Why Does God Allow Suffering? Series

The Rest of Ravi’s Story

Let me return to Ravi from the beginning of my talk. When Ravi was seventeen, he decided that he was at wits’ end with his family. “At the age of seventeen, I stole some money and ran away from home.” Ravi recalled. “It was really a strange scene: a teenage boy in a wheelchair roaming the streets and the roads. One day I was just sitting on a bench at a train station, and a Christian dressed in a white robe sits down by me. I tried to lie and tell him that I was waiting for the next train, but he knew that wasn’t the truth. The next train was not scheduled to arrive for another nine hours.” Ravi continued the story about the strange man at the train station. “He opened a Bible and just started sharing with me. Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about, but he kept reading and talking about verse after verse. I would see him close his eyes at times, but I had no idea what real prayer was.”

“He told me that God really loves me, and how he paid for my sins. All of my life I had been told that the gods were angry with me since I did not please them enough.” The man was persistent with Ravi. “He repeated several times that God had a special purpose in my life, and that my physical disability would be used for God’s glory,” Ravi continued. “But I didn’t even know what glory was.”

Although Ravi did not become a Christian that day, the strange man in white started a chain of events that would lead him to the Savior. He told Ravi that he could go to a Christian boarding school about an hour away. They would take care of him and let him continue his education. Fourteen months later in the Christian school, Ravi met Christ.

1. The Plan of Our Father

2. The Pain of Living

3. The Proof of Our Faith

“so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:7).

Now Peter uses the picture of a goldsmith. Your faith is the gold, and God is the goldsmith, and life is the crucible in which your faith is shaped and molded. Many of us do not understand exactly what a goldsmith does. First, a goldsmith takes the rough ore of gold, and puts it into a crucible. He then turns up a great fire underneath this crucible in order to melt this gold. The reason for doing this is that all of the impurities that contaminate this ore of gold will rise to the top and the precious gold will settle to the bottom. Your faith is as precious as gold to God, and He allows your faith to go through the fiery trials of life because trials have 2 very wonderful effects on faith:

3.1. Trials Verify Faith

Peter speaks of the genuineness of a man’s faith. That word “genuine” literally means to prove something to see if it is genuine; to test something to see if it is the real McCoy, or just a counterfeit. You see, there is a genuine faith and there is a counterfeit faith. And anything that God makes that is genuine, Satan will always try to counterfeit. You know, there are some people who appear to be Christians, when they really are not Christians. And it is sometimes very, very difficult to tell the difference between a real Christian and a false Christian. When it comes to faith all that glitters is not gold. Peter makes this very salient point that the faith that cannot be tested, cannot be trusted. Faith must be tested. An untried faith is an untrustworthy faith. Until your faith is put to the test, we can never be sure if is real faith. If there’s a defect in our faith, we need to know it: “Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test” (2 Corinthians 13:5)! That is, if your faith is real.