God Is More Valuable Than Life & Health Series

I'm really grateful for God's word. I don't know what I would do without it. The Bible has so much information in it about who we are and who God is and God's plan for us that it becomes this really strategic place that we spend our time learning and studying. That's why we spend so much time looking at God's word each week, whether it's on Sunday morning or doing Bible studies, or what have you.

But one of the beautiful things about the scriptures is they don't hide controversy. The controversies are spelled out in scripture. In fact, seven times Jesus heals people on the Sabbath. I think He's trying to create controversy, or at least try to get people to wrestle with things inside of their hearts. There's a lot of controversy in our world today and the Bible speaks to controversy. This Bible speaks to the darkness that our world experiences, the suffering that exists out there, the difficult things that happen in people's lives. The Bible speaks to that. I don't know what I would do without the Bible.

I mean, this week I talked to a man who is experiencing a lot of anxiety in his life. I don't know how I could help him without sharing with him the truths from God's word. I talked to a woman who's divorced but doesn't want to be divorced. She never wanted to be divorced. But she is and so she's trying to adjust to all that. I don't know how I would help her without an understanding of God and His grace and what He does in people's lives. I talked to a six-year-old this week about death because she had experienced the death of a loved one. Just how would any of us be able to help someone else without the benefit of God's word? It's just so helpful.

Today we're going to look at a difficult situation. I think one of the most challenging experiences for any of us is when a child of ours suffers. That is so painful. And sometimes it's short lived. Like my grandson broke his arm. I mean, that's painful. He was showing me this week how his arm is strong again, and it is, and that's great. But I'm talking more about those really difficult child experiences. Sometimes children are born with challenges. Challenges like autism, or Down Syndrome, or attention deficit disorder, or emotional challenges that they have in their life, or some deformity, or some kind of a challenge like blindness, as we'll see today. I think it's so painful to wrestle with that. Because it hurts us to see that take place sometimes. I think it's really hard on parents, especially. Parents have to wrestle with those things. Especially with a child like this one – a man who was born blind. He grows up, he's a man now, but he was born blind. So his parents had to kind of wrestle with that. So today, I think we all need to wrestle with this, with suffering, with difficulties in our lives. I think some parents, you know, they have a child with special needs and they go, “I didn't sign up for this. This isn't what I was expecting when I was going to have children. I expected we'd have this big happy family and they'd go forward. But now our life has completely changed.” So my heart just goes out for this family that's represented in our passage today in John 9.

But it's out of this story, one of seven stories that John has chosen to talk to us about and share with us in his book, one of seven miracles. He's chosen to tell us this one because it has some very important things that we all need to wrestle with. Because I don't know if you're like me, but I think all of us could say at certain points in our lives, “I didn't sign up for this.” In other words, this isn't how I expected life would be. I thought I would be going and I'd have these expectations, these dreams, these hopes. I thought it would be going this way in my life, but something stopped. It could be the loss of a job. It could be a divorce, it could be the loss of a mate, it could be sickness that comes into your life. And you end up saying, “I don't know how to handle this.” So we're going to see how Jesus addresses this issue and the wrestling that disciples are having as we look at our passage today in John 9.

Open your Bibles to that passage or you can follow along on the screen. I put it here so that you could see it. Would you please stand with me as I read these first five verses of God's word today from John 9. It says this: As he (that is Jesus) passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”