The Apostle Paul employs a startling phrase in 2 Corinthians 6, verse 10. He says, "Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing." It's startling because he's talking about his own testimony of rejoicing in sorrow, and those two experiences run consecutively in his life. Sorrow and joy existed in his experience at the same time.

It's simply a truism of life that good things and bad things are always happening to us all the time simultaneously in our lives. That's just normal Christian living. Picking up from this point, here's Pastor John preaching in Vancouver in 2015. So we Christians are complicated people. We should not think of all these calamities like you could add your personal calamity to my list.

We shouldn't think of those as exceptional, like occasional. Occasionally there's a calamity. Are you kidding me? 50 million people die in the world every year. Five 107 people die every hour. 95 every minute. Breathe in, breathe out. Four people have died. Calamities are not exceptional. They're just a breaking of the surface of the ocean of sorrow.

So we notice them a little more than what's going on right now in Vancouver as we speak in hospitals, in nursing homes, in hospice care. It is utterly naive to think that there are good times and bad times. Sequentially there are good times and there are bad times always all the time simultaneously.

And if you walk through the world with a heart ready to weep with those who weep, ready to rejoice with those who rejoice, you will be a very strange and wonderful person. So I want to I want to ask why do we have a world like this? Why so much pain?

Why so much conflict? Why so much suffering? Why so much death? It is a horrible place. It is a conveyor belt of corpses. Millions of people right now are weeping their eyes out over the sorrows in their lives as we speak. Why such a world? Now before I go to the Bible and try to give you pointers for you to think about, let me tell you something that I think I found very shocking when I realized it.

God has ordained in his mercy that sometimes very unbelieving people wake up to his reality because of pain not because of his absence. For example, suppose you're a professor in a university and you've absorbed a postmodern mindset that playfully says what's right for you is right for you and what's right for me is right for me and 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 morality on each other.

There is no one absolute right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly that gets squashed down onto our own perceptions and preferences. That's just rampant, right? It's just rampant and it is playful and it is gonna come to an end when that professor walks into a real living Holocaust himself.

So whatever the situation is he walks into an experience of six million Jewish people murdered or 60 million under the Stalinist regime starved and killed in the gulags or we celebrating a hundred years this year since the Armenian genocide of the Turkish people slaughtering a million and a half Armenians between Turkey and Syria in 1915.

You walk into that as a professor who's been playing word games on tenure with students fitting them to be destroyed by the world in which they live with this absolute nonsense that what's right for you is right for you what's wrong for me is wrong for me and suddenly he is so confronted by an evil he finds welling up out of his heart a statement he thought would never come that is evil.

And suddenly he he realizes what he just said. He does not mean well, if you don't think it's evil, you don't have to think it's evil. You can think it's good. He has just woken up from a dream world an academic dream world and he knows he has made a pronouncement of absolute significance that's evil.

That's evil and he knows he's a professor. He knows and he realizes I have just broken every rule in my philosophy and I cannot deny what I am saying. That's evil and I don't mean it's the result of chemical synapses popping in my evolutionary primate brain. I mean, it's real.

I mean it has significance. I mean it is a moral reality. It holds for everybody. This is not part of what I was thinking. This is evil and he knows pronouncements like that are meaningless unless there's an absolute and where do they come from? They come from God or nowhere.

You live a life of meaninglessness. You're a bag of chemicals and electrical impulses. It's moving in a kind of evolutionary movement of time and chance with no significance to your moral judgments whatsoever unless God is. It happens. In other words, it happens that in the midst of evil, evil becomes the very moment and means by which a person can awaken to the fact that we're not playing games.

We're not just stuff. It is a wonderful thing that God has mercy like that in the midst of such great evils. So here we are at my question. Why such a world and we are biting off the biggest problem in the world. And so I just don't mean to claim to have the last answer with every strand neatly woven into a fabric of perfect knowledge.

I don't mean that. I want to offer you glimpses of answers that are really here. I believe you can live by these and ask you to go home and consider whether these things are so like good Bereans in the chapter of chapter 17 of Acts. So here's my first wrong answer.

The reason this world exists with its calamities and conflicts and suffering and death is because God is not in control. I've already rejected that there's no God. I'm just saying answer number two that's wrong, He's not in control. He's looking down and it's wheeling out of control and there's nothing you can do about it.

That's not a true answer. Some people opt for that answer it biblically it won't hold for reasons like this. Matthew 10 29 are not two sparrows so for a penny and not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your father. That's a first century way of looking for the most random and insignificant event in the world and claiming God governs it.

Are not two sparrows so for a penny and not one of those sparrows in the darkest forests of Papua New Guinea falls dead without God deciding that that happened. 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 26 2015.

The whole message is available at DesiringGod.org right now. Go listen to it. This clip came in from Nick in Savannah, Georgia. Thank you Nick for sending this in. All of our clips are now crowdsourced. You tell us what bits of Piper's sermon has changed your life and we share that clip with the APJ audience.

If you've got one email me. Give me your name, your hometown, the sermon title, the time stamp of when the clip happens in the audio and tell me how it impacted you. Put the word clip in the subject line of an email and send it to me at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org.

That's an email address. AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. Speaking of mortality, cemeteries are unique places. They're somber. Normally very quiet acres quarantined from the bustle of the city. For many, these are awkward, uncomfortable places. Others are drawn to make regular pilgrimages. And for those who do visit cemeteries, it raises the question of what are we seeking to accomplish in a grave visit?

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. We'll see you then.