Warm-up: Romans 8:18-39

Much has been written about the positive after-effects of pain--how through unselfish sadness we pass into maturity and deeper gladness. Suffering, borne patiently and trustfully, produces a richer, nobler existence. Only those who have borne sorrow can know it.

The world around us sees no value in suffering. In it's reckoning pain is blind, bitter and fruitless--something to be avoided at all cost. Ordinary men and women will always seek the easier and less costly route.

But not so with God's children. Suffering, though we speak of it as adversity, is not our adversary; it is our friend--the means by which Christ-likeness is born in us and begins to grow.

Pain rids us of our preoccupation with earthly things so that we take less interest in them and turn our thoughts more to the eternal and invisible. It moderates our unfaithfulness, irritability, intolerance, greed and self-consciousness. It is the means by which we pass through death and "take hold of the life that is truly life." "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies," Jesus said, "it remains by itself alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (John 12:24 NASB).

God wants with all of his heart to make us complete: "He would have us rid of all grudging, all bitterness in word or thought, all gauging and measuring of ourselves with a different standard from that which we apply to another. He would have no curling of the lip; no indifference to the man whose service we use; no desire to excel another, no contentment at gaining by another's loss. He would not have us receive the smallest service with ingratitude; would not hear from us a tone to jar the heart of another, a word to make it ache, be the ache ever so transient" (George MacDonald).

Pain is the way God matures all of us. Even our brother Jesus had to endure it: "He learned obedience from what he suffered" (Hebrews 5:8).

There is no other way. Without grief we can never amount to anything, and in the end, though we will be glad when the ordeal is over, we will also be glad that our Father did not spare us any more than he spared his own dear Son.

But suffering has a purpose beyond us. It is for our sake but it is for God's sake as well. It is the means by which he prepares us for himself, beautifying us so he can enjoy us forever.

The Westminster Catechism says that the chief end of man is "to love God and enjoy him forever," but God would want us to know that his chief aim is to love us and enjoy us forever.

There are those Pygmalion stories, like My Fair Lady, in which some kind and gracious benefactor finds a miserable wretch, lifts her out of poverty and squalor, beautifies her and gives her new life so he can take delight in her and love her for himself. God does all this for us and more: he lifts us out of our sin and defilement and recreates his image in us, readying us for his eternal kingdom so he can enjoy us forever. Eternal love awaits us when all God's work is done.

Browning wrote with remarkable insight of what he called "this changing dance of plastic circumstance... machinery meant to give the soul its bent." He sees himself as a lump of clay "bound dizzily" to circumstance's wheel, each whirl forming, shaping, making him until he has been made into a vessel "sufficiently impressed."

"And why?" he asks. Why does God need this rude cup turned out on earth's wheel? We must "look not down, but up," he insists, "for uses of the cup." It is "to slake his (God's) thirst."

To be formed by God for his own lips! To be a vessel to quench his thirst! What a stupendous thought! To know that in some inexplicable way God not only wants us, but needs us, thirsts for us, yearns for us until his thirst is satisfied. "There is a property in God of thirst and longing..." says Dame Julian of Norwich, "he hath longing to have us."

So Browning prays...

So take and use Thy work:
Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strain o' the stuff,
what warpings past the aim!
My times be in Thy hand!
Perfect the cup as planned!
Let age approve of youth,
and death complete the same.

You know Paul's words: "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer" (2 Corinthians 1:3-6)

Our adversity is for others: it enables us to understand the human heart in ways we could never otherwise understand. It prepares us to connect with the deeper needs of those around us and to give counsel on a level we could never otherwise give. It enables us to teach, guide, soothe and comfort human souls with great mercy and understanding. "All this trouble of mine," Paul says, "is for you" (2 Corinthians 4:12, 15).

And (odd thought) can it be that our suffering is for the sake of those who have caused it? Can it be that a difficult colleague, a rebellious teenager, an aging, complaining parent, an uncaring spouse is the very one for whose sake we are being prepared?

F. B. Meyer once confided to a friend that he felt welcome in any home in England except his own. His loveless marriage was a source of deep misery and heartache, yet Meyer believed that he, by his aching soul, was being prepared to give love and strength to his wife at the end of her days. He wrote of her...

If then your future life should need
A strength my love can only gain
Through suffering--or my heart be freed
Only by sorrow from some stain,
Then you shall give, and I will take
This crown of fire for Love's dear sake.

Oh, to be so shaped--for ourselves, for God, for others--a vessel formed "for noble purposes, made holy, useful to the Master and prepared to do any good work" (2 Timothy 2:21).

David Roper
11/8/97