God’s Good Design in Our Suffering

00:00:04.000 | What is God's good design in our suffering?

00:00:08.000 | What's he doing in us and for us and through us in our pain?

00:00:13.000 | These are the very questions every Christian will ask at some point.

00:00:17.000 | And these are the questions that were answered by Pastor John in a sermon exactly seven years ago today.

00:00:23.000 | The sermon was preached at Christ Community Church in Houston, Texas.

00:00:27.000 | Kevin, a podcast listener who attends the church, has been trying to get me to play the following clip for about five years now.

00:00:34.000 | Kevin, thank you for your persistence. Here it is.

00:00:37.000 | Here's Pastor John in Houston seven years ago preaching on Romans 8, verses 12 to 17.

00:00:43.000 | No pain, no gain.

00:00:47.000 | No cross, no crown, no suffering, no inheritance.

00:00:51.000 | That's the way God has set it up.

00:00:56.000 | In other words, when it says in Romans 8, verse 23, "We're groaning."

00:01:03.000 | I would say all the groaning experienced on the path of obedience is what the suffering refers to in Romans 8, verse 17.

00:01:14.000 | Because if you limit it to only hard things done to you from others because you're a Christian,

00:01:21.000 | you're missing a big piece of your suffering.

00:01:26.000 | Every pain in your life, every frustration in your life, every conflict in your life,

00:01:34.000 | every difficulty in your life that you experience walking on the path towards the inheritance is suffering with and for Jesus.

00:01:47.000 | Because it is being used by the devil to threaten your faith and used by God to strengthen your faith.

00:01:59.000 | And if you will embrace it the way verse 17 says, it's your pathway to glory, God is triumphant and the devil is defeated.

00:02:08.000 | I don't care if it's a stubbed toe on the way shopping.

00:02:15.000 | How you handle a stubbed toe in relation to God Almighty bears witness of your faith in His providence.

00:02:23.000 | If you're in His face, "I'm so down to get a stubbed toe, I asked another problem today, this is a bad day."

00:02:30.000 | Look, if you're not in hell, it's a good day.

00:02:38.000 | Why would God ordain that the pathway to the inheritance be suffering and only suffering?

00:02:46.000 | I mean there is no other path of suffering free access.

00:02:51.000 | Doesn't mean everything on the path is suffering, you know that.

00:02:53.000 | We're sitting here in a very nice place and I'm feeling really good right now.

00:02:57.000 | I have no stomach ache, no headache, no backache, I'm just, God is good, right?

00:03:02.000 | I don't mean there aren't good things on the way, I mean there will be suffering.

00:03:07.000 | Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of heaven, Acts 14.

00:03:12.000 | There's no other way.

00:03:14.000 | Now why would that be? Why would God set it up that way?

00:03:19.000 | Here's a clue from Romans 5, 3.

00:03:22.000 | "Not only this, but we also exult or rejoice in our tribulations,

00:03:30.000 | knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance, or in other words, endurance."

00:03:40.000 | Endurance of what? Faith.

00:03:45.000 | How does that work?

00:03:48.000 | Every hardship, from the tiniest dubbed toe to the loss of a spouse, the loss of a child,

00:03:56.000 | from the smallest to the biggest, every hardship in your life is the kicking out from under you

00:04:04.000 | of a prop that was supporting your happiness.

00:04:09.000 | You can either curse God or fall on God.

00:04:15.000 | And God is kicking them for you to fall on Him.

00:04:20.000 | Because that's what makes you strong.

00:04:23.000 | Remember Paul in 2 Corinthians 1, verse 8?

00:04:27.000 | We were so unbearably crushed.

00:04:30.000 | We felt that we had received the sentence of death.

00:04:34.000 | That was to make us rely on God who raises the dead.

00:04:42.000 | God brought Paul to the brink of death for one reason.

00:04:48.000 | There was only one person to trust now. The God who raises the dead.

00:04:54.000 | All of our hardships are designed to make our faith stronger, to make us rely more on God.

00:05:02.000 | From the littlest to the biggest. That's why it's the pathway to glory.

00:05:06.000 | We've got to trust Him. Faith is the only way to heaven.

00:05:10.000 | And tribulations serve our faith.

00:05:15.000 | If the Holy Spirit is testifying that He's your Father, if He's not, you get angry at God.

00:05:23.000 | "I don't want this anymore! I'm out of here! If this is the way the children get treated, I'm out of here!"

00:05:29.000 | You don't have the Holy Spirit.

00:05:31.000 | The Holy Spirit says, "Father, I need You. This is hard. This is really hard.

00:05:38.000 | But You're my Father and Jesus is my Lord.

00:05:41.000 | This is the pathway to the inheritance, so I'm all in. Help me!"

00:05:45.000 | That's the way the Holy Spirit talks.

00:05:47.000 | So if you respond to hardship with, "I need a Father and Jesus is my Lord,"

00:05:52.000 | the Holy Spirit is bearing witness with your spirit that you are the child of God.

00:05:57.000 | I'm going to close with a story from John Newton.

00:06:00.000 | I come back to it over and over to convict myself of my murmuring.

00:06:05.000 | Paul said in Philippians 2, "Do all things without murmuring."

00:06:11.000 | Is there any more condemning verse in the Bible?

00:06:15.000 | All things without murmuring.

00:06:18.000 | Murmur, murmur, murmur.

00:06:22.000 | So here's what happened.

00:06:23.000 | This is John Newton writing in the 18th century.

00:06:26.000 | So there are no cars, there are only carriages.

00:06:28.000 | So picture a horse-drawn carriage.

00:06:30.000 | A man is on the way to New York to get his inheritance.

00:06:33.000 | Here's what happens.

00:06:34.000 | "Suppose a man was going to New York to take possession of a large estate."

00:06:40.000 | Let's just say it's worth $5 million.

00:06:43.000 | "Suppose a man was going to New York to take possession of a large estate,

00:06:48.000 | and his carriage should break down a mile before he got to the city."

00:06:55.000 | This is where we are in our walkway towards heaven.

00:06:58.000 | "Which obliged him to walk the rest of the way."

00:07:02.000 | What a fool we should think him if we saw him wringing his hands

00:07:08.000 | and blubbering out all the remaining mile,

00:07:12.000 | "My carriage is broken, my carriage is broken."

00:07:17.000 | Because he's on the way to an inheritance worth millions of dollars.

00:07:25.000 | He can fix the carriage.

00:07:29.000 | Here's my addition to the story.

00:07:32.000 | Sometimes your kid falls over the cliff when the wheel comes off the carriage.

00:07:41.000 | And you fall out of the carriage and so crush your knee,

00:07:47.000 | you never walk normal again on the mile that's left in your life.

00:07:54.000 | That happens.

00:07:56.000 | I want to make light here of broken carriages.

00:08:00.000 | We all can laugh at a broken carriage.

00:08:02.000 | Not as easy to say, "I lost my kid when he was 5, 21 of leukemia."

00:08:09.000 | I've buried so many kids.

00:08:12.000 | There's a whole, you know this, there's whole sections of woodlawn cemetery

00:08:17.000 | with little teeny places.

00:08:20.000 | And to see his dad carry a white box like this is a carriage that you don't make light of that's broken.

00:08:30.000 | But he can know for himself, for this child, for his wife,

00:08:35.000 | he can know just a mile, just a mile over the hill.

00:08:41.000 | I get the child, I get the wife, I get the health, I get the world,

00:08:46.000 | I get a new car, I get a new body to enjoy it all.

00:08:50.000 | And that's how his tears will not be the tears of those who have no hope.

00:08:55.000 | He will weep. We will weep.

00:08:58.000 | No, we won't weep as those who don't have an inheritance.

00:09:03.000 | So, my prayer for you now is that God would awaken the witness of the Holy Spirit,

00:09:12.000 | and would call out Abba, Father, and causing you to hate the sin in your life

00:09:18.000 | that murmurs against the Father, betrays the Father.

00:09:23.000 | And if those two things are happening, the Spirit is speaking loud and clear into your life, your mind.

00:09:30.000 | Powerful. That's a clip from Pastor John's sermon from October of 2013 in Houston

00:09:35.000 | on Romans 8, verses 12 to 17.

00:09:37.000 | The sermon is titled "A Spectacular and Scary Promise."

00:09:41.000 | You can get the entire recording right now at DesiringGod.org.

00:09:45.000 | Kevin, thank you for your persistence in getting this clip shared with the APJ audience.

00:09:50.000 | And if you have a favorite sermon clip of Pastor John's, send it to me.

00:09:54.000 | You'll only need to ask once, not multiple times like Kevin, I promise.

00:09:59.000 | Give me the title of the sermon and the timestamps from the audio of when the clip begins and when it ends.

00:10:04.000 | Tell me why it's impacted you.

00:10:06.000 | Give me your name and the closest city to you, and email me all those details

00:10:10.000 | at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.

00:10:12.000 | That's an email address, askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.

00:10:16.000 | Put the word "clip" in the subject line if you would, please.

00:10:19.000 | Speaking of questions, one of the great and most important questions of Calvinism

00:10:24.000 | is over how God hardens hearts, like Pharaoh's heart.

00:10:29.000 | Did Pharaoh harden his own heart first, or did God harden Pharaoh's heart first?

00:10:34.000 | And how does this dynamic of self-hardening lead to divine hardening as it unfolds,

00:10:41.000 | even in our culture today, as we look at Romans chapter 1?

00:10:45.000 | So, a really sharp question coming up next time with Pastor John back in the studio with me on Friday.

00:10:51.000 | I'm Tony Reinke, and we will see you then.

00:10:53.000 | [ Silence ]

God’s Good Design in Our Suffering

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