Ministries:
Adult | Teens | Children

Pastor's Pen's:
2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001

Sermon Series:
Following Jesus
Earthly Cross
His Name Is
Apostles Creed
Dealing with Feelings
Jonah
Get Real
Promised Land Living

Grace Church
257 Kendall Street
Burlington, WI 53105

(262) 763-3021

Email:
Pastor Scott Carson

Secretary Patti Hall

PASTOR'S PENS 2006

Grace Church of Burlington March 12, 2006 “No matter how deep our darkness, God is deeper still.”        Corrie ten Boom       Sometimes we in the Church are too glib about suffering. We often do not take it seriously enough...unless it’s our suffering. There’s an insightful episode from a British movie entitled, Whistle in the Wind, where a couple of young children, a brother and sister, were trying to work through the pain from the death of their pet kitten. They had prayed fervently that the cat would get well, but instead it died. They couldn’t understand. So, they went in search of the local pastor. They found him in taking a morning break, enjoying his tea and newspaper. They asked him, "Why did God let our cat die?" Well, this pastor was not exactly pleased to be interrupted with the matter of a deceased cat, but out of duty he laid aside his paper and launched into a long, complex, theological response to their question. The children listened intently. When he finished he wished them well and went back to his newspaper. The children walked away somewhat bewildered. The little boy, holding his older sister’s hand, looked up at her and said, “He doesn’t know either, does he?”    During the coming weeks we’ll be considering a Christian worldview of suffering in our new sermon series, Keeping the faith when you’re running on empty. We’ll work through some of the questions that all of us have. Hopefully this series will help each of us as we work through the tough questions that believers through the ages have struggled with. As we launch out into this new series, let me attempt to lay some needed groundwork by suggesting the following:     1) Our answers to the problem of suffering must have intellectual integrity.  We’re made in the image of God. That means we must think. We must ask the right questions if we hope to get the right answers. At some point then we must all become philosophers and question our questions. We can't avoid this, because the minute you try to answer a question about life, you become a philosopher.      2) Ultimately, believers live by promises, not by explanations. At the same time no one can fully answer all the questions. But even if we could, the answers are not guaranteed to make life easier or suffering more bearable. God is not standing at the end of a syllogism, nor is peace of mind found at the conclusion of an argument. In every area of life there must always be an element of faith; marriage, business, science, and ordinary everyday decisions. What you believe determines how you behave, but you can't always explain what you believe and why you believe it.    3) We must live!  Life is a gift from God, and we must treasure it, protect it, and invest it.  We may be able to postpone some decisions, but we cannot postpone living. "Life cannot wait until the sciences may have explained the universe scientifically," wrote Jose Ortega y Gasset. “We cannot put off living until we are ready...Life is fired at us point blank.” Either we come to grips with life and make it work the best we can, or we give up. The ultimate in giving up is suicide. The most important question in life is not Why do bad things happen to us? but Why are we here at all? What’s the purpose of life?     4) We must live for others.  Suffering can make us selfish or sacrificing. It can make us a part of the problem or a part of the answer. The Apostle Paul explained to the suffering people of his day that God “comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (2 Cor. 1:4). Believers were created to be channels and not reservoirs, to think of others and not only ourselves.    5) The resources for creative  suffering  are available  to all of us. All of nature depends on "hidden resources," and so must we. Church history glows with testimonies of people who could have been victims but who decided to be victors. "Although the world is full of suffering," wrote Helen Keller, "it is full also of the overcoming of it." Suffering will be your master or your servant, depending on how you handle the crises of life. A crisis doesn't make a person; it reveals what a person is made of. What life does to us depends on what life finds in us. The resources are available if we will only use them.      As we work through these issues, we’ll have to stretch our minds and do some serious thinking. At the same time, we must open our hearts to the kind of spiritual truths that can't be examined in the laboratory or manipulated by a computer. But above all else, we must be willing to obey God’s truth wherever it leads us. It is not enough for your mind to be enlightened, or your heart to be enriched; your will must be enabled to trust God and to serve others. Suffering is not a topic for speculation, it’s an opportunity for compassion and involvement. The mind grows by taking in, but the heart only grows by giving out.