Over the past three weeks, we’ve been taking a Biblical look at hardship … what the Bible says it is … why we experience hardship … and how we should respond to the trials and challenges of life from a Biblical perspective. God uses the trials and hardships of life to teach us … to help us grow and become stronger, more affective Christians and servants of God. God works His good through our trials and difficulties when we pray and when we stay. This week we’re going to wrap up this brief series by exploring how God loves to bring out His purposes through our problems.
If I had to sum up this whole series on hardship, I would sum it up with this personal observation: Where I end, God begins … and to help me explain what that means, I’ve invited the Apostle Paul here today to share his experience and understanding about hardship and the ways in which God uses those experiences to mold us and shape us into powerful, effective Christians eager to answer His call in our lives.
Well … welcome, Paul.
“Shalom, my Christian friend and brother. Thank you for this opportunity to preach the Good News here in Canton. Beautiful mountains filled with beautiful people. What I’ve been asked to do, if I understand your pastor correctly, is to share a bit of my experience with trials and hardship and then let your pastor give you some insight into how all of this can help you … is that right, Pastor Pike? Good.
“As you probably know, I used to search for Christians in order to make them suffer. My life was profoundly changed when I met Jesus in a dramatic way on my way to Damascus to arrest and imprison as many Christians as I could possibly round up. While I didn’t fully understand what Jesus meant at the time, Jesus made it clear to me at my conversion that I would be sent to tell people about Him. As Jesus explained to His faithful servant, Ananias, ‘I will show him how much he must suffer for my name’ (Acts 9:16).
“Of course, Jesus was right. I had the privilege of bringing the Gospel to different parts of the world. I started a number of churches and got to watch them come to life and begin to grow and thrive. After spending time in these cities … teaching and encouraging new believers … I often wrote letters to them as a way of keeping in touch with them and letting them know how I was doing while passing on to them what information I could about the spread and growth of the church during my travels. Some of my letters were designed to teach and equip my brothers and sisters as they continued to grow into Christians who would change the world. I had no idea that some of my letters would have survived this long and continue to teach and encourage generations of Christians around the world. Enough boasting, eh?
“Pastor Pike asked me here to shed some light on a passage that I wrote to the church at Corinth. Tough town to start and maintain a church in, let me tell you. Many of my Christian brothers and sisters in Corinth who were totally on fire when I left there were beginning to struggle with their faith in the face of growing opposition from their skeptical and sometimes hostile Jewish neighbors and the deeply pagan and cosmopolitan community that surrounded them. Some of them began abandoning the movement and started lapsing into their old ways … so I wrote them a couple of letters to both comfort and confront them. In my first letter, I corrected them on some topics that they were confused about. I addressed issues of divisions that were beginning to develop … immorality … lawsuits … marriage and singleness … attacks on my claim to be an apostle of Christ … the Lord’s Supper … the origin and use of spiritual gifts … the Resurrection … and the importance of regular giving as a way of supporting the church.
“Needless to say, the situation for the Christians in Corinth continued to get worse, so I wrote them a second letter explaining to them that God comforts us when we go through hard times and that God will use our trials and difficulties so that we will be able to understand and walk through hard times with other people. I also explained the importance of not being unequally yoked with unbelievers and how to grow in generosity. Even though it’s something that I don’t like to do, I felt the need to defend my ministry because there were a number of church leaders in Corinth who were attacking my authority and my claim to be a genuine apostle of Jesus Christ.
“If you have you Bibles with you … do you still call the Bible our ‘owner’s manual,’ Pastor G.? … I thought so. If you would, take out your ‘owner’s manual’ and turn to my second letter to my brothers and sisters in the city of Corinth … I believe it’s called ‘2nd Corinthians’ in your Bible, am I right, Pastor? Ah … good. Before we look at verses 7 through 10, I need to share a phenomenal experience that I had before I wrote this letter.
“Fourteen years before I wrote my second letter to the Corinthians I had an incredible experience that I had never shared with anyone … partly because I was afraid my friends would think that I had lost my mind and partly, to be honest, because I still don’t know how to explain what happened or describe what I saw. You see, somehow I was … well … ‘transported’ for the lack of a better description … to what was called the ‘third heaven’ in my day … the heavenly realm where God and His angels and saints reside beyond the clouds and beyond the stars and planets. It was … well … you’ll just have to experience it for yourself … that’s all I can say.
“The reason I shared this incredible event in my life was to establish my credibility which some of the church leaders had been undermining, as I mentioned earlier … but I also mentioned my ‘trip’ to Heaven because of what happened next. Look at verse 7: ‘To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given to me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.’ I don’t know about you but over the years I have learned that there is no sin so subtle and pervasive and ugly as pride. Proverbs says that a person’s ‘pride brings [them] low, but a [person] of lowly spirit gains honor’ (Proverb 29:23).
“There has been a lot of discussion and conjecture about exactly what the ‘thorn’ in my flesh was but I haven’t told anyone for a reason. You see, if you don’t know what it was that I struggled with, you won’t get all caught up in the ‘what’ and not hear the ‘why’ … and the ‘why’ is what you need to apply to your life or your situation. What I will tell you is that the word that I used for ‘thorn’ referred to the point on a fish hook or a sharp stake that was used to torture or impale someone, usually as part of some extreme form of punishment. I used such a strong image as a way of letting you know how painful and persistent my malady or difficulty was.
“Satan used that fishhook … that stake … to torment me. Once I was pierced by my thorn or difficulty, Satan kept grabbing hold of it and twisting it and turning it … never letting it heal … never letting me forget that it was there. Has that every happened to any of you? I have no doubt that it has. It doesn’t have to be physical pain, you know. It can be spiritual or emotional or mental as well. Whatever form it takes, your pain … your trial … your difficulty is always there … and just when you think it’s getting better … just when you think that it may be gone … Satan comes along and sticks his finger in it and twists it, amen? Can I get a witness?
“My problem … my ‘thorn,’ if you will … was so paralyzing that I prayed to the LORD and literally begged Him to take it away or do something about it … and as hard as I prayed … and believe me, I prayed with all my might … God didn’t take it away from me. In fact, He told me in no uncertain terms that He wouldn’t. I’ll never forget what He said to me: ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness’ (2nd Corinthians 12:9). I’d like to say that that was the end of the matter but I have to be honest and tell you that I didn’t like His answer at first because, well, quite frankly, I didn’t get it. All I heard at first was ‘no’ … and, frankly, I was mad that God said ‘no’ and that He was going to let me continue to suffer. But His words lingered in my mind and in my heart. ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness’ (v. 9).
“It took me a long time to understand the great gift that God had given me. Like your pastor said, I find God’s strength when I reach the end of my own strength and have no strength of my own left to go on. When I have reached the end of my rope … when I have no choice but to give up and throw myself helplessly upon God’s care … that’s when I discover the immeasurable and inexhaustible strength and power of God.
“’My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness’ (2nd Corinthians 12:9). Like your pastor, I’m a stickler for words. God said that ‘His’ grace was sufficient for me. ‘My’ strength … ‘my’ power was clearly lacking … clearly insufficient. Jesus wasn’t pointing this out to humiliate me. Just the opposite. He was encouraging me to abandon my obviously limited strength and resources and rely on His. God said that I would realize that HIS power, not mine, would be made perfect in my weakness. His strength, His power … my weakness. He didn’t make me stronger. I’ve always been weak and I’m still as weak today as I was then … and that’s okay … more than okay … because I have God’s grace and I have God’s strength … not just today … but always … ready … available … when I need it … but it is only when I realize that I need it … that I don’t have it … that I lean upon Him. I’ve come to accept the fact that there is only so much I can do and I am grateful that I am so weak. In fact, what I would encourage each and every one of you to do is go straight to the LORD all the time with all your problems. Why fight and struggle and wrestle with your problems until you are exhausted and frustrated and forced to give up … only to realize that your efforts were inevitably doomed to failure and that you should have gone to God in the first place, amen? Why put yourself through all of that only to have to throw your hands up in the air and give up in the end anyways, amen?
“Now … don’t misunderstand me. I can’t just pray and do nothing and expect God to do it all. He won’t do for me what I can do for myself. I do have some strength … I do have some skills. I can do what I can with what God has given me, but God will make up for what I am lacking. I do all that I can with all that I’ve got knowing that what I’ve got won’t be enough … but I do all that I can with all that I have knowing that God will come beside me and give me what I need so that I will be able to accomplish His will and His purposes.
“Like I wrote to the folks in Corinth, ‘I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me’ (2nd Corinthians 12:9). Less me, more Christ … more Christ, the more I can do, the more I can endure, the more I can accomplish … and here’s where it gets good. When people see what I have done, when people read about the amazing, incredible things that I have accomplished … they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was no way that I could have done that on my own, amen? I did super-human things … not because I’m super-human but because I had the super-human, super-natural power of Christ resting on me and dwelling within me … and I’ll be the first to admit that it wasn’t me and give Jesus and God and His Holy Spirit all the credit.
“Well …I hope this helps explain why I am able to celebrate God’s strength in the midst of my terrible pain and suffering and I hope that you will discover as I did how to be content with your weaknesses, your hardships, your calamities for the sake of Christ because … like me … you are confident that where you are weak, where you are lacking, Christ will come and make you complete and make you strong. I may have gone to Heaven, but it was through my hurts and hardships that Heaven came to me … and if it can happen to me … weak wretch that I am … it can happen to you.
“Well, Pastor G., I hope that helped. If you don’t need anything else, I’ll be on my way.”
Thank you, Brother Paul, for coming and sharing some of your great wisdom … er, God’s great wisdom … that you have acquired with us. I can’t speak for anyone else but I plan to go on showing God’s strength to the world through my weakness. As Brother Paul mentioned, I thought I’d take a few moments here to wrap up this series by sharing with you some of the ways in which you can find purpose in your problems.
First of all, confess your bitterness to God. As the Bible says in Hebrews 12:15: “See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and through it … become defiled.” If I am bitter towards my circumstances then I risk becoming bitter towards the cause of my circumstances … and eventually I’m going to blame God for my problems or become bitter when I pray to Him and He doesn’t remove my “thorns” when they are clearly causing me so much pain and trouble. God can remove my thorns or He can help me to persevere and endure my trials and hardships … but not if I blame Him for my problems and turn my back on Him and develop what the Bible calls a “hard heart,” amen? In order to be made perfect or complete, I have to accept God’s offer of grace and strength … not blame Him for my problems and curse Him as I struggle and limp along under my own power, amen? Understand? Good.
Bitterness springs from my pride and arrogance. Pride says that this shouldn’t be happening to me and arrogance insists that I can solve all my problems on my own without any help. Pride says I shouldn’t ask for help and arrogance insists that God answer my demands when I should be getting down on my knees and asking for His help. Pride is what makes us hang in there until things become so painful, so desperate, that we have to overcome our arrogance and humble ourselves before God and ask for help … only to discover that the only shame that comes from asking God for help is our refusal to ask God for help, amen?
Our pride and our arrogance also stem from our selfishness. We want all the credit, all the praise, all the accolades that come from overcoming the hardships and problems that life puts in our way rather than allowing God to give us what we need and then boasting and giving God the rightful praise and accolades that He deserves. As our brother Paul pointed out in his second letter to the saints in Corinth:
“… we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but no crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2nd Corinthians 4:7-9).
A cynic once needled an elderly believer who had endured pain for 20 years. “What do you think of your God now?” the cynic sneered … to which she calmly replied: “I think of Him more than ever.” As poet and theologian Richard Baxter put it: “Suffering so unbolts the door of the heart that the Word hath easier entrance.” Hardship and suffering bring us to our knees.
Pray with passion. Pray with persistence. Ask God for a miracle. But never forget to whom you are praying. When you pray to God be sure to ask Him to give you the wisdom, the humility, and the courage to accept His answer no matter what His answer may be, amen? God not only told our brother, Paul, that He would not remove the thorn from his side but that He was the one that allowed Satan to put it there and that He had a purpose and plan for allowing Satan to keep tormenting him with it. Are you willing to accept God’s answer even if the answer is “no”? Are you okay with God giving and God taking away as He sees fit?
Paul’s hardships, like ours, are more often the result of being obedient to God’s will … God’s plans and purposes … than they are a punishment from God for failing to stay in God’s will. We often avoid doing God’s will because it looks to be too much … and it usually is too much for us without God’s help … but I am a firm believer that God will never ask us to do anything without counting the cost first and then giving us what we need to accomplish His plans and purposes … we need to know that going in when we pray for God’s will to be done in our lives … or we will quickly get discouraged and walk away when God answers our prayers. Makes sense, right?
And now, are you ready for some real “black belt” Christianity, my sisters and brothers? You sure? Okay … here we go. Brother Paul was ‘content’ with weakness … he was ‘content’ with insults … he was ‘content’ with hardship … with persecution … with calamities … he was ‘content’ … he was ‘honored’ … to be chosen to go through all of this for the sake of Christ … so that Christ would be glorified … so that Christ would be honored. When God choses you for so great an honor or privilege, how do you respond? Do you whine? Do you complain? Do you walk away? Or do you thank Christ … do you thank Christ for the opportunity to experience your weakness … to have your faith challenged … and be strengthened in the process?
Prayer allows us to open our hearts to God. Prayer allows us to ask God for what we need. But prayer also opens our minds to see our trials and our hardships as God sees them. Don’t judge your circumstances by your feelings … judge your circumstances by the Holy Spirit and by the Word of God. You may not “feel” excited or full of joy when it comes to facing the challenges that lay ahead but you may have the courage and hope to face them because of the One … with a capital “O” … you are praying to. Seeing things God’s way doesn’t cancel your trials or turn them into “non-trials,” but you may view them differently when you realize that God intends to accomplish His purposes … whatever that may be … through them. As the great journalist and former atheist Malcolm Muggeridge once observed: “Supposing you eliminated suffering … what a dreadful place the world would be! Everything that corrects the tendency of man to feel over-important and over-pleased with himself would disappear. He’s bad enough now, but he would be absolutely intolerable if he never suffered” (https://thereligionthatstartedinahat.org/2020/02/14/ malcolm-muggeridge-quotes/).
Treat your trials and hardships as a gift from God … that’s the “black belt” part I was talking about earlier. Thank God for your trials and hardship. In fact, take a moment right now to think of the biggest trial or problem you have … and thank God for it. [Pause.]
Great trials give me great hope that God is doing a great work in me. Imagine being grateful for having “amyotrophic lateral sclerosis” … usually referred to ALS. As Jim Harrell’s body was slowly succumbing to ALS, he was thankful for the perspective that this terminal disease gave him. “Suffering is the icy cold splash that wakes us up from the complacency of living this life,” Harrell told writer Randy Alcorn. “We truly don’t see God and His purpose and strength without suffering because we just become too comfortable” (https://www.epm.org /blog/2008/Dec/11/jim-harrell-perspectives-in-suffering-part-3).
An anonymous person once said that you can either accept your trials and they will become heavenly blessings … or you can fight your trials and they will become heavy burdens. Again, something that Brother Paul would agree with. “We do not want you to be uniformed, brothers and sisters, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia,” Paul wrote in 2nd Corinthians. “We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead” (1:8-10).
You ready for some more “black belt” Christianity? Sometimes the trials and hardships that come our way actually have nothing to do with us. They are not a test from God. They are not caused by God. They may simply be the result of sharing this life and this planet with other people. Just as my actions impact the lives and actions of those around me, so too do the actions and decisions of others impact my life. Maybe we have to undergo some ordeal or trials because God needs us to rise up to a certain level of strength or faith in order to help someone who needs God to take on flesh and be God’s hands and feet for them. A reporter once asked Mother Theresa: “When a baby dies alone in a Calcutta alley, where is God?” I love her response. “God is there, suffering with the baby,” she said. “The question really is, ‘Where are you?’”
Paul prayed to have his thorn removed so that he could get on with his life and with his ministry. What he learned is that the thorn … or the lessons that he learned from his thorn … enriched his appreciation for life and increased his ability to minister to people who were also suffering and undergoing great challenges and trials in their lives. In his book, “If God is Good,” author Randy Alcorn wrote: “Through suffering we become powerless so that we might reach the powerless … suffering makes Jesus visible to the world. Suffering creates a sphere of influence for Christ that we couldn’t otherwise have” (2009. Colorado Springs: Multnomah Books, pg. 110).
Have you ever considered the possibility that God may be using you or using your pain and suffering as a way of helping someone else? It’s hard to relate to someone who has lost a child unless you’ve lost a child yourself. Please … I’m not saying that God will cause you to loose a child just so you can help someone else down the line who lost a child … but He will take you through that experience and later on use you and use that experience to bring healing and hope to someone else … just as He brought someone with healing and hope to you when you went through your particular hardship or trial. “Praise be to God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles,” Paul tells the saints in the Corinth church, “so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (2nd Corinthians 1:3-4) … so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort that we ourselves received from God, amen?
Corrie ten Boom’s sister, Betsie, died in a German Nazi concentration camp. Towards what was clearly going to be the end of her life, Betsie told her sister: “There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still” (https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/ there-is-no-pit-so-deep/). A victim of a great evil once told Randy Alcorn: “I discovered in myself the spirit of entitlement. I learned that God was not going to go down my checklist of happiness and fulfill it. I learned what it meant to suffer to His will. Before, I wanted certain gifts from Him. Now I want Him” (2009. If God is Good. Colorado Springs: Multnomah Books, pg. 89).
I want to close with this poem which was found on the body of a dead Confederate soldier:
I asked God for strength, that I might achieve.
I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey.
I asked God for health, that I might do greater things,
I was given infirmity, that I might do better things.
I asked for riches, that I might be happy.
I was given poverty, that I might be wise.
I asked for power, that I might have the praise of men.
I was given weakness, that I might feel the need of God.
I asked for all things, that I might enjoy life.
I was given life, that I might enjoy all things.
I got nothing that I asked for – but everything I had hoped for.
Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered.
I am among men, most richly blessed.
Do you feel weak and worthless? Has life been pounding you into the ground like a tent peg? Have you been battered and thrown around by the storms of life? Maybe it’s time you surrendered, amen? Maybe it’ time for you to surrender to Jesus? Maybe it’s time to tell Him that you can’t go any further on your own? Maybe it’s time to tell Him that life is too much for you sometimes? In fact, let’s tell Him right now, shall we?
