Encouragement for Sufferers
Romans 8:1-2, 38-39,
If you were talking to a Christian who you knew was going through a real difficult time in their life in terms of pain and suffering, where would you take them in the Bible to try to encourage them or give them hope, comfort, peace, even joy? And the Bible is called a book of comfort or a book of encouragement. It was meant to encourage us. Not that that is all it is for, but it certainly is there for that very reason.
Again, where would you go in your Bible? I think if you wanted to go to the New Testament, you could begin with the gospels and you could take them to those stories about Jesus and see the most compassionate person who ever lived reaching out to suffering people. He often healed them from those diseases and things that people couldn't; the medical profession, if you had doctors in those days, could have healed them. And it was not only His love and His compassion that was put on display, but His power. He could heal anything, there was no disease that He could not heal. So you could take him to the gospels and show him the love and compassion of Jesus.
You could also take him to the life of the Apostle Paul and see how he handled his own suffering and how he found the sufficiency of Christ's grace to be sufficient. Remember what he said in terms of his weakness, “He was made strong.” So we could take him to that 2 Corinthians 12 passage and see Paul's own experience and how he handled suffering. And you could also take him to the Psalms. Martin Luther would run to Psalm 46 when he was in times of danger, “God is our refuge, our strength, a present help in trouble.” And certainly I think most of us would probably go to Psalm 23, where you get the picture of the good shepherd, “The Lord is my shepherd.” And you find out that He provides, He protects with His rod and His staff and He guides and He also draws near to us in the midst of our suffering. He is with us in that valley of the shadow of death.
But another great place to go in your Bibles, I would argue, is Romans chapter 8. Again, it has been called perhaps by many the greatest book, greatest chapter that has ever been written. And in this chapter, the apostle makes no attempt to hide the reality of pain and suffering. You have three big groans. You see that word groan? It's found three times in Romans chapter eight. If you look at verse 19 he talks about creation groans. What does that tell us? We live in a world that's been cursed by God, a sin cursed world; floods, tornadoes, famines that will always be part of life here upon planet Earth. So this creation itself groans and even waits for that day of deliverance. But you also have the groaning of us inwardly. Romans 8:23, “We groan inwardly as we wait for our adoption and redemption of our bodies.” We experience weaknesses, disappointments, physical mortality, sin struggles and falls.
And even when it comes to prayer, there's a groaning, right? How you interpret that, there's a debate amongst the commentators. Some think it's the groaning of us as we pray and the Spirit is deciphering our groans. But notice what he says, verse 26, “groaning too deep for words.” Sometimes it's even hard to articulate yourself when you're in the midst of a lot of pain and suffering. Romans 8 reminds us that we never, ever escape suffering. We'll have manifold sorrows and pains in this present life. But even in the midst of the greatest of suffering, we can experience joy, hope, and peace. If you look back over the whole chapter, there's encouragement for sufferers. I'll mention six of them. Someone else put the word greatest in front of all of these, which is, I think, a good suggestion. Here's what he says,
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” Verse 38, 39, “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
If you were talking to a Christian who you knew was going through a real difficult time in their life in terms of pain and suffering, where would you take them in the Bible to try to encourage them or give them hope, comfort, peace, even joy? And the Bible is called a book of comfort or a book of encouragement. It was meant to encourage us. Not that that is all it is for, but it certainly is there for that very reason.
Again, where would you go in your Bible? I think if you wanted to go to the New Testament, you could begin with the gospels and you could take them to those stories about Jesus and see the most compassionate person who ever lived reaching out to suffering people. He often healed them from those diseases and things that people couldn't; the medical profession, if you had doctors in those days, could have healed them. And it was not only His love and His compassion that was put on display, but His power. He could heal anything, there was no disease that He could not heal. So you could take him to the gospels and show him the love and compassion of Jesus.
You could also take him to the life of the Apostle Paul and see how he handled his own suffering and how he found the sufficiency of Christ's grace to be sufficient. Remember what he said in terms of his weakness, “He was made strong.” So we could take him to that 2 Corinthians 12 passage and see Paul's own experience and how he handled suffering. And you could also take him to the Psalms. Martin Luther would run to Psalm 46 when he was in times of danger, “God is our refuge, our strength, a present help in trouble.” And certainly I think most of us would probably go to Psalm 23, where you get the picture of the good shepherd, “The Lord is my shepherd.” And you find out that He provides, He protects with His rod and His staff and He guides and He also draws near to us in the midst of our suffering. He is with us in that valley of the shadow of death.
But another great place to go in your Bibles, I would argue, is Romans chapter 8. Again, it has been called perhaps by many the greatest book, greatest chapter that has ever been written. And in this chapter, the apostle makes no attempt to hide the reality of pain and suffering. You have three big groans. You see that word groan? It's found three times in Romans chapter eight. If you look at verse 19 he talks about creation groans. What does that tell us? We live in a world that's been cursed by God, a sin cursed world; floods, tornadoes, famines that will always be part of life here upon planet Earth. So this creation itself groans and even waits for that day of deliverance. But you also have the groaning of us inwardly. Romans 8:23, “We groan inwardly as we wait for our adoption and redemption of our bodies.” We experience weaknesses, disappointments, physical mortality, sin struggles and falls.
And even when it comes to prayer, there's a groaning, right? How you interpret that, there's a debate amongst the commentators. Some think it's the groaning of us as we pray and the Spirit is deciphering our groans. But notice what he says, verse 26, “groaning too deep for words.” Sometimes it's even hard to articulate yourself when you're in the midst of a lot of pain and suffering. Romans 8 reminds us that we never, ever escape suffering. We'll have manifold sorrows and pains in this present life. But even in the midst of the greatest of suffering, we can experience joy, hope, and peace. If you look back over the whole chapter, there's encouragement for sufferers. I'll mention six of them. Someone else put the word greatest in front of all of these, which is, I think, a good suggestion. Here's what he says,
- We have in Romans 8 the greatest security, there's no condemnation, there's no separation. You are eternally secure.
- We have the greatest hope as we anticipate the glory to come. He makes that point in Romans 8:18-25. The greatest hope is the hope of future hope of heaven, resurrection, seeing Christ face to face. We have that great hope, the greatest hope.
- You could also argue from this chapter, the greatest power living in you, the Holy Spirit. That's divine. He indwells us, He guides us, He even helps us when it comes to the mortification of sin, Romans 8:13. So we have the greatest security, the greatest hope, the greatest power.
- The greatest assurance. Look at verse 28, “All things are working out for our good.” That's a great, wonderful assurance that everything that happens in our life, “all things are working out for our good.”
- The greatest privilege. We can call God Father, Abba, the greatest privilege when it comes to prayer. We go to God as our Heavenly Father. And so as Christians, we can be very realistic, can't we? We should be when it comes to suffering, we don't deny it, we don't pretend it's not there, but we should always be worshiping. We never ever want to stop praying and rejoicing no matter how much we are suffering and how much pain we are in. And again, we even heard this from Pastor Mark Sunday night:
"All because of who Christ is and what Christ did."
- And I think we could also say this, we can pray the greatest of prayers with the greatest of boldness and the greatest of joy.
And so that's what we want to do, we want to pray. We want to go to God and cry out to Him for help, for guidance, that His word would have a wonderful sanctifying effect upon our lives. Psalm 119 tells us we are to hide the truth in our hearts or in the innermost part of our beings. So we are to store the truth there. We don't want it to simply sit on the shelf of our minds, but we want it to be in our hearts and impact our lives.
Posted in Pastor Devotional