Untitled Sermon

INTRO

C. S. Lewis said, “Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer.” That’s the difference between suffering and misery right there. Suffering is the wound. Misery is the infection that sets in when we can’t stop picking at it.

There’s something destroying more homes than money problems, infidelity, or outside pressure. Misery.

We live in a culture that runs from suffering at every turn. If there’s an escape hatch—we take it. If there’s a numbing agent—we use it. We’ve built entire industries around pain avoidance: entertainment to distract, pills to dull, apps to keep us scrolling so we don’t have to sit with the ache.

But when we run from suffering, we don’t actually escape it. We just trade it for something worse. We swap suffering for misery.

Here’s the difference: Suffering is part of living in a broken world—sometimes it happens to us, sometimes we choose it for righteousness’ sake. Jesus promised it: “Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33, NLT) Misery is when we let suffering become our identity. It’s suffering without hope, without purpose, without God. And misery isn’t mandatory. Misery is optional.

Mary Johnson knows about suffering. Her son was murdered by a sixteen-year-old boy. For twelve years, she carried hatred for his killer. “I hated this 16-year-old boy,” she said. “And I never ever thought I would be put back together.” Twelve years. That’s 4,380 days of waking up with hate. Going to bed with hate. That’s not just suffering. That’s what Lewis was talking about—living each day thinking about living each day in grief. That’s misery—being so shattered you can’t imagine wholeness again.

I know what that’s like. Growing up in a family marked by alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, mental illness—I didn’t just experience suffering. I let it harden. Every hurt, every betrayal, every moment of chaos—I collected them like stones, built them into walls. By the time I was an adult, I wasn’t just carrying pain. I was carrying resentment. Bitterness. A kind of hardness that leaked into every relationship I had.

Then one day, I came home to visit my parents. Standing under a willow tree in their front yard—the same yard where I’d witnessed so much brokenness—God touched me. Right there, under those hanging branches, all that calcified misery just… shattered. Like ice breaking up on a frozen river. I offered up my brokenness to God—not my strength, not my solutions, just my brokenness. And the hatred, the anger that I’d carried for years—it lifted off me. I didn’t stop having a painful past. But I stopped being imprisoned by it. I stopped thinking about the fact that I was suffering every single day.

Suffering is unavoidable—but what we do with it determines whether it wrecks our homes or rebuilds them.

2 Corinthians 4:8–10 (NLT) “We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair. We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed. Through suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies.”

Paul knew this. Look at 2 Corinthians 4:16–18 (NLT): “That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day. For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.”

He’s writing about the ministry of the Gospel. Earlier he says we carry the treasure of God’s glory in “fragile clay jars” (v.7)—fragile bodies—so God’s power, not ours, is seen. He’s honest about suffering—pressed, perplexed, hunted down—yet not crushed, not abandoned, not destroyed. Weakness isn’t failure; it’s where resurrection life shows up.

This man is writing while getting beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned, betrayed by churches he planted. But notice—he’s not in misery. He’s in pain, yes. But not misery.

What’s his secret? How does he keep suffering from becoming the homewrecker? Let’s walk through this passage and find out.