Ghosted: Does God Speak Through Suffering

Recap:

Last week we started a new series called Ghosted, and we talked about Elijah and how he had this really big emotional experiece where he worked with God against the prophets of Baal, and he prayed and God poured down fire from heaven. But then the evil queen Jezebel wants to kill him and so he runs, and he’s up on a mountain, in a cave, and there he feels like God has ghosted him.

He feels like he is not hearing from God. But really it was Elijah who was ghosting God. Elijah was paying more attention to his own voice, to the voice of his own mental health. He leaned into his own fear. He leaned into the voices from the culture around him. And when he did that he felt like God was silent because he couldn’t hear God over all of the noise in his head and all around him.

And in the end Elijah seeks to hear God in a windstorm and an earthquake and a great fire and in the end he had to be still and God’s voice came as a whisper in the silence.

The point of Elijah’s story was that God wasn’t actually ghosting him, Elijah just needed to stop, be calm, and listen for God’s voice instead of the noise all around him.

Tonight:

Tonight we’re going to be talking about another situation where a couple of different people wondered if God had “ghosted” them.

Tonight we’re gonna talk about a simple concept, but maybe one of the hardest to actually deal with, and the concept is this: Where is God’s voice in our suffering? And an associated question with that is: Is God still good when life is hard, and we don’t understand why?

Throughout the worship tonight all of our songs were about how God is good. And it’s true that God is good, but we don’t always feel like God is good. And that’s ok, we’re allowed to doubt, and thats where we’re going tonight, what do we do with our doubts that God is good, or that he has a purpose, or that he’s still speaking even when life is hard?

Before we go any further I’m going to ask ____ to come and read a passage for us.

John 9:1–3 ESV

As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.

Thank you _____. So in this passage, we have a man who’s been blind his whole life, it wasn’t through any fault of his own but from what we’re told in the story that’s not what the people around him have thought, and we’re not sure but maybe it’s not what he himself has thought in his past. Later in the story Jesus does heal him, but I want to focus in on this question that the disciples asked.

They make an assumption, that many in the past have made, and many people still make today. Their assumption is that the blind man’s suffering is directly connected to sin. And they weren’t entirely wrong. But as Jesus points out they don’t get it completely right.

What do I mean by that?

Sin is any time that we miss the mark, if you picture someone doing archery if they shoot and they don’t hit the bullseye they were aiming for then they’ve missed the mark. Sin is any time we miss the mark of not living life the way that God intended for us. And sin affects us in three ways.

Sin affects us when we do it - our sin separates us from God, and we’re in bondage to it until we confess it and ask God for forgiveness for it.

So for example if I didn’t live how God intended and I was really bad with my money, and I gambled all of my money away then I would hurt myself because I have no money, and my relationship with God would be hurt because I wasn’t a good steward of what he gave me.

Sin affects us when someone else does it, and it harms us - we need to forgive the person that sins against us.

So in the gambling example, Cass and I are married, and let’s say that we had a family with a few kids, if I gambled away all of our money, and we don’t have any money then not only has my sin affected myself and God, it also now affects my family. They’re affected by my sin.

But Sin has a third effect that’s a little different. Sin affects us when it is just in the world. Since Adam and Eve first ate the fruit and missed the mark of living their lives the way God intended in the garden of Eden; the whole earth has been broken because of sin.

It isn’t like the gambling example, this is one like natural disasters and sickness. Why was the man born blind? Is his suffering a result of sin? Yes. But not his sin or someone elses sin. His suffering is a result of the fact that sin has messed up all of creation.

And this man had to wrestle with the same sorts of questions that another man in the bible had to wrestle with. The other guy’s name is Job. And Job is a unique story in the bible, if you’re interested you can read the whole book of Job. But here’s the summarized version.

Job’s a solid guy, he listens to God, he’s a righteous dude. The first verse literally says:

Job 1:1 “There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.”

But through no fault of his own, Job has everything stripped away from him. First, everything he owns is stolen, then his house is knocked down, and all of his children die inside of it, and then he gets these painful boils all over his body. He goes from having everything to having nothing overnight. His wife tells him to curse God and die, his friends come and they tell him that he must have sinned to earn this punishment.

And the rest of the book is him and his friends wondering about the nature of suffering, where is God within the suffering?

And Job gets to the point where he says this:

Job 7:20–21 “If I have sinned, what have I done to you, O watcher of all humanity? Why make me your target? Am I a burden to you? Why not just forgive my sin and take away my guilt? For soon I will lie down in the dust and die. When you look for me, I will be gone.””

Essentially Job is saying the same thing that Elijah did. God where are you? I would rather die than face what life has given me. And in Job’s case, just like the blind man we started with, he’s confused, if his sin hasn’t caused this suffering, then why is God allowing it?

And the rest of the book of Job continues with that confusion. Where is God amidst suffering? Why does God allow it? Job is asking a version of the age old question, if God is good then why do bad things happen? When bad things happen is God absent? Is He ghosting us?

And to be honest, no matter how well someone answers this question we’re never really going to be satisfied with it. In the end, God doesn’t really answer Job’s question, He just reminds Job, that He, God, is the author of the universe, He holds all things together, He has a plan and purpose for the suffering even when we can’t see it. And in a way that’s comforting, but that doesn’t always make it easier for us to understand what the purpose of our suffering is.

And that’s the part that we all have to wrestle through.

Because sometimes life sucks, we’re faced with situations where our lives or the lives of people we know crumble around us and we don’t get why God is allowing something so terrible to happen. The first time I really felt that was October 27, 2018. I remember that night so well, I was over in that prayer room, holding one of my best friends and praying for him as he wept because he had just found out that his childhood best friend had just died at the age of 17 from heart failure. We sat prayed, and I didn’t get why God would have allowed her to die so young. I remember days later yelling out to God, asking why?

A year later, I was down the hall at the other end of the building, vaccuuming the offices, and I get a call saying that Pastor Sterling had passed away, and I remember sitting down on the ground in the hallway, tears rolling down my cheeks asking again, God, why?

A year after that I’m sitting in the car at 11pm with one of my other best friends, in their driveway, and he asks why did God allow his dad to die of cancer. And again I struggled, and later yelled asking God, why?

Why do you allow suffering? Where are you? Why does it feel like you’re absent? What’s your purpose in this?

And the hard part, is that three years later I still don’t have the answers, not really. I don’t know why God allowed these people to die? I don’t know what his plan is for that? But I do know that he has one.

C.S Lewis once said this:

“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

God uses pain and suffering in a unique way, sometimes it’s to get someone’s attention. Other times its to produce character, and to bring glory to himself, just like what Jesus said about the blind man. He was born blind so that God’s work might be displayed through him. Pain isn’t meaningless, even when it feels like God isn’t there in our pain, He is. He promises us this: Deuteronomy 31:8 “Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord will personally go ahead of you. He will be with you; he will neither fail you nor abandon you.””

We may not always understand why we or others are suffering, we can sometimes see connections to our own sin and choices, or to others sin or choices, but sometimes we don’t understand why.

We don’t always see what God’s plan is in suffering, we don’t always see how God is working, but we have the promise that He is always with us, even in our most difficult times, we have the promise that He is using our situation for our good and His glory, and we’re not asked to completly understand, we’re asked to trust Him.

I want to show you clip from The Chosen, and this clip isn’t based on a bible story, it’s a scene that the direct, Dallas, and his creative team have made, but it’s a really beautiful picture of why God allows suffering.

This scene reminds me of a bible verse in James, James 1:2–4 “Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.”

Our suffering, our pain, our hardships, they ultimately build our character. When we’re faced with suffering and sin in the world we’re left with a choice about what we’re going to do.

When our suffering comes because of the sins or choices of ourselves, we need to recognize our sin, and repent and allow God to change us and restore us.

When our suffering comes because of the sins or choices of others, then we need to forgive them, it’s not always going to be easy, its a lot easier to look at the pain that they’ve caused us, sometimes irreversable pain, and to hold a grudge. But God calls us to forgive, we have been forgiven a lot, and so we are called to forgive a lot as well.

And finally, when our suffering comes because of the sin that affects the world, we can choose to grow bitter and hateful towards, God, or ourselves, or others. We can choose as Job’s wife said, to curse God and die. Or we can choose to praise God in the good times and bad times, because even when we can’t see what He’s doing, He’s still working, He’s still moving in our midst and in our hearts and lives, and we can choose to trust that He’ll use our suffering for a reason, and He’ll take what was meant for evil and turn it for good.

There’s a final song we’re going to sing, and I’ll invite the band back up now as I close, the song’s called It Is Well, and it was written by a man named Horatio Spafford. He wrote it in maybe the hardest time of his life, his wife and 4 daughters had been sailing over to England, when a larger boat hit there’s and over 200 people were killed including all 4 of his daughters, and on the way to meet his wife, he writes this song. And the first line says this:

When peace like a river, attendeth my way When sorrows like sea billows roll Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say It is well, it is well, with my soul

Which is similar to what Job said, Job 1:21 “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.””

This series that we're doing right now is called GHOSTED. We chose the name because sometimes we feel like God is far away or that he doesn't understand. The truth is that God is not ghosting us...

Even when we’re faced with our suffering, when we don’t understand what’s happening, when we feel like we never will... we can choose to trust that God is moving in it and through it, and we can choose to praise Him even in our suffering. God has made a promise to us that he won't ghost us, that he will always be with us, and we can rely on that.