God And Suffering Series

So hey there, so good to see you, welcome to this place that we call DCC, and before we say anything else, happy Mother’s Day to you. If you are a mom would you please stand? We want to appreciate you today. Let’s give it up for all of these awesome women in our lives. Okay, so moms stay standing and now if you are a female of any age mom or not would you stand and join these moms. Here is why we always do this, because I know that every one of the mom’s standing right now and all of the rest of us in the room too want you to know that you are not less than because you are not a mom. So please stand up, I want to pray for all of the ladies in the room.

PRAYER: Thank you for mom’s, mother’s to be, want to be mom’s, women who have lost children, suffered miscarriages, struggled with fertility, are trying to adopt, stepmothers, foster mothers. Those of us who have lost mothers. Never knew our mothers or had less than desirable experiences with our mothers. Amen.

You can be seated. Okay, so here we are today continuing on in this series we are in called Distortion, trying our best to clear up this distorted image that in one way or another we all have of God so that we can see him and understand him as he really is. But before we jump back into that we want to make sure that we say hello and welcome to you if you are brand new. We want you to know not only that it is a big deal that you are taking a chance on us today, you also need to know that all of your story is safe and welcome here with us regardless of how it reads, you belong with us regardless of what you believe, and you have landed in a place of people who are exactly like you. Hope you feel that and experience that in your time with us today and that you want to come back and do this again with us real soon.

ILLUST> Back about 20 years ago I led my first mission trip to Poland. About 5 months before we would be taking a team of men over to do some construction work 2 or 3 of us went over to assess exactly what would be needed when we returned with the team. As a part of that trip I got to experience the World War II German concentration camp Auschwitz for the very first time. It was February, very cold, and there was about 6 inches of snow on the ground. Not ideal conditions to visit, but I don’t know that there would have been a better way for me to begin to understand what the prisoners there had to experience. As we walked the brick streets we were told stories of the roll calls where the Germans would make the prisoners who were barely dressed, many didn’t have shoes stand outside for hours. I couldn’t help but think about that as I trudged through the snow, with a cold wind cutting me in two. I walked through the buildings to see the photos of all of the faces of people who had died there. I saw rooms full of shoes, glasses, suitcases, toys, human hair of people who died in this place. I stood in the gas chamber where over 70,000 people died. I saw the scratch marks on the walls made by human hands as these innocent people breathed their last breath. I saw the gallows where so many prisoners were hung and died. In the end it is estimated that over a million innocent people died in that small concentration camp.

So, where was God in all of that? That’s a great question. Two weeks ago in this series, we talked about God’s heart for rescue and celebrated the 1,000 or so people that we have been a part of rescuing from human trafficking, today I want to focus on the millions who haven’t, who continue to suffer. There may be nothing that distorts our view of God more than the pain and suffering we experience in our lives and stories. How do we reconcile an all powerful, loving God with all the pain and suffering that is going on in our lives and all over the place in the world around us? That’s what I want us to dive into and talk about in the time we have left together today. So let’s do this.

If you brought a Bible we are going to be in Psalm chapter 69 today. If you would like a Bible to follow along in but don’t have one, they are on the back tables. Or you can just hit our app, the YouVersion app, or you can just read along with me off of the screens. Okay, so here we go, Psalm chapter 69 beginning with verse 1…