Recently some friends of mine posted on their blog (http://evanandjulia.blogspot.com/) the age old question of why evil exists in this world. It wasn’t quite stated that way but essentially that’s what they were asking. Last summer I was in a reading frenzy and I picked up a book by a guy living in Namibia, Africa entitled, Ten Things I Wish Jesus Never Said. One of the things that has interested me the most so far in reading this is the idea that suffering is not something to be avoided for the Christian (as we often believe it ought to be) but rather understood as a sign of God’s care for us. He spends an entire chapter devoted to this topic. In a book on pain by Philip Yancey, Yancey notes that “books on pain can be neatly divided into two categories. The older ones, by people like Augustine, Luther, Bunyan, and so on, ’ungrudgingly accept pain and suffering as God’s useful agents.’ The modern books on the topic move God to the position of a defendant who must answer to man for his inability to remove pain from our lives.”Now I’m not suggesting that you go and look for pain in your life today. What I am suggesting is that rather than challenging God to only give us “good things”, that we begin to see that God is also at work in the “bad things”. That suffering is God’s way of developing in us the kind of people we are destined by Him to be. Paul wrote in the letter to the Phillipians, “I gave up all that inferior stuff so I could know Christ personally, experience his resurrection power, be a partner in his suffering, and go all the way with him to death itself. If there was any way to get in on the resurrection from the dead, I wanted to do it.” and to the Romans he wrote, “This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!God does love us and our experiences of suffering can sometimes be a way for Him to draw us closer to His best wishes for us. So praise Him in whatever circumstance you find yourselves. From my heart,Pastor Troy
