One Surprising Reason for Pain

00:00:04.000 | The Apostle Paul employs a startling phrase in 2 Corinthians 6, verse 10.

00:00:09.800 | He says, "Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing."

00:00:13.520 | It's startling because he's talking about his own testimony of rejoicing in sorrow, and those two experiences run

00:00:20.480 | consecutively in his life.

00:00:23.240 | Sorrow and joy

00:00:25.680 | existed in his experience at the same time. It's simply a truism of life that

00:00:31.160 | good things and bad things are always happening to us all the time

00:00:35.520 | simultaneously in our lives. That's just normal Christian living.

00:00:39.200 | Picking up from this point, here's Pastor John preaching in Vancouver in

00:00:43.720 | 2015.

00:00:46.560 | So we Christians are

00:00:49.680 | complicated people.

00:00:53.120 | We should not

00:00:55.040 | think of all these calamities like you could add your personal calamity to my list. We shouldn't think of those as

00:01:02.760 | exceptional, like occasional.

00:01:05.840 | Occasionally there's a calamity.

00:01:08.960 | Are you kidding me?

00:01:11.320 | 50

00:01:13.120 | million people die

00:01:15.440 | in the world every year.

00:01:19.240 | Five

00:01:23.560 | 107 people die every hour.

00:01:28.520 | 95 every minute. Breathe in,

00:01:35.360 | breathe out.

00:01:39.760 | Four people have died.

00:01:42.280 | Calamities are not exceptional.

00:01:45.520 | They're just a breaking of the surface of the ocean of sorrow.

00:01:53.040 | So we notice them a little more than what's going on right now in Vancouver as we speak in hospitals, in nursing homes,

00:02:01.360 | in hospice care.

00:02:04.160 | It is utterly naive to think that there are good times and bad times.

00:02:09.400 | Sequentially

00:02:13.120 | there are good times and there are bad times always all the time

00:02:17.560 | simultaneously.

00:02:19.720 | And if you walk through the world with a heart ready to weep with those who weep,

00:02:24.320 | ready to rejoice with those who rejoice, you will be a very strange and wonderful person.

00:02:32.080 | So I want to I want to ask why do we have a world like this?

00:02:38.520 | Why so much pain? Why so much

00:02:41.160 | conflict? Why so much suffering? Why so much death? It is a

00:02:46.640 | horrible place. It is a conveyor belt of corpses.

00:02:50.800 | Millions of people right now are weeping their eyes out over the sorrows in their lives as we speak. Why such a world?

00:03:00.400 | Now before I go to the Bible and

00:03:03.760 | try to give you pointers for you to think about,

00:03:07.240 | let me tell you something that I think I found very

00:03:12.160 | shocking when I realized it.

00:03:15.760 | God has ordained in his mercy that

00:03:19.320 | sometimes

00:03:22.400 | very

00:03:24.600 | unbelieving people wake up to his reality because of pain not because of his absence.

00:03:32.640 | For example,

00:03:35.960 | suppose you're a professor in a university and you've absorbed a postmodern

00:03:41.800 | mindset that

00:03:45.000 | playfully

00:03:46.800 | says

00:03:48.160 | what's right for you is right for you and what's right for me is right for me and

00:03:53.200 | what's wrong for you is wrong for you and what's wrong for me is wrong for me and we don't impose our

00:04:00.360 | morality on each other. There is no one

00:04:05.520 | absolute right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly that gets squashed down onto our own

00:04:13.520 | perceptions and preferences. That's just rampant, right? It's just rampant and it is playful and it is

00:04:20.520 | gonna come to an end when that professor

00:04:23.680 | walks into a real living

00:04:27.960 | Holocaust himself.

00:04:30.720 | So whatever the situation is he walks into an

00:04:37.840 | experience of six million Jewish people

00:04:43.720 | murdered or

00:04:45.720 | 60 million under the

00:04:48.200 | Stalinist regime

00:04:50.480 | starved and killed in the gulags or we celebrating a hundred years this year since the

00:04:57.760 | Armenian genocide of the Turkish people

00:05:02.040 | slaughtering a million and a half

00:05:04.760 | Armenians between Turkey and Syria in

00:05:07.720 | 1915.

00:05:10.240 | You walk into that

00:05:12.400 | as a professor who's been playing word games on tenure

00:05:18.160 | with students fitting them to be destroyed by the world in which they live with this absolute nonsense

00:05:27.040 | that what's right for you is right for you what's wrong for me is wrong for me and suddenly he is so

00:05:32.840 | confronted by an evil he finds welling up out of his heart a statement he thought would never come that is evil.

00:05:41.440 | And suddenly he he realizes what he just said.

00:05:45.800 | He does not mean

00:05:50.320 | well, if you don't think it's evil, you don't have to think it's evil. You can think it's good.

00:05:54.840 | He has just woken up from a dream world an academic dream world

00:06:00.000 | and he knows he has made a pronouncement of

00:06:04.360 | absolute significance

00:06:08.160 | that's evil.

00:06:10.320 | That's evil and he knows he's a professor.

00:06:13.520 | He knows and he realizes I have just broken every rule

00:06:18.160 | in my

00:06:20.920 | philosophy and

00:06:22.640 | I cannot deny what I am saying.

00:06:25.600 | That's evil and I don't mean it's the result of chemical synapses popping in my

00:06:33.120 | evolutionary

00:06:35.200 | primate brain.

00:06:37.880 | I mean, it's real. I mean it has significance. I mean it is a moral reality. It holds for everybody.

00:06:44.160 | This is not part of what I was thinking. This is evil and he knows

00:06:49.520 | pronouncements like that are meaningless unless

00:06:55.040 | there's an absolute and where do they come from?

00:07:01.720 | They come from God or nowhere.

00:07:06.960 | You live a life of meaninglessness.

00:07:08.960 | You're a bag of chemicals and electrical impulses.

00:07:13.760 | It's moving in a kind of evolutionary

00:07:17.000 | movement of time and chance with no significance to your moral judgments whatsoever

00:07:23.440 | unless

00:07:25.160 | God is.

00:07:27.160 | It happens. In other words, it happens that in the midst of evil, evil

00:07:33.200 | becomes the very moment and means by which a person can awaken to the fact that we're not

00:07:40.240 | playing games.

00:07:42.400 | We're not just

00:07:45.200 | stuff.

00:07:47.200 | It is a wonderful thing

00:07:49.280 | that God has mercy like that in the midst of such great

00:07:54.760 | evils.

00:07:56.680 | So here we are at my question.

00:07:58.680 | Why

00:08:00.080 | such a world and we are biting off the biggest problem in the world. And so I just

00:08:06.880 | don't mean to claim to have the last answer with every

00:08:12.840 | strand neatly woven into a fabric of perfect knowledge. I don't

00:08:18.120 | mean that. I want to offer you

00:08:20.920 | glimpses of answers that are really here. I believe you can live by these and

00:08:27.240 | ask you to go home and consider whether these things are so like good Bereans in the chapter of

00:08:33.840 | chapter 17 of Acts.

00:08:36.640 | So here's my first wrong answer.

00:08:38.840 | The reason this world exists with its calamities and conflicts and suffering and death is because God is

00:08:45.720 | not in

00:08:47.640 | control. I've already rejected that there's no God. I'm just saying

00:08:52.400 | answer number two that's wrong,

00:08:56.600 | He's not in control.

00:08:58.600 | He's looking down and

00:09:01.080 | it's wheeling out of control and

00:09:03.320 | there's nothing you can do about it.

00:09:06.760 | That's not a true answer.

00:09:09.520 | Some people opt for that answer it biblically it won't

00:09:13.600 | hold

00:09:15.400 | for reasons like this.

00:09:17.400 | Matthew 10 29 are not two sparrows so for a penny and not one of them will fall to the ground

00:09:26.040 | apart from your father. That's a first century way of

00:09:30.200 | looking for the most random and

00:09:33.960 | insignificant event in the world and claiming God governs it. Are not two sparrows

00:09:41.520 | so for a penny and not one of those sparrows

00:09:45.160 | in the darkest

00:09:48.000 | forests of Papua New Guinea falls dead

00:09:51.360 | without God deciding that that happened.

00:09:55.960 | It's just a little taste of an excellent sermon titled the pain of the world and the purposes of God preached in Vancouver on April

00:10:03.080 | 26 2015. The whole message is available at DesiringGod.org right now. Go listen to it.

00:10:09.240 | This clip came in from Nick in Savannah, Georgia. Thank you Nick for sending this in.

00:10:13.720 | All of our clips are now crowdsourced. You tell us what bits of Piper's sermon has changed your life

00:10:18.680 | and we share that clip with the APJ audience. If you've got one email me.

00:10:21.960 | Give me your name, your hometown, the sermon title, the time stamp of when the clip happens in the audio and

00:10:26.800 | tell me how it impacted you. Put the word clip in the subject line of an email and send it to me at

00:10:31.600 | AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. That's an email address. AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org.

00:10:37.800 | Speaking of mortality, cemeteries are unique places. They're somber.

00:10:43.880 | Normally very quiet acres quarantined from the bustle of the city.

00:10:50.400 | For many, these are awkward,

00:10:52.400 | uncomfortable places. Others are drawn to make regular pilgrimages.

00:10:56.960 | And for those who do visit cemeteries, it raises the question of what are we seeking to accomplish in a grave

00:11:03.760 | visit?

00:11:05.760 | I'm your host Tony Reinke and we're going to be rejoined in the studio with Pastor John when we return on Friday for that.

00:11:10.800 | We'll see you then.

00:11:12.800 | [BLANK_AUDIO]