Ten Reasons Why We Suffer

Romans 8:18-19

We are in Romans, chapter 8. Last time was actually two weeks ago since last Thursday night I was in D.C. for my dad’s service.  Some of you may not know that we also had a service for my aunt. My uncle had been buried there a little over two years ago. My aunt died a little over a year ago and so we were also interring her cremation urn with my uncle so it made for a somewhat busy, busy time. 

Romans 8:17 talks about suffering. Now this is a crucial idea because Paul connects suffering here to being a future heir of Christ, a joint heir with Christ. We have to re-punctuate the verse a little bit, “If children, then heirs of God,” which is true of all children of God. Now there’s a difference here. I’ve stressed it before but I want to remind you that there are two phrases here. These are critical phrases for proper interpretation of this text. “Sons of God” which is the Greek word huios and “children of God” which is teknon. This refers to every believer but huios refers only to those who advance to spiritual maturity. It’s important to understand that difference because as we see in this verse, those who become joint heirs with Christ are those who suffer with Him. 

As I pointed out, suffering is not something extreme. Some people think suffering is something on a great order of pain and adversity but it’s just basically having to face and deal with issues in the cosmic system, the devil’s world, in a corrupt fallen universe and every day as we bump heads with the corruption that is reality around us, we suffer. Whenever we have to make right decisions for the truth and any time there’s any negative blowback, that’s part of suffering. Rather than taking the path of least resistance we took the path of righteousness and truth and we have experienced a negative reaction from it and that is necessary for us to grow and mature spiritually. So we have to put these sufferings into perspective and they’re necessary for that future time. 

We are shifting our focus here when it talks about heir-ship and inheritance and what happens when the Messianic Kingdom is established and Christ comes back. The church age believers will rule and reign with Him as co-heirs during the Millennial Kingdom. So the focus now is not just on the present time but on living in the present in light of that future reality and that ultimate destiny. That ultimate destiny is referred to as glory. Verse 18, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed in us.” 

Now that glory is different from the other glory, the mention of being glorified with Him, in verse 17. Being glorified with Him means we are recognized and elevated as joint heirs with Christ at the judgment seat of Christ when we receive our rewards. The glory that’s revealed in us is related to that eternal state so there has to be a distinction and an understanding of the ways glory is used in this particular passage. 

Critical to our preparation is testing. We have to be tested. This is true in every endeavor in life. If you’re going to succeed at anything, you have to go through testing to make sure you have qualified by learning what you needed to have learned to reach a certain point. Unfortunately, there are people in the field of educational philosophy today who don’t understand the purpose of testing.  Because that’s become muddled in education today we have a problem because we think that we can fix the failures that are occurring in the home and the failures that are occurring because of societal breakdowns of discipline which all impact the classroom. We think we can fix the educational failures by just assessing or mandating certain tests. The result of that is just the opposite. That seems to be the intuitive response but the reality is that when you start imposing tests as your criteria, then what happens is that the teachers have to teach to the test because their evaluation and their assessment is based upon how well their students do on the tests. So they’re no longer teaching to learn but teaching to pass tests. That doesn’t work in the real world. Tests don’t function in that way.  So testing happens to be a way in which you face the realities of life and have to utilize and apply the knowledge you’ve acquired in the classroom. 

For the Christian that means applying it to our thinking so that rather than being run over by adversity we stand firm, trusting the Lord. It doesn’t mean the adversity isn’t painful. It doesn’t mean the adversity isn’t emotionally traumatic. I’ve pointed out many times that the Lord Jesus Christ went through emotional trauma in the Garden of Gethsemane. The words that are used there, the fact that He physically sweated blood shows how intense the emotional and physical pressure was as He anticipated what would take place the next day before He went to the Cross. It’s a very real emotional pressure. I find that too many Christians have a shallow view of emotion. Either on the one hand you try to suppress it and act like it’s not really there or on the other hand, you just let it reign supreme and let it run your life. That’s not true. The Lord Jesus Christ did not let that emotion run His life or make His decisions or neither did He act like it really wasn’t there and life was fun, great, and wonderful and everything was just perfect. He recognized and dealt with the realities of that emotion but He didn’t let it dictate what He was going to do. He was not going to be mastered by the emotion generated by the circumstances.

I went through some categories of suffering last time. I’m just going to hit them very quickly this time. The first category is preventative suffering. It warns and instructs according to Job 33:16. It teaches us to turn from sin according to Job 33:17. It is designed to prevent arrogance and sin associated with sin in Job 33:17b. It is to protect us from death, which is not eternal death but temporal death or a death-like existence from living a non-productive spiritual life in Job 33:30. 

The second category is corrective or disciplinary suffering, also known as punitive suffering where the Lord punishes the believer for disobedience. This is found in Proverbs 3: 11-12 and Psalm 6:1. The third category we looked at was suffering designed to teach us in Job 36:22, Job 34:22, Psalm 25:8-14, and Psalm 94:12. Also Psalm 119: 66, 67, and 71. We’ll run into this again in Deuteronomy 8:3, as well as Psalm 119:50, 67, and 71. Psalm 77: 1-3 and then John 11:14-15 where Jesus was teaching and instructing the disciples with reference to strengthening their faith. 2 Corinthians 8:1, 2, and 9.

The fourth category is suffering to glorify God. This is seen in John 9:1-3 with the man born blind, not because he sinned or his parents sinned but so that God would be glorified when he was healed. And in John 11, just think of all the suffering and misery that went on when Lazarus died. Lazarus’s physical pain, Lazarus’s emotional and mental anguish, the anguish and sorrow of Mary and Martha and his friends and family as they surrounded the tomb and they were still there in grief four days after Lazarus died. Because of that anguish the Lord Jesus wept. He looked upon their anguish and their sorrow and He wept. That is one of the most striking things in my thinking. We don’t have a really good handle on the theology of emotion. Here Jesus, in His perfect humanity that never sinned, gets quite emotional. He weeps but the reason He weeps is because of the grief that He sees, the sorrow, the anguish on the part of people who have experienced death and the loss of a loved one which God did not design. That was not God’s original intent for man to go through that. That is not what God intended. I remember the first few times I taught that people said, “What do you mean, God didn’t intend that?” No, He didn’t. That was the punishment for sin and this shows the compassion Christ had in His humanity for the suffering of people who were going through something that was not their fault. It was because they were living in a fallen corrupt world. Paul’s suffering with the thorn in the flesh is another example of suffering to glorify God. It was a demon messenger, literally an angelos, an angel of Satan, which means it’s a demon, sent to antagonize and buffet Paul. That’s to control his arrogance. He was to learn that God’s grace was sufficient for him and this would glorify God. Also in Psalm 50:15, God says, “Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I shall rescue you and you will honor Me.” 

The fifth category was suffering to remove distractions and focus on the important issues of life. We have so much going on in our lives. You think about all the decisions, all the things that stimulate us today from the time we wake up in the morning until the time we go to bed and you compare that to what someone up to the end of 19^th century experienced and it’s profound. They had an extremely simple, undistracted way of life and they could spend time reading and thinking. If they lived on a farm, which most people did, they had time to think and reflect as they were going about various chores. But now we have all these distractions and we love our entertainment. We are entertainment addicts. True confessions. My name is Robby and I’m an addict to entertainment. We all are, because it’s stimulative; it’s part of our culture, but it’s a distraction from studying the Word and focusing on our mission and ministry to the Lord. 

I’m reading the new third volume of William Manchester’s massive work on Winston Churchill. It just recently came out. I read most of the first one and bits and pieces of the second one. I’ve been looking forward to this but I didn’t know if this was going to come out because Manchester died in 2003 or 2004. He had a series of strokes in the mid to late 90’s and had not been able to write after that. He could think, his mind was good, but he couldn’t transfer his mental ideas to paper. He could verbally express himself but he couldn’t write anymore. He commissioned another writer to finish the task when he died and that has now come out. 

It’s just remarkable. Churchill was a brilliant man and he anticipated the arrival of television but the reality disappointed him greatly and he never watched it because it would be such a disappointment and a waste of time and destroy productivity. I actually had a deacon like that in Connecticut. I guess Dave is probably 94 or 95 now. He is a great war hero. He was with the marines that came in and replaced my dad. My dad was in the first wave at Iwo Jima. He was medevac’d at the end of the second day and on the third day Dave came in with a replacement division, probably one of the few marines that was not wounded and remained on Iwo Jima for the next 28 days. Dave came back to Preston City, where he was a native. I think he’s still a deacon at Preston City Bible church. We used to kind of laugh because he was deaf and when anything controversial came up, we’d just talk in our normal voices and he’s just nod his head and go right along with everything. But Dave never had a television. He raised his kids without a television. He never allowed one in the house and he never had air conditioning either. And that’s a problem because it gets up to 90 there in the summer. So talk about suffering. Suffering is to remove distractions and the things you can accomplish just by removing some of these things from our life. 

That brings us to the next part of this study on suffering which is ten reasons why we suffer, understanding why we suffer. One of the key passages for our first category is our passage in Romans 8:18-24. The first reason is because of Adamic responsibility. Adam made a bad decision and we all suffer its consequences. That’s a form of how we’re associated with people who make bad decisions so we suffer. Well this is the ultimate association. We’re all associated with Adam. Because Adam sinned and disobeyed God immediately the human race was plunged into spiritual death, separation from God. 

In a sense it’s like having a fan plugged into a wall outlet. As long as it’s plugged into the outlet it’s receiving energy and moving. Once it’s removed from the outlet, it still has the semblance of life but if you watch it, it slows down and slows down until eventually it dies. The spiritual death of Genesis 2:17 is like pulling the plug on the human race. But Adam didn’t die physically for a number of years. That was a consequence of spiritual death, that condemnation, that punishment God imposed on the human race because it disobeyed Him by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As we studied in the past that didn’t just affect Adam and Eve and their relationship to God. It affected the animal kingdom. The serpent was cursed more than all the other animals. That means there is a difference in degree. That means there’s a judgment on the serpent that’s worse than the rest of the animal kingdom. 

It clearly states that the rest of the animal kingdom came under a judgment. There was corruption that impacted them. There was a corruption that impacted Eve in terms of her bodily functions in relation to procreation and in relationship to giving birth. There was now pain and sorrow that was increased. The soil was now going to produce thistles and thorns and Adam would have to scratch out, in terms of farming, scratch out his living through the sweat of the brow so the curse impacted creation, all of the elements. It had a physical impact. 

We know in physics, there are the two laws of thermodynamics. The first law states that matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed. Now there was a time when that wasn’t true. In Genesis 1 during the creation week, energy and matter are created and being organized. It was not until the completion of the creation week that that first law of thermodynamics would go into effect when there would be no more creation of matter and energy. But the second law of thermodynamics—that all energy is moving to a state of entropy, a state where it’s not usable; it just goes from being usable to not being usable; we don’t lose energy or matter because of the first law—doesn’t go into effect until Adam sins. 

The moment Adam sinned, one of the consequences was that everything in the creation started moving into a direction of disorder and chaos, and it’s still running down; eventually it will run down. This is one of those sophisticated little arguments against the evolutionary model. If you start with a finite amount of matter or energy, how long does it take for it to run down? Well, it will run down before eternity. If we started billions of years ago with a finite amount, it would have run down by now. It would have dissipated by now because they believe in the eternality of matter. So it would have run down by now. If it’s finite to begin with, it can’t run for an infinite length of time. That bypasses their presuppositions. 

So Adamic responsibility brings corruption into everything in the planet. Everything is affected that way so after Adam sins nothing is the way it’s supposed to be. We go out and we want to work in the garden and we have weeds that come up. It’s not what it’s supposed to be. We have to weed over and over again. We go out and we try to do anything or build anything and sooner or later it rusts or it grows and we have to cut it or it disintegrates in the humidity and it rots. It all runs down. Nothing is the way it’s supposed to be. When we experience frustration with the way creation is we’re reminded that things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be. There’s something inside that says that it shouldn’t be this way. And it shouldn’t. It wasn’t originally designed that way. 

This is part of that inner testimony of God’s existence that God has built into every one of us. Sort of that God-shaped vacuum that Ecclesiastes talks about. Romans 8:18 confirms this in relation to creation. Paul says in verse 18, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” Consider is the Greek verb logizomai, which has to do with the word logic, and has to do thinking, considering, reflecting upon something and is often used to present a logical conclusion from stated premises. It should be best translated, “I have come to the conclusion as a result of the doctrine that Paul has learned that the sufferings of this present time ..” That includes all degrees of suffering, adversity, and difficulty.

Present time is an interesting phrase in Greek. There are two different ways to express the concept of ‘now’ in Greek. One word is arti. The other word is nun, which indicates a broader sense.  Arti indicates something happening right now in the immediate present today or tomorrow. We might say, “We are now looking to purchase some land for the church.” That’s not a true statement but you might say something like that. That just covers a general, broad period of time. Whereas I might contrast that by saying, “Right now we don’t have any plans.” There’s a general sense in which you want to do something now in a broad time period but right now in the immediate there’s no plans to do it. That would express the difference between those two words. Paul uses it that way in 1 Corinthians 13:11-13. He says, “For now we see in a mirror dimly [enigmatically] …” That is the word now meaning right now. The mirror is the Word of God and it’s not complete. The perfect hadn’t come; the canon hadn’t been completed yet and so right now our understanding is affected by the fact we don’t have a complete revelation. 

Then he says, “But now these three things shall abide…” Now here is a broader term of what abides beyond the writing of the canon, the apostolic period, what now abides are generally faith, hope, and love. So that shows the distinction between the two words. In Romans 8:18 ‘now’ is the word for a general period of time. There are several times when this phrase is used in Romans and it always refers to this present age or dispensation. So he’s saying that the suffering in this present time is in contrast to the future time when the Messiah comes. He’s drawing out this distinction of living under the present era and the future period of the Millennial Kingdom. “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory that is to be revealed in us.” Now that glory refers to our future glorification when we’re in our glorified bodies, ruling and reigning with Christ. Romans 8:19 says, “For the anxious [earnest] expectation…” There is something within us and I see this and I hear this with folks and the older they get they say, “I’m just so tired of living in this corrupt world I just can’t wait to go be with the Lord and be face to face with the Lord.” Not that they’re wanting to end things soon, it’s just that they feel the tension of living in this fallen world and they anticipate, look forward to, that future time when there will be no more time, no more fear, no more sorrow, no more tears, the old things are passed away. So there’s this longing for and anticipation of something so much better. “For the anxious longing of the creation...” 

This is a personification of material creation to compare it with human beings. So the creation, itself, is being depicted as though it has these feelings, these hopes, which are analogous to ours. 

The longing of the creation “waits eagerly for the revealing [the disclosure, the revelation, the unveiling] of the sons of God.” Now this takes us back to verse 14, “For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God..” These are the ones who are growing to maturity. So there will be a disclosure or revelation of this group of believers known as the sons of God, these are the ones who will rule and reign with Christ in the Millennial Kingdom with Christ. These sons of God will be unveiled at the beginning of the Millennial Kingdom as those who will be joint heirs with Christ, ruling and reigning with Him. 

So there’s this longing on the part of the creation for this time period because at that time period the curse is partially rolled back. Not completely rolled back because we’re still living in a fallen world. But it will be partially rolled back. For example, one of the consequences of the curse is the antagonism in the animal kingdom, the development of carnivores. After Adam sinned you wouldn’t want to go put your hand in a cobra’s den and the lion would not be lying down with the wolf but when we get into the Millennial Kingdom that aspect of the curse will be partially rolled back. The curse is not completely obliterated. It’s still going to be a fallen world and bear the scars of all history but there will be a certain amount of change. People will live lengthy lives, possibly the entire length of the Millennial Kingdom so it will be more like the period between the fall and the flood than the period of time since the flood. It’s rolling back the curse to a large degree so there’s this expectation of that time.

 And then we’re given a little further explanation in verse 20, “For the creation was subjected to futility [vanity], not willingly but because of Him [God’s plan] who subjected it in hope…” Now when you think of hope, don’t think of hope in the present but hope is always something that is fulfilled in the future in Biblical teaching. It’s fulfilled eschatologically when Jesus comes back. Hope is a confident expectation of something in the distance so we’re talking about expectations here, the expectation of the creation is rolling back the curse. God subjected this creation to this curse in hope so there’s this anticipation of something that will be resolved. Why? Verse 21, “That the creation, itself, will be set free from its slavery to corruption…” So what this is saying is that the creation itself is under a bondage. We, as believers, are born into bondage to the sin nature and we’re living in a state of corruption. So, it will be delivered “into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Now notice the shift here. Children of God relates to all believers. Previously we talked about the sons of God, which are those who pursued maturity in their spiritual life. Here, in this time period during the Millennial Kingdom is for all believers and it is a time when we, as believers, experience real liberty in the Millennial Kingdom. 

So the first point is that the reason we suffer is because of Adam’s original sin and we’re living in a corrupt world and we’re living with corrupted people and corrupted institutions and nothing is going to be what it ought to be. So rather than living with depression and discouragement we need to recognize that we live in a fallen world and God expects us to move out, trust Him, have joy because of the hope we have of this future restoration. 

One other side note on Romans 8, verse 18, talking about this expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revelation, which the Old King James calls the manifestation, of the sons of God. Now there is a heresy today, just to let you know that I know about this and it’s around. It’s the idea from some really poor translations from the Old Testament, trying to make the fact that there’s going to be this super army of believers in the church age.  It’s tied to post-millennialism and dominion theology, and that this group of spiritual elites are going to take over the world. This has been a foundation in a lot of Christian activism, which is motivated by a desire to bring in the kingdom. This is just as utopic as Marxism and socialism and it is not Biblical because it’s based on this rejection of the literal kingdom. It’s based on the idea that the church militant is going to bring in the kingdom. That connects to something we said on Tuesday night. It’s actually what Diesel was asking a question about on Psalm 110:3. I didn’t catch what he was driving at but he wanted me to connect that. This is a very popular belief. Two years ago there was this day of prayer, maybe you remember they had in August. Rick Perry came and spoke. It was a really big deal. Nearly everyone involved with that day of prayer came out of the dominion, reconstructionist, ‘manifest sons of God name it and claim it’, that crowd. Of course politicians like Rick Perry don’t know anything about these things so they end up becoming duped by some of these kinds of programs that come out, thinking they’re just doing something that is a good thing like a day of Prayer. They don’t realize that these theological undercurrents run behind things. That was what Diesel tried to open me up to say something about that and I didn’t catch.

Okay, second point is that we suffer personally because we make bad decisions. We make bad decisions in what we do and we make bad decisions in how we respond to adversity. It’s not just bad decisions on things we do, choosing overt sin, and consequently reaping the negative consequences for those bad decisions but we make bad decisions in how we choose to respond to adversity. We have horrible things happen; we see horrible things and it generates horrible emotions in us. Then, we start acting on those horrible emotions and giving reign to them and the next thing we know we’re reaping the consequences of that and we’re in a downward spiral into a dark hole of depression because we’re not claiming the promises of God. We haven’t learned how to claim the promises of God and we haven’t learned the mental discipline to shut those things out and to focus on our mission as believers and let God deal with the horrible things going on in creation. Galatians 6:7 says, “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked, for whatever a man sows that shall he also reap.” This isn’t talking about divine discipline. This isn’t talking about additional punishment that God may bring into the life of a believer because of ongoing carnality or sin in the life. This is just talking about the natural consequences of making bad decisions. The trouble is that in the spiritual realm the consequences don’t often happen immediately so we get sucked into a sinful lifestyle, a sinful way of thinking, and ten years down the road we start reaping the consequences. We’re a little slow on making the connection between the consequences and the bad behavior.

The third reason we suffer is divine discipline, in a punitive sense. There’s divine discipline in a positive sense where God is teaching us to discipline our lives and to organize and control things in our life so we can be productive for Him. This is talking about discipline in a punitive sense where God intensifies the negative consequences of our own bad decisions, to get our attention, to get us to get back on track. This is seen in Hebrews 12: 5-6. There’s a quote from Proverbs, chapter 3. “And you have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons, ‘My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by Him, for those whom the Lord loves He disciplines.” Now that’s something that needs to come across to parents that a sign of love is discipline—the right way, not out of anger, not out of resentment, not because the kids have intruded upon your private time, or somehow it’s taking away from your personal agenda; but discipline them because they need to learn right from wrong. There needs to be an objective pattern of rewards and punishment for children in order to train them. Train is the root word in discipline; it has the idea of training someone in the right path. These verses in Hebrews are focusing on the negative aspects of discipline, “..do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord nor faint when you are reproved by Him, for those whom the Lord loves, He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.” If you are not being disciplined by the Lord, then maybe you’re a bastard. You’re not legitimate, if you think you’re a believer. This is saying that every believer is going to be disciplined by the Lord because He loves them. That’s not a sign of the assurance of your salvation, by the way, so don’t take it that way. So there’s divine discipline. One reason we suffer is because we continue to stay in rebellion to God.

Fourth reason, this is one that applies in a lot of ways. Think of the concentric circles of the people you’re associated with. If you’re married, you have a spouse. You will be positively and negatively impacted by the decisions of your spouse. So pick your spouse wisely. Then there are your children. You can’t do anything about your parents; they may wish they could do something about you. You can’t do anything about them; you didn’t pick them. They are yours for the duration. But you have children and those children may bring great joy in your life or they may bring great misery in your life. In most cases they bring some of both. They’re your children and then eventually there are your grandchildren. 

Then you have people you are associated with in business. They may be business partners. They may be people you work for, let’s say you work for a large company. You work for a company, let’s say an oil company. I won’t name any oil companies, this is just a generic illustration, and somebody gets involved in some very bad decisions. We can think of numerous examples recently. Somebody in management makes bad decisions. 

Sometimes they make bad decisions because of their own arrogance and own selfishness. Then the next thing you know the company is in very bad shape and people are losing their jobs because of bad management. It’s just one way we are associated with people who make those decisions and we suffer because people make bad decisions. 

So we’re associated with someone who may be suffering from the fact they are reaping what they are sowing and we may be involved in an organization where someone is under divine discipline so consequently, the company is undergoing problems because of those associations. 

It could be your spouse. It may have nothing to do with you. I find a lot of people who the first thing they say is, “I must have done something wrong.” As I go through all these explanations I think that it’s pretty easy to decide, “Am I in fellowship? Am I really trying to walk with the Lord?  Or am I living in rank carnality?” If the answer is “yes, I’m living in rank carnality,” then we need to confess our sins and we need to get our bodies back into Bible class and we need to start walking with the Lord. That’s the solution. But if we’re already there and bad things are happening then it could be for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with that. But our sin natures are so self-absorbed that the first thing we say is, “What did I do wrong? I’m a failure. I’m a loser.” Immediately what have we done? We’ve become a failure and a loser because of our self-absorption. So we need to get our eyes off self, always, and get our eyes on the Lord.

 If we’re going through suffering, what’s the solution? Make sure you’re in fellowship. Put your eyes on the Lord. Start claiming promises. It doesn’t really matter why you’re going through the suffering, whether it’s your fault, your wife’s fault, your husband’s fault, your kid’s fault, your employer’s fault, the government’s fault, George Soros’ fault, Obama’s fault…it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we take what is a really bad situation and turn it into something positive for the Lord by claiming promises and being obedient to the Lord and then what was meant for bad will turn into good. That’s how we end up with Romans 8: 28 and 29 later on. 

Then the next reason is just living in the cosmic system. Now this is different from the first one. The first one is focused on the fact we live in a corrupt world. Nothing is going to work the way we want it to work. This reason is focusing on the fact that people who think like the devil dominate our world, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re a believer or not. The people who run the systems in this world by and large think like the devil, not like Jesus. They just don’t. I don’t care how great a believer some president was or some congressman was, I will tell you they were not focused on the Word and they probably are living on a lot of cosmic system ideas. 

Now if you go back in history there may be some examples that are different but in our lifetime, there are very few examples of political and national leaders who had a clear focus on the Word of God as their marching orders, from a solid position. They just weren’t trained that way. So we live in the cosmic system. Because we live in the cosmic system, it’s always going to be difficult and there always will be suffering. There will be suffering at your job site. Whatever you do, you’re dealing with unbelievers, fallen creatures who operate on a cosmic system scale of values. You’re living under a government that is more and more being dominated by cosmic system values. So it’s always going to be difficult so rather than caving in to depression and discouragement, we need to get our focus back on the Lord, claiming promises and executing God’s mission for our life as rigorously as we can. 

Now another reason is a positive aspect that comes out of suffering. The first positive aspect is that it’s a wake-up call evangelistically. In Acts 16 we see the suffering, the potential suffering, coming upon the Philippian jailer. He’s in charge of the security of the prisoners. Under Roman law, if the prisoners escape under your watch, then you die. Now the Philippian jailer was probably the smallest person in the jail…because he slept on his watch! 

It’s a wake-up call. What does he do? He immediately comes to Paul and Silas and asked what he must do to be saved. Because as soon as the prison opened enough he knew his head was on the chopping block so he wants to know how he can be saved and he’s open. So, suffering can wake people up for the need for the gospel, the need to secure their eternal destiny.

Seventh reason is that suffering motivates us to learn doctrine. When people go through tough times, then all of a sudden they recognize they can’t handle it and they need to get into Bible class. I know that many, many people, myself included, can point to times in their life when it was all they could do to drag themselves to church every single night because they knew that no matter what else was taught, they were going to come out of class being reminded that God is faithful, God has a plan for your life. If you’re still alive, God still has a plan for your life, it’s not too late, and there’s hope and there’s a future. But you have to get with it spiritually and you hear that day in, day out, and you’re able to make it another day. You’re able to crawl through another twenty-four hour period until things begin to reverse course. Psalm 119:71 says, “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I may learn your statutes.” So we go through suffering and it motivates us to learn the Word and make it the priority that it should be. As Solomon says in Proverbs, we’re to buy truth and sell it not.

The eighth point, we’re to be a witness to our neighbors. As we go through adversity, people watch. Now you may not think anybody is watching you but you’d be surprised how many unbelievers out there and how many believers know all about you. They know that you’re a Christian. They know exactly what goes on in your life. They watch you in the morning, like on Sunday morning when you get up and get in your car as they’re looking out through their bloodshot eyes trying to recover from the night before and they see you drive out your driveway. They see this over a period of time, and figure out that you go to church. “You’re a Christian, you’re one of them.” That’s part of your testimony. People watch us, and they observe us, and how we handle adversity is part of our testimony, part of our witness. In 1 Timothy 1:16 Paul says, “Yet for this reason I found mercy so that in me the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life.” Not already believers but for those who would believe. And so our life is a testimony to other human beings. 

But it doesn’t stop there. We are also a witness in the angelic conflict. Ephesians 3:10 says, “So that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church …” That is through us. The wisdom of God is made clear through us. As we apply the Word, then God’s wisdom is demonstrated. We become, as it were, exhibit A in a trial and the people, the witnesses that are watching, are not other human beings but as the verse says, “to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.” These are the angelic forces. They’re learning things about God and about God’s grace and about His faithfulness and love through watching us that they could learn no other way. They watch us, and they’re just amazed. They can’t believe we can screw up as much as we do and God still cares for us. And we turn back and we trust God and we see His faithfulness. They see His faithfulness and that is a testimony to them.

Then the last reason that we suffer has to do with how we grow and learn in that suffering. You may be going through some suffering right now. You may go through something that is so horrible that you can’t even imagine why God is taking you through it. I want to tell you something. In five years, in ten years, as you have moved out of this and grown and matured spiritually, there are going to be people God brings into your life who are going through what you’re going through and you’re going to be able to encourage them and strengthen them. They’re going to look at you as an example that there is indeed life after all this misery and you’ll be able to share with them how God took you through that and that’s an important part. 2 Corinthians 1:4, “Who comforts us in all our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”

One of things I see in a lot of churches as a pastor in watching the church scene over the years is that in a lot of big churches you have a lot of programs. Now some programs are good and some aren’t and there are pastors who like to dump on programs all the time. But the problem I see in churches is when doing the right thing is motivated by an external, top-down structure. A deacon board meets and says, “We really need to do this.” And whatever it is, we’re going to go out and let’s find somebody to head this up and we’re going to put five people in charge and we’re going to make this happen and see that they meet once a month and that this is taken care of and that is taken care of. It flows from the top down, from mature believers who are setting up structures for others in the church. A lot of times I’ve seen this really doesn’t work. I’ve seen churches which try to do this with evangelism. Every year they have their evangelism training programs. They go through teaching on evangelism. They have role-play on evangelism. They go out to the malls, the highways and the byways, and do evangelism. But when it’s all over with the people aren’t witnessing any more than they were before. Because internally they haven’t matured as believers to where they are self-motivated, and ready to share the gospel with people who are going to hell. This happens in a lot of ways. What I’ve seen is the way it should happen is that as you come to Bible class and as you learn the Word and as you mature, someday the Holy Spirit gets you to finally turn the light bulb on inside your dark little brain and you go, “I should be witnessing to that person.” And now all of a sudden it’s coming out of your soul from your spiritual growth.

I’ll tell you one example around here that I’ve been really pleased to see. That is, that over the last nine years now, since the existence of this church, we have seen a number of men die in this church. In fact, it’s almost scary. We’ve seen a number of men die in this church and we’ve seen a number of widows. What I’ve been pleased to see is how these widows have encouraged one another. It’s not because the board has gone to one or two of them and said, “You know, you’ve been a widow a pretty long time now and you’re fairly mature spiritually so why don’t you get with a couple of others and you guys organize something?” It’s motivated by their own spiritual growth and their own desire to minister to one another. That’s the way it should be. There are people who come out of structured churches who say, “No, no, it needs church structure.” No, it doesn’t. If people are growing spiritually they’re going to meet the needs of one another and they’re going to encourage one another, pray for one another, all those one another passages. And that shows a healthy church. 

Now if a church is young in terms of spiritual maturity, those things don’t happen right away. But for people who are in the Word over time, those things happen. It’s so great to see it. It shows that the church is maturing. You have mature believers and they’re really responding to the teaching of the Word. That, to me, is a much greater sign of the health of the church than anything else when you see those kinds of things happening in the congregation because it shows that people are really growing and maturing in their spiritual life.

Okay, next time we’re going to come back and wrap up this one particular section. I don’t know how far we’ll get because we have to deal with this whole issue of the future orientation of verse 22 down to verse 27 because that focuses us. This is why we suffer. It focuses us on the ultimate goal and we need to get a better handle on that ultimate goal. This is what the ‘good’ is in Romans 8:28. It doesn’t say “all things work together for good”. It says “all things are working together for the good.” God is working them together for something in the future and it’s that future orientation that we need to keep in focus. That’s what enables us to deal with all the manure we walk through day in and day out.

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