Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense
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Read between March 24 - August 26, 2020
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Your suffering has replaced God and his truth as the lens through which you look at and understand life.
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What you fear will be directly influenced by where you focus the thoughts of your heart.
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No wonder they are afraid! Remember, God will never ask you to deny reality, but if you allow your difficulty to control your meditation, you will end up hopeless and afraid. What has your trouble done to your meditation?
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The reality is that spiritual warfare is mundane, normal Christianity because our hearts are always a battleground between fear and faith, between doubt and hope, and between what is true and what is false.
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No wonder you’re assaulted by fear, if you’ve somehow come to believe that it’s you against the world.
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You and I have to fight for the faith of our hearts.
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two psalms (118 and 136) are entirely dedicated to the importance of fighting forgetfulness.
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Give thanks to the God of heaven, for his steadfast love endures forever.
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But here is the issue: fear can be an appropriate response to the dangers of life in a fallen world, but we must not let it rule our hearts. Fear is a good thing in the face of danger, but it makes a cruel god.
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So here is the thing that we all need to fight against: we must not allow fear to become the lens through which we view life and the guide for how we make decisions.
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But Jesus did not give way to the fear of aloneness and did not let it be the lens through which he saw life. So he preached to himself the gospel of God’s presence.
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So you have to fight to see life with the eyes of faith and not through the lens of fear.
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The only truly practical and lasting solution to fear of situations, locations, or people is fear of God.
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When you fear God, the equation is not you compared to the size of your trial, but your God compared to it.
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It really is true that fear of God is the only solution to fear of anything else. Where right now does fear of God need to overwhelm fear of anything else?
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envy never rests. Envy never lives in the heart as just envy.
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1. Envy Is Natural
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We’ll never know the worth of our faith commitments and life decisions by comparing our lives to the lives of others.
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2. Envy Makes You Question Your Allegiance to God
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Our blessings are never payment for the good we’ve done, and our trials are never punishment for the wrongs we’ve done. This cause-and-effect equation is always bad spiritual math.
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Every good father does hard things with his children, not because he hates them but because he loves them and gives them what they need, which is not always the comfortable thing they want.
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Envy Is a Wearisome Burden to Carry
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4. Envy Ignores the Impermanence of the Comforts of the Present
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What is will not last forever.
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Envy tempts you to crave what is temporary while you devalue what is eternal. This never leads you anywhere good.
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5. Envy Embitters Your Heart
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The real burdens of suffering are made significantly more difficult when you carry them in a heart spiritually weakened by bitterness.
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Bitterness so obstructs your view of blessing that you can’t see it anymore. Bitterness in your heart is like being in the darkness of your basement on a day when the sun is shining and saying, “I hate the fact that I live in a world of darkness.” You don’t actually live in a dark world; rather, the structure around you and above you is obstructing your view of the sun. When envy becomes the soil in which bitterness grows, your suffering will become a lens through which you look at everything.
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6. Envy Underestimates the Goodness of God
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They hadn’t turned from their faith or rejected God in any self-conscious way, but when they told their story with great detail, there was no God in the telling.
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When you feel unprepared, alone, overburdened, and besieged, what but God is able to give you reason to hope again, to believe again, and to live again?
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Envy Forgets Eternity
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You’re not aware of it, but your envy of others and the pain it produces lock you into a view of life that has a disastrous past and a painful present but is functionally without a future. It feels as if what is will always be.
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But here is what’s vital to understand, to believe with all your heart, and to preach to yourself again and again: what is will not always be.
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It’s hard to grasp, but try; there will be a day when you will look back at this huge and horrible thing, and it will look to you like a little thing. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:16–17, “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.”
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You see, you and I only ever really understand the painful trials of this moment when we look at them through the lens of eternity.
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8. Envy Never Tells the Truth It is so tempting, when you are suffering, to look around and compare what you are enduring to what others seem to be enjoying. And as you do this, it’s so easy to fall into wanting the life of someone else. But as you can see, envy never produces a good harvest. Envy adds layers of trouble to the trouble you’re already facing. Envy robs you of hope and destroys your ability to trust. And worst of all, envy steals away the hope that is only ever found when you’re convinced of the presence and goodness of God. (I’m going to write much more about this in the second ...more
Brian Combs
envy is a liar
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When you’re tempted in your suffering to look around and calculate, you must determine to look up and celebrate. When all you feel like doing is complain, you must require yourself to find reasons to praise. When you feel abandoned and alone, you must preach to yourself the gospel of the boundless, eternal, and unshakable love of God. For a sufferer, a heart free of envy is a spiritual war, and we must all cry out to God for the willingness and strength to be good soldiers. The battle for an envy-free heart is big and dramatic for every sufferer, but the grace of God is infinitely bigger and ...more
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In ways that he was unaware of, his private conversation had become progressively theological. More and more, he thought about God, and because of that, the meaning and purpose of his life. But rather than letting what the Bible says about God help him interpret the overwhelming circumstances he was facing, he let his circumstances redefine his view of God. How could a loving God let this happen to anyone? Where were all God’s promises? Why didn’t God answer his prayers? Why were other people being blessed while he got cursed? Why didn’t God use his power to help him? Why was God punishing ...more
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None of us would ever think of seeking out the help of someone we no longer trust. Doubt in the middle of suffering has the potential to radically change your life but not for the good. Let’s Talk about Doubt Like fear, doubt is not in and of itself a bad thing.
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Because doubt drives us to know and understand, it has the power to lead you to the One who knows and understands everything. Your capacity to doubt can drive you to God, but not always. This is why we need to talk about doubt, because this God-given capacity, wrongly functioning, can be disastrous.
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The doubt of wonderment is a normal part of a life of faith, and it’s spiritually healthy when it drives you to bring your confusion to the One who has no confusion.
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But there’s a second and not so healthy form of doubt. It is the doubt of judgment.
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The minute your functional theology tells you that God is not good, it’s very hard to hold on to the confessional theology that declares he is.
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The surprise of situational distress has produced deeply emotional questions that have led them to deeply theological conclusions, but it’s been nothing like the sort of theological debate found in a classroom.
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“What has my suffering done to my theology?
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Do I still believe that God is the definition of what is loving, good, wise, and true?”
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Peter knows that when we suffer, we are susceptible to the lies that the Enemy whispers in our ears: “Where is your God now?” “Why have you been singled out?” “Perhaps God does have favorites.” “Why isn’t God listening to your prayers?” “Why do others have it so much easier than you?” “Maybe God doesn’t love you after all.” The function of all these lies is to sow seeds of doubt in our hearts when we feel the weakest, the most afraid, and are reaching out for help. The Enemy is seeking to make us doubt the goodness, love, presence, and power of God. He knows that if we begin to question God’s ...more
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Your suffering is not a sign that you’ve been forsaken; rather, it’s a sign that you live in a world that doesn’t function the way God intended and is in need of complete renewal.”
Brian Combs
Yes! Help me remember this, Lord,
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It’s practically impossible to suffer without doubt, but it’s critically important to assess what kind of doubt has taken residence in your heart.