you can't, you can't even visit her house because if you sit

on one of her chairs, you become unclean, all right?

So the Mosaic covenant, the law of God has made her unclean

for 12 years.

12 years, no church for you.

Can't hear the word of God.

And what, how the text describes what she goes through is consistent with what we saw

in Hebrews 12.

So she had suffered much under many physicians.

She had spent all that she had.

She was no better, but rather grew worse.

I'm gonna just be blunt.

If you don't have a, if you don't die in your sleep, this is what's gonna happen to

all of you, to me too.

If I don't die in my sleep, you're gonna go to the doctor.

Your doctor's gonna say, here's your problem.

You're gonna pay the doctor to fix your problem.

And you're gonna grow worse rather than get better and you're gonna end up dying.

Your last illness will be this, okay?

For her, this goes on for 12 years and you have to wonder what kind of physicians these are, right, and

she'd grown worse.

She had heard the reports about Jesus and she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his

garment.

Now we know from the cross -referent here, if you know one of the rules for men

in the Mosaic Covenant is that they had to have tassels coming off of their shirts, off the

corners of their shirt.

This is called tzitzioth.

That's the plural form of tzitzit.

And basically there's these tassels.

And Jews to this day, Orthodox Jews wear those.

And people who are in the Hebrew Roots Movement, which is just modern day Judaizing, they wear these things too,

all right?

So what the woman thought to herself was she'd heard the reports, she knew that Jesus can heal her,

she's gonna sneak in because she's got an issue.

And that is that she can't show her face in public because to do so is

to break one of the commandments of the Mosaic Covenant.

As an unclean person, she's required to announce her presence, she's required to

engage in social distancing like you wouldn't believe.

I think it's bad enough they stand six feet apart from people at Home Depot, okay?

This woman was by God required to socially distance and not mix with other people.

She is disobeying the Mosaic Covenant here and she's surfed into the

crowd and she touches one of the tzitzioth of Christ's garment.

That's what she was thinking.

I'll just do that, that's all that's needed.

Yeah?

But that's part of the prophecies of the Messiah that the hem of his garment would break.

So just touching the tzitzioth, the tzitzit, is not just, I'm

just gonna touch him randomly.

She's acting out of faith in a biblical prophecy.

Correct, she's acting out of faith.

Jesus is my Messiah.

That's what she's saying.

By her actions, and she's believing the prophecy that Jesus' garments bring healing, right?

So if I touch his garment, I will be made well.

And this is where we recognize that the Greek word for made well is going

to be, it's saved, okay?

So she literally says, if I touch his garments, I will be saved.

And then you have to work out from the context, what does she mean?

Well, in this context, since we know what's gonna happen, does she merely receive a

physical healing from Jesus?

No.

So this is one of those ones where you sit there and you go, which is it,

salvation or physical healing?

Yes, it's kind of like that, you know?

Does light travel in particles or waves?

Yes, okay, the answer's yes, all right?

So immediately, the flow of blood dried up and she felt in her body that she was healed of

her disease.

Wrong, okay?

That is not what the text says.

Hati iatai, hapa teis mastigas.

She was healed from her scourge.

And this word, again, it's the cat of nine tails.

She was healed from her scourge.

Now, connect this then with Hebrews 12.

God scourges those whom he loves.

Was the scourge that she received because God didn't love her or because God did love her?

This is where it gets tough.

The answer is because God did love her.

And in her own psyche, in her own mind, she is describing and thinking of what she

had to endure as a mastigas, as a scourge.

And this then sets up what I think is one of the most beautiful portions of scripture.

So Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the

crowd and said, who touched my garments?

Now, the disciples are thinking, oh no, Jesus is losing his mind, all right?

Uh -oh, we've been working a little too hard, guys.

I think Jesus needs a couple of Sabbath days off.

So his disciples said to him, Jesus, you see the crowd pressing around you and yet you said,

who touched me?

It's almost as if Peter's going, John touched you, I was touching you, Shlomo was touching you.

Itzhak, he was touching you too.

You know, what is this, Jesus, right?

All right?

So who touched me?

And so he, notice, he flat out ignores

the disciples.

All right?

So he, and yet you say, who touched me?

So he looked around to see who had done it.

Now, you're this woman and you have been declared and

repeatedly told for 12 years you are unclean.

You cannot have visitors.

You cannot not social distance.

You cannot come to the synagogue for 12 years.

Do you think God loves you or do you think God's really mad at you?

You think God's really mad at you, right?

Is Jesus mad at this woman?

No.

What's the reason why Jesus is stopping?

Is it to chew her out?

It's beautiful, watch what happens.

So the woman, knowing what had happened to her, she came in fear and

trembling and fell down before him and told him the whole truth.

And based on this idea that she came in fear and trembling and fell down before him, we've all seen how

this goes down.

This woman is, hey, it was me, right?

This is just ugly.

This is an ugly cry here.

And she just lays her heart out.

And Jesus said to her, first word, thugater, daughter.

I just love it.

It's the most unexpected thing ever.

Jesus doesn't say like the Pharisees, how dare you, you sinful woman.

You've been, God has punished you for your sins and made you suffer and rightly so.

Just look at what you've done here.

You've broken the Mosaic covenant 50 ways since Saturday and how dare you touch

Jesus and make him unclean with your uncleanness, right?

That's not what she gets.

Jesus, in kindness, in love and in mercy, looks her dead in the eye and says,

daughter, your faith has saved you.

And that's what the text says.

Your faith has saved you.

Go in peace and be healed of your mastigas,

of your scourge.

It is so amazing.

So here's a clear example of somebody who suffered horribly

and their suffering in their physical body, they even described it as a

mastigas.

And what does Hebrews 12 say?

That God scourges those he loves.

And so we recognize then that in our difficulties,

the suffering that we experience, these are not the mastigas of a God who's

intent to send us to hell.

These are the loving disciplines of a father who cares deeply for our souls

and deeply for us.

And the cross makes sense of it all because you'll remember from that Hebrews 12

text, it begins by having us think back to the sufferings of Christ.

And it's described in scripture that Christ was made perfect in his suffering.

Kind of changes everything, right?

But who of us doesn't know this?

Who of us doesn't know this?

And so these are the loving scourges of a father who wills for us to be done with ourselves,

done with our sin and to be full of him.

And so our sufferings cause us to come to the end of ourselves,

really, and reveal something fascinating.

I recently was speaking with somebody on the phone who was struggling

because of the toll that the

forced isolation and the lockdowns took on them during COVID.

And she told me, she said, you know, the only thing I feel like I have

right now is I have Jesus and the forgiveness of my sins.

All I have is my faith.

I don't have anything else at the moment.

And I said, you never had anything else anyway, but your suffering made you realize that for real.

You know, the one thing, everything else got washed away and the only thing she had left was Christ.

So you'll note then that when the self -righteous and the NAR, the faith healers, and all this kind of

nonsense, what these people are teaching us to do is to despise the discipline that God has put us under.

And rather than seeing it from a loving father, as actually coming from

the devil.

But the one thing I've noted in all the different ways I've suffered in my own life, and some of you

here have seen me kind of in my darker days.

And, you know, today's not so dark, but give it a week, things will turn around.

You're right.

Today's not so dark, but have seen me in my darker days.

It's hard to bear up and to be patient when you

are struggling, in my case, with depression.

And the connections your mind makes are so bizarre.

And to be, and just be angry, just to be angry about the circumstance or the thing that's missing in your life or

whatever.

Right?

It's really easy.

But these are the things that God uses to discipline us.

Yes.

Well, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was young and healthy, I ran long distance.

Yeah.

All right.

But when you're in your second or third mile and things are really hard, it helps to see the goal.

And a passage that comforts me greatly in suffering, it's kind of a longer passage, but

is actually seeing where God would be bringing me through this suffering helps me very much.

And heaven is a great goal.

You know, Romans 8, 18 is great, but something here, earthly, a shorter term goal that helps me

endure my suffering is 2 Corinthians 1, 3 through 10, or

3 through 11, which is God's comfort in our suffering.

But if you wanna go shorter, six through 11 narrows it down even more.

Okay.

So, and so Bruce here has kind of tapped into what the

scripture teaches us to do in the midst of our suffering.

Because you don't know when your suffering is gonna stop.

You don't know if Christ is gonna answer your prayer and you bring your debilitating pain or

agony or anxiety to an end.

You don't know this.

So, you know, how do you day by day have something to hang on to?

So he used the analogy that when he was young, back when Noah and the dinosaurs were still around,

Bruce used to run cross country or he would run, you know, he brought long distance races.

That's something we both have in common.

I ran cross country for a couple of years too.

I was never any good at it.

I don't know why I did it now that I'm thinking about it.

But one of the things that helps when you're racing in a 5K

and you're three and a half K into the 5K and your muscles are screaming at you and yelling for oxygen,

how do you get past that?

And do you have to keep your eyes on the end?

And which is what scripture teaches us to do regarding the eschaton.

Over and again, the reason why scripture reveals what's coming when Jesus comes back, and we only

get a foretaste of it, just a tiny sip of the soup that he's making, is that that taste is

designed to keep our eyes focused on what is coming.

But sometimes you need something temporal.

And so Bruce's, 2 Corinthians chapter one.

Okay, so for Bruce, for something in the more immediate term, he looks to 2 Corinthians

chapter one.

And I'll start at verse three.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Father of mercies and God of all comfort.

Let's say already, I like this text, okay?

Because I can tell you in my own life, I need comfort and I need mercy and I need him in large heaping

portions.

He is the one who comforts us in all of our affliction so that we may be able to

comfort those who are in any affliction.

Now I wanna pause there for a second.

I want you to consider the implications here.

We are called by Christ to love one another.

Which means that the place you should be able to get comfort and help when you are in the

midst of your suffering is from another member of the body of Christ who may not be in the middle of suffering at the

moment, who recognizes that what you're going through is difficult and is there to comfort you.

And by the way, I said this in one of the Bible studies yesterday and I will reiterate it.

Christians are sometimes some of the worst people when it comes to comforting, all right?

If, okay, if you know somebody who has, somebody close to them who died and they are

mourning, when they are mourning and they are like in the first days of dealing

with that, do not say anything.

Sit quietly, let them cry.

Do not try to problem solve their life for them.

It is just so annoying.

I remember one time when my best friend died, I was really, really

wrestling with it and some well -meaning Christian said some really stupid things.

And murder became a sin that I had to repent of and be forgiven of, even though I didn't

actually pull the trigger.

Mentally, I did, okay?

Because I'm thinking, you morons, okay?

You know, so you just, you got,.

We are there to help each other and to comfort each other.

And note then that comforting somebody says, you know, you just get your healing and your breakthrough's on its

way because God told me you're gonna have a suddenly.

What does that mean?

Okay, you know, or you'd have your breakthrough and it's just on its way if you would just forgive that

person that you haven't forgiven in your heart.

What, just, oh, no, that's not comfort.

Those are the lies of the devil.

In fact, you sound like Job's comforters when you start talking like that, right?

But true comfort comes in helping somebody bear up under their

affliction.

So, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and

God of all comfort who comforts us in our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those who are

in any affliction.

With the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

Ah, for as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through

Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.

If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and your salvation.

And if we are comforted, it is for your comfort which you experience when you patiently endure the same

sufferings that we suffer.

Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will

also share in our comfort.

We do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia, for we were so

utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself.

That's written by the Apostle Paul.

Yes, ma 'am.

It doesn't say that.

No, the context doesn't allow itself for that.

If it was talking about persecution, it would be specifically honing in on it.

And so, this is talking about the suffering that we experience, and here's the experience.

We were so utterly burdened beyond our strength, we despaired of life itself.

That sounds to me like difficulties while traveling.

Remember the days before highways?

Traveling was an ordeal, all right?

This isn't talking about, you know, we had people wanting to stone us and kill us because we were proclaiming Christ.

He's talking about an everyday kind of life experience, which was part of the standard danger you could experience

while traveling on a road, right?

Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death, but that was to make us rely not on

ourselves, but on God, who raises from the dead.

He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us.

On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.

Also, you must help us by prayer so that many will give thanks on our

behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.

So, you can see the context here is not talking about persecution.

This is talking about, you know, an actual dangerous situation that could have resulted in their death.

Now, by the way, did God deliver Paul from being executed by a

Roman centurion?

Nope.

But yeah, but yeah, he did.

Permanently.

Permanently, right.

So, the idea then is that Paul ultimately didn't experience

that physical thing where God delivered him from danger of death.

In fact, put him in greatest danger, and it resulted in his head being lifted off of his shoulder.

But Christ ultimately delivered him because Christ says, anyone who believes in me, even though he dies, yet shall he live.

The one who believes in me will never taste death.

Yeah.

So, not to overshare, but I have an area in which I suffer which has no

prognosis of recovery at all in this earth.

It's a heaven -only kind of a thing, and I love this passage because

no matter whether it's that issue or anything else, at

no moment in my life can I ever suffer needlessly or uselessly.

Because even if it brings no benefit for me, it can bring benefit, God can use it

to help me bring benefit to others.

Even if it brings no benefit to others, God can use it to draw me closer to him in total desperate dependence,

and that can be benefit for me.

And aside from benefit for others and the benefit for me, dependence on the church and fellowship and prayer and

confession, and that they can see God's faithfulness in my suffering can build the church.

So, there is a trinity of use in any suffering in my life,

regardless of outcome.

Whether I'm delivered on earth, whether I have to relate, whether

God's mercy is sufficient for my, like Paul's thorn in the flesh.

This is true for prisoners, for the sick, for people just trying to balance their

checkbook and anything in between.

This passage in my life has completely delivered me from the despair of needless or

helpless suffering, because it lays out God's reasons and what God can use, regardless of

what we normally look at as the result.

Right.

And no discipline is pleasant while experiencing it.

I could, I, I, I.

We can dissect the rest.

You're right.

Yeah, but I'll come back to, if I could summarize one of the things that you had said,

that there's a trinity of benefit in suffering.

And I love the fact that this text, and along with all the other passages that teach

us this, that everything is anchored back in the sufferings of Christ.

Our very salvation was accomplished by God

himself suffering.

In fact, the fact that he suffered so, is held up as,

as proof that he does not, he's not far off, or he's, that he actually cares for us and understands

our weakness and the difficulty that we go through.

And so our very salvation was accomplished through suffering.

Now, this does not mean that we're some kind of a sick cult that believes that, oh man, the more suffering you

have, the better, and then we can become like Opus Dei and the Da Vinci Code, and, you know, put something on our

leg to make us bleed or whip ourselves.

That's not what we're talking about here, okay?

You don't get to pick your cross.

Christ will pick it for you, and when he lays it on you, believe me, you'll feel the weight of that thing, right?

But the point is this, is that we then, knowing what scripture says regarding

suffering, we do not sit there and go, this something's wrong,

I'm being made to suffer, this doesn't make any sense.

I'm the head and not the tail, I, you know,.

Right?

In fact, scripture says, don't act like that something weird's happening to you.

That's the Roseboro paraphrase.

We are to expect these things.

This is the normal bit.

You know, I'm always leery of a pastor who hasn't really suffered much.

I mean, you get the 28 -year -old guy who went from high school to college, to college to

seminary, seminary to the pulpit, and I'm sitting there going, no, I don't have nothing to do with you.

You haven't suffered yet, okay?

We'll talk in 15, 20 years, okay?

You know, and I think about all the different ways that, you know, we've been made to suffer as a family.

I mean, there was a time when the people at the urgent care closest to our

house, we were on a first -name basis with the doctors and nurses there because my kids were

so prone to accidents that it just was insane.

It's like, hey, Chris, how's it going?

It's going good, Bob, yeah.

Here again, yeah, well, you know, got kids bleeding out of their head, might need some staples, you know.

Okay, well, you know, how's the broken leg working out?

I think he's healed from that, but, you know, we'll be in next week.

We might as well schedule it for Monday.

You know, it's always bad, but, you know, and the

anxiety and the difficulty and all of that.

I mean, and none of those doctor bills ever came at a time when we were loaded, you know.

It's, you know, have you noticed that?

It's like just when you think you're starting to get on a sheer footing, guess what?

Braces, no.

You know, you get the idea, or, uh -oh, you got to go to the store and get, I just bought you

clothes six months ago.

I know, but I've grown four inches.

Stop growing.

I married a tall lady.

I wanted short kids.

I should have married a short lady.

Anyway, but the point is that when all of these difficulties and

sufferings and the anxieties that come from it, none of this is outside of what we should experience as

Christians.

This is not something abnormal.

This is normal, and we recognize that these difficulties come from God, and

they train us.

They train us to long for him.

They train us to empty ourselves of ourselves, to trust in him and not in

the things around us, and so, you know, when people say,.

I don't know, Pastor, I don't know what's going on.

My whole life has just become topsy -turvy.

It's like, well, duh, you were just baptized last week.

I told you this would happen, you know?

You know, this is the normal Christian life.

In this life, it's not victory after victory.

We are in a parade following Jesus to death because

Christ is making all things new through death and resurrection.

Notice he's not putting a new coat of paint on this cursed creation.

All of this is going away.

We're going away, and he will raise us up on the new day, so we look forward then to what's coming then

as well.

A world without pain, a world without sickness, a world without death.

This is the thing that, you know, many times when I'm in the depths of struggling with my depression,

I have to figure out how do I break this cycle of meditating on these worst -case scenarios?

For me, it's the eschatological text.

I'll go to the end part of Isaiah.

I'll go to the middle portion of Jeremiah.

I'll go to the book of Revelation, you know, chapter 21, and read what's coming because I

recognize that God is doing something in the midst of the suffering that I'm going through, but there's a new world coming.

And I don't think I've done this with Kongsvinger, but give me a second here.

You're gonna also get to see all the weird, crazy books I've been reading lately.

But -.

Where the scripture says, count it all joy.

Count it all joy, yeah, yeah.

But there's a great picture here, and I'll kind of end off with this thought.

In, okay, hang on a second here.

I'm gonna go to my library, and my apologies.

I've been reading a lot of books about Freemasonry and Gnosticism, so I cannot

wait to explain what I've been learning.

But let's go here, last battle.

Last battle, all right.

Yeah, I'll ever read the Chronicles of Narnia.

Further up.

Pass that part for the sake of brevity, but hang on a second here.

That's the one I want.

What is this little note here?

It's not letting me load it.

Let's see here.

This book cannot be opened. Please remove the book from your device and re -download it.

Okay.

I hate it when that happens.

See, the analog books never used to have this problem.

Hang on, let's see here.

So I gotta, let's see here.

Remove from device, there we go, and re -download it.

All right, we're re -downloading it here.

Give me a second here.

I got pretty good internet.

But the last part of this book always tears me up in a good way.

So if you're not familiar with the story, I apologize.

There's going to be a spoiler here, all right.

And it's kind of necessary.

But if you remember the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, right, in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,

you know, it's a story of Edmund and Lucy and Peter and Susan.

And one of the things that happens in the book is that Peter and Edmund

and Lucy eventually cannot come back to Narnia.

You know, they've gotten too old or something like that.

It begins with Peter and Susan couldn't come back.

And then eventually, Lucy and Edmund couldn't come back.

And what happens in the last battle is that they finally are back,

okay.

And they're afraid that they're gonna be sent back to Earth again.

But what they don't realize, and it was hinted at strongly earlier in the book, is that

when they showed up in Narnia, the reason why they were there is because they were traveling on

a train.

And it had something to do with that old professor and his silver apple from another book.

But they were traveling on a train in the British countryside.

And the train crashed, and they all died.

And they didn't even know they were dead.

And that's the bit that's kind of fun here.

But looking ahead here, at the very end of the

book, the light ahead was growing stronger.

Lucy saw the great series of many colored cliffs that led up in front of them like a giant

staircase.

She forgot everything else.

She's seeing this new world that Aslan has created.

Because Aslan himself was coming, leaping down from cliff to cliff like a living cataract of

power and beauty.

And the very first person whom Aslan called to him was Puzzle, the donkey.

This is a donkey who participated in the apostasy of Narnia, and was shamed

to do so.

And you never saw a donkey look feebler and sillier than Puzzle, as he did as he walked up to Aslan.

And he looked beside Aslan as small as a kitten looks beside a St. Bernard.

The lion bowed down his head and whispered something to Puzzle, at which his long ears

went down.

But then he said something else, at which his ears perked up again.

Yeah, one has to think that Aslan forgave him for his apostasy and participation.

No human could hear what he said either, either time.

Then Aslan turned to them and he said, you do not yet look so happy as I mean

for you to be.

Lucy said, we're so afraid of being sent away, Aslan.

And you've sent us back into our own world so often.

No fear of that, said Aslan.

Have you not guessed?

And their hearts leaped, and a wild hope rose within them.

There was a real railway accident, said Aslan softly.

Your father and your mother and all of you are as you used to call it in

the Shadowlands.

Dead.

This is what gets me through.

This next line is one of the most brilliant lines in all of literature.

The term is over.

The holidays have begun.

We all know what this is like.

Remember that feeling that you would have on the last day of school, right as summer break began?

The bell rings and you leap with joy and you

head out to the adventure of the summer that's ahead.

Tiny picture of what's coming.

The term is over, the holiday has begun.

The dream has ended.

This is the morning.

And as he spoke, he no longer looked like, looked to them like a lion.

But things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them.

And for us, this is the end of all the stories.

For we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after.

But for them, it was only the beginning.

The beginning of the real story.

All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover of the title page.

Now at last, they were beginning chapter one.

Chapter one of the great story, which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever, in

which every chapter is better than the one before.

That's our hope.

Summarized by C .S. Lewis.

And he's already begun his holiday.

And soon we will too.

So today we talked about suffering and I don't wanna answer a lot of questions and I apologize, I've run out of time.

But hopefully you have a better understanding that these are the scourges that Christ gives us

as a result of being his children because he loves us, not because he doesn't.

And the hope of the new world is real and Jesus will eventually show up someday soon

to come and rescue us, to save us, to bring us into that new world where the

story just gets better and better and better.

And all of this that we've suffered now will not even come to mind.

But until then, may Christ give us the strength to bear up under the scourges that we suffer

because he loves us.

See you guys next week.