I Have Multiple Disabilities — How Do I Not Waste My Life?

00:00:00.000 | We end the week with a question from Isaac, who listens to us in his hometown of Nairobi,

00:00:08.880 | Kenya.

00:00:09.880 | Pastor John, thank you, thank you, thank you for your encouragements in APJ 1611, "How

00:00:15.760 | Does Chronic Pain Glorify God?"

00:00:18.400 | I resonate with this episode deeply and I carry those promises for myself.

00:00:22.120 | I have a question concerning the story or the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in

00:00:27.040 | Luke 16 verses 19 to 31, specifically about Lazarus.

00:00:32.200 | Please help me make at least some sense of his life.

00:00:34.680 | He lived all of it poor.

00:00:36.000 | He died poor.

00:00:37.000 | It shouldn't bother me, but it does.

00:00:39.120 | I carry neurological, physical, and mental disabilities and have for many years as an

00:00:44.720 | invalid, unable to create any life for myself.

00:00:49.280 | I am now 30.

00:00:51.320 | Feel I should have become a productive, self-reliant man by now?

00:00:54.720 | I'm not.

00:00:55.720 | I may never be.

00:00:57.120 | But we also don't see a definite purpose or self-will or self-drive in Lazarus's life

00:01:02.920 | either.

00:01:03.920 | I also lack those very same things.

00:01:06.640 | How would you motivate a disabled man, disabled nearly to the degree of Lazarus, to not waste

00:01:12.360 | his life as his physical life wastes away?

00:01:16.080 | Well, of course, this is a dangerous thing for me to do, to venture to give counsel to

00:01:24.360 | someone whose condition I know so little about, especially when he says, "I carry neurological,

00:01:33.200 | physical, and mental disabilities."

00:01:36.520 | So please understand, Isaac, that what I say here is tentative as far as its specific applications

00:01:47.960 | to you go, even though I do want to stand by the biblical things I'm going to say.

00:01:54.600 | So a warning, and I want to defer to you to know yourself.

00:02:01.360 | First I would remind you of the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, 14, following.

00:02:09.240 | The master, and he represents Christ, gave to one of his servants five talents.

00:02:15.320 | Now you know that a talent is an amount of money in those days, not an ability to do

00:02:21.000 | something, but I think it does represent any kind of resource that we have as a gift of

00:02:27.680 | God that he expects us to use for his honor.

00:02:30.880 | And he gave one, five, as I said, and he gave another, two talents, and he gave another

00:02:37.360 | one talent, and then he went on a journey, and when he came back he called them to account

00:02:44.000 | to see whether they had wasted their lives in his resources.

00:02:49.000 | Now two things seem relevant from this parable for your situation, Isaac.

00:02:55.200 | One is that God clearly recognizes that different disciples have different capacities.

00:03:03.480 | Five, two, one.

00:03:07.000 | That's a great difference.

00:03:08.000 | Being one and five, what is that, 500% difference?

00:03:12.600 | And he doesn't expect that the person with fewer resources will produce the same amount

00:03:21.360 | as the one with the greater resources.

00:03:23.560 | He says, "Well done," to the man who turns five into ten, and he says the same, "Well

00:03:30.360 | done," to the man who turns two into four.

00:03:34.000 | So you should infer from this that God will call you to account not to be as productive

00:03:42.680 | as someone with a different set of gifts and limitations, but simply in accord with what

00:03:48.280 | he's made you capable of.

00:03:50.600 | That's the first thing.

00:03:52.160 | Second thing that this parable says to your situation is that that third man who basically

00:03:59.820 | did nothing with his single talent was not scolded because he didn't turn one into two.

00:04:10.680 | He was scolded because he didn't even put it in the bank.

00:04:15.000 | In other words, it sounds like the master is saying, "Look, you say I'm a hard man,

00:04:21.680 | hard to please.

00:04:22.680 | I'm not the hard taskmaster you think.

00:04:25.960 | All you had to do was put it in the bank and get interest for it and then tell me that

00:04:33.440 | I had it with my interest and why you put it in the bank."

00:04:40.040 | He would have been commended, I think, for that.

00:04:43.680 | I think C.S. Lewis is right when he said that God is hard to satisfy but easy to please.

00:04:51.520 | So don't feel helpless that you are going to be judged by a standard beyond what God

00:05:01.240 | has equipped you to do.

00:05:04.960 | The next thing I would point out in Scripture is that Paul was given a thorn in the flesh

00:05:11.800 | in 2 Corinthians 12, verse 7 through 10, and the point of giving him a thorn in the flesh

00:05:21.040 | was to weaken him.

00:05:23.240 | You might say he gave him a disability.

00:05:26.520 | He pleaded with Christ to take it away, and Christ said, "No, my power is perfected

00:05:35.480 | in your weakness."

00:05:38.960 | That is an amazing statement.

00:05:41.480 | God is not mainly looking for powerful people who can lend him their strengths.

00:05:49.600 | God needs nobody's strength.

00:05:53.920 | He gives, he takes according to his will.

00:05:57.600 | All strength is from him, through him, and to him.

00:06:01.760 | What he's looking for is trust and a deep contentment in his fellowship in the situation

00:06:10.240 | that he gives us because that will make him look more precious in our lives than any health

00:06:18.680 | or any wealth or anything else.

00:06:21.480 | That's what he's after.

00:06:23.000 | Make my power, my sufficiency look great.

00:06:26.920 | And if I have to make you weak in order to make me look strong, I will.

00:06:32.880 | So don't measure the usefulness of your life by productive capacities.

00:06:40.960 | God has given you what he has given you in order that in your weakness you might rely

00:06:48.600 | upon his strength and in that way magnify his worth.

00:06:55.400 | And then I would mention Isaac 2 Corinthians 9 verse 8.

00:07:02.600 | God is able to make all grace abound to you so that having all sufficiency in all things

00:07:09.280 | at all times, you, Isaac, may abound in every good work.

00:07:15.400 | Now what I take away from this verse is that every good work that God expects me or you

00:07:24.080 | to do, he will give us grace to do it.

00:07:28.520 | That's what he says.

00:07:30.560 | For some, that will be a lot of productive activity.

00:07:36.540 | For others, it will be less, far less.

00:07:42.000 | And the older and the weaker we get, the less productive we are going to be.

00:07:48.720 | And some are assigned to be weak all their lives.

00:07:54.280 | But what this verse implies is that you and I should wake up in the morning and ask God

00:08:02.320 | to grant us the grace, the promised grace, to do just those good works that he calls

00:08:09.600 | us to do.

00:08:10.840 | Now that may be a smile directed to a passerby or a quiet freedom from murmuring in the midst

00:08:21.200 | of misery or a healthy performance of some technical task.

00:08:27.080 | God decides what good works we are assigned to do, and he promises to give grace to do

00:08:34.440 | them.

00:08:35.640 | And the last thing I would say is a comment on Lazarus and the rich man.

00:08:41.620 | This is not a parable about the character of Lazarus.

00:08:46.380 | We know virtually nothing about his state of mind or heart.

00:08:52.520 | He's not held up as a person of faith, though we can infer that he was a person of faith

00:09:00.920 | in God, in Jesus, because he goes to heaven while the rich man goes to Hades.

00:09:07.080 | But Jesus never mentions his faith.

00:09:10.100 | We do not know how resourceful Lazarus was.

00:09:14.120 | Be careful.

00:09:15.120 | You say he didn't have any resourcefulness.

00:09:17.440 | Well, I don't know that.

00:09:19.920 | It says in Luke 16, 20 that he was laid, was laid at the rich man's gate.

00:09:27.280 | So someone is carrying him from where he lives, maybe out in Shantytown.

00:09:33.680 | Someone's carrying him and putting him down at a spot where there might be some hope of

00:09:38.560 | crumbs.

00:09:39.560 | Now, did Lazarus arrange for that?

00:09:44.840 | Did he use the little tiny bit of resourcefulness that he had to arrange each day to be put

00:09:52.880 | in the place where there might be some little bit of food for him from the rich man's table?

00:10:01.760 | We don't know.

00:10:03.040 | It's all speculation.

00:10:05.080 | So don't use Lazarus as a model.

00:10:08.080 | Either way, he may have been a great model of resourcefulness.

00:10:13.040 | I have seen great resourcefulness in mentally ill people in my neighborhood who make a living

00:10:20.840 | and live in their car.

00:10:22.840 | And no matter how I try to help them, they want to live in their car because they have

00:10:29.000 | proved their resourcefulness to make it by certain kind of panhandling, a certain check

00:10:35.000 | from the government, and a certain use of a dinged up old truck.

00:10:39.380 | And I've sent them to every conceivable manner of helping institution, and they just want

00:10:45.840 | to prove their own resourcefulness.

00:10:48.080 | In other words, it's just not simple to know when you look at a poor person what measure

00:10:54.460 | of resourcefulness they may be exercising.

00:10:57.400 | So Isaac, the sum of the matter is that God knows your neurological, physical, and mental

00:11:04.680 | limitations.

00:11:05.680 | You are not a mistake.

00:11:08.280 | There is a reason for your existence as you are.

00:11:13.240 | Join the Christians around you by seeking God's wisdom for what that reason is, your

00:11:20.200 | reason for being.

00:11:21.860 | And then as much as lies within you, by grace, give yourself to that.

00:11:29.120 | And I wonder, Isaac, if you are aware of the great poet from the 1600s named John Milton.

00:11:40.100 | He wrote the most famous poem in the English language, probably, Paradise Lost.

00:11:45.780 | And in the midst of his amazing, productive life, he went blind.

00:11:53.420 | And he felt that God had taken away from him the one gift that he had to be useful.

00:12:02.580 | But eventually he wrote a sonnet about his loss, and he called it On His Blindness.

00:12:10.560 | And I want to close by just reading it to you because of how encouraging it's been

00:12:16.580 | to me over the years and to others who feel their limits and their fading powers.

00:12:24.540 | When I consider how my light is spent ere half my days in this dark world and wide,

00:12:31.780 | and that one talent which is death to hide lodged with me useless, though my soul more

00:12:38.520 | bent to serve there with my Maker, and present my true account lest he returning chide, doth

00:12:46.380 | not exact day labor, light denied, I fondly ask?

00:12:51.500 | But patience, to prevent that murmur, soon replies, God doth not need either man's

00:12:59.940 | work or his own gifts.

00:13:02.780 | Who best bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.

00:13:07.180 | His state is kingly, thousands at his bidding speed, and post, or land and ocean without

00:13:15.460 | rest, they also serve who only stand and wait.

00:13:22.500 | That's a famous sonnet that puts words to suffering in the form of an agency frustrated.

00:13:30.220 | John Milton's poem On His Blindness.

00:13:32.940 | You can find the text online.

00:13:34.420 | If you wish to meditate on it, just search for it.

00:13:37.060 | On His Blindness.

00:13:38.060 | It's worth reading and rereading a few times to get the depth of what is communicated here

00:13:43.300 | from Milton's heart.

00:13:45.540 | Thank you for joining us today.

00:13:47.360 | You can ask a question of your own, search our growing archive, or subscribe to the podcast,

00:13:50.820 | all at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

00:13:55.060 | And we're going to break for the weekend now.

00:13:56.540 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke, Pastor John, and I will see you back here on Monday.

00:13:59.940 | Thanks for listening.

00:14:00.940 | We appreciate it.

00:14:01.260 | [END]

I Have Multiple Disabilities — How Do I Not Waste My Life?

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