Sermon Tone Analysis

Engage

Have you ever had a bad day?

A day where nothing seems to go right?

One of those days that you can’t wait to see end so you can just get to tomorrow?

Days like these examples:

Days where you drive away from the gas station with the pump nozzle still in your car.

Days when you set everything up to get a cup of coffee from your Keurig without realizing that you’ve put your mug in upside down.

Days when you put that adorable toddler on your shoulders and twirl them faster and faster around as they giggle with delight, without any warning that they just ate.

Or a day like this brick layer describes in a letter to his boss requesting sick leave:

I arrived at the job after the storm, checked the building out and saw that the top needed repairs.

I rigged a hoist and a boom, attached the rope to a barrel and pulled bricks to the top.

When I pulled the barrel to the top, I secured the rope at the bottom.

After repairing the building, I went back to fill the barrel with the leftover bricks.

I went down and released the rope to lower the bricks, and the barrel was heavier than I and jerked me off the ground.

I decided to hang on.

Halfway up, I met the barrel coming down and received a blow to the shoulder.

I hung on and went to the top, where I hit my head on the boom and caught my fingers in the pulley.

In the meantime, the barrel hit the ground and burst open, throwing bricks all over.

This made the barrel lighter than I, and I started down at high speed.

Halfway down, I met the barrel coming up and received a blow to my shins.

I continued down and fell on the bricks, receiving cuts and bruises.

At this time I must have lost my presence of mind, because I let go of the rope and the barrel came down and hit me on the head.

I respectfully request sick leave.

Michael P. Green, ed., Illustrations for Biblical Preaching: Over 1500 Sermon Illustrations Arranged by Topic and Indexed Exhaustively, Revised edition of: The expositor’s illustration file.

(Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1989).

Tension

We each are going to have bad days.

Some of them will give us reasons to laugh at later when we think about the silliness of what we do at times.

Maybe your bad days won’t be filled with as dramatic events as I have shared, but nonetheless, in life there will be good days and bad days.

This we know.

But what does one do when a bad day stretches to season of life?

Not just a few days in a row with uncooperative hair, but months or even years where one is faced with excruciating physical bodily pain or a state where it’s impossible to fake it until we make it by pretending to wear a smile.

Life and the world seems to have dealt a bad hand and it’s not that there are just bad days, but there is true suffering.

What does that look like?

Well, from exhaustion that rises in the midst of suffering, some have said that they wish they weren’t born and others have very much welcomed the thought of death.

The greatest peace their minds can produce in the midst of suffering is a picture of the world without them in it.

And in acknowledging that suffering is a real aspect of life, I want to ask, how does one make sense of this?

Or maybe more pointedly, where is God in the midst of suffering?

Why does God let suffering take place?

Truth

If you have joined along in the last two weeks’ worth of readings for our church, you’ll be very familiar with Job.

Job is a man who is introduced to us as Job 1:1 “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.”

Job’s life and situation are ideal.

He had seven sons and three daughters, livestock aplenty and a team of servants to attend to his estate such that Job Job 1:3 “...was the greatest of all the people of the east.”

But in an instant, all of those things were lost.

A storm kills his entire family and a neighboring group of people slaughtered all his property.

It’s not long after these sad proceedings that Job then is afflicted with sores that cover his entire body.

To all the false teachers of our day who at this very hour are calling upon people to give so God can give more, they must not have Job in their Bibles because in no way could anyone conclude that Job was living his best life now.

Upon hearing of the terrible events in his life, a trio of Job’s friends arrive and try to assess what he must have done to bring this suffering upon himself.

After they’ve said their peace, a fourth man arrives on the scene by the name of Elihu.

Our text this morning finds us reading from this Elihu’s speech to Job after Elihu has already rebuked the three friends and has even rebuked Job.

See, what Job has done in response to his continued suffering and the prolonged interrogations of his friends is to suggest that maybe God isn’t perfectly righteous.

In other words, Job allows himself to think and suggest that a fair and righteous God would never permit such sufferings to come upon a righteous person as himself.

Before we rush to villainize Job, we must remember that he is a human like you and me and what we learn is that trials and hardships expose our hearts—are they hardened by difficulties so that we want to turn back, or purged by them so that we long all the more to press onward into the heavenly land held out before us?

This, of course, is something Job says without the benefit of knowing the conversation Satan had with God himself.

Back in Job 1, God permits Satan access to Job: Job 1:8 “8 And the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?””

And returning our focus to the speech of Elihu in Job 36:3 says, in contrast to Job’s ignorance and self-righteous wallowing, Elihu declares “I will ascribe righteousness to my Maker.”

Elihu goes on to say that he is speaking with the authority of the Lord in Job 36:4, and from what follows we come to understand two aspects of God’s purposes with human suffering.

God uses suffering to correct sinners

The first aspect of God’s use of human suffering is that it is an instrument to correct sinners.

Suffering is a divine tool of correction.

Suffering is God’s punishment for the unrepentant, who continue to live and operate as if they are kings, denying the fact that Christ is Lord of all.

Affliction and suffering are also used by God against the child of God who is living in sin.

We can see this from what Elihu is explaining to Job and his friends in Job 36:8-9 “8 And if they are bound in chains and caught in the cords of affliction, 9 then he declares to them their work and their transgressions, that they are behaving arrogantly.”

To say this as simply as possible, God uses adversity and suffering to reveal to humans their sin.

“Well, that’s not a very nice god,” says someone.

“I prefer a god who is loving, a god who grades on the curve, a really lenient god,” says someone else.

A god like that sounds so nice, doesn’t it?

The problem with a god like who is described by those statements is that god tends to look and act and sound a lot like us.

Or maybe a god who is a white-haired, elderly man who is ready to just give you a Werther’s candy and suggest to you that it’s all going to be OK.

You may prefer to follow that god, I’ll follow the one true God who has so beautifully revealed to the reader of his Word his great magnificence.

You see, God is perfectly righteous and absolutely holy.

His holiness cannot permit or tolerate any bit of sin.

And that makes for a real dilemma for you and me, because sin is all we know and who we are.

We may cry afoul at the suggestion that affliction and suffering is a divine instrument to correct sinners!

We may just want to say, “that’s not fair!”

Well, I have news for you: God isn’t fair.

If he was fair, the entire human experiment would have been rolled up like a piece of paper with God sinking a jumper from his glorious throne right into Heaven’s trash can.

Nothing but the bottom of the dumpster after what Adam and Eve did in the garden of Eden.

Do you remember reading that on New Years Day? Do you remember Pastor Carlos’ message 4 Sundays ago? “Well no, I hardly remember what I ate at the brunch where the suffering I faced was denying myself a second cinnamon roll.”

Allow me to remind you then, Adam and Eve have disobeyed God in the ONE THING God forbid them to do, and after these first two humans bring sin into the world, how does God come back into the scene?

Is he snarling and roaring, “Fee-fei-fo-fum, I smell the blood of two dead people?”

Is he hurling lightning bolts?

How can I say God isn’t fair in relationship to sin? How can I tell you that if your picture of God is anything but the one of the Bible, then you’re wrong?

Because a holy and righteous God, who cannot tolerate sin, cannot be in the presence of it, reveals that he’s not in the business of being fair, but holding in tension his holiness and righteousness that demands justice for sin that is committed against him, are his natures of grace and mercy.

Returning to the garden of Eden after that first and great offense, Genesis 3:9 “...the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?””

Friends, I cannot promise you anything material in this world but I can tell you about God to the best of my ability.

It pains me to consider all the sin I have committed and am yet to commit, but God in his mercy and grace sought me out, to save me.

In my lowest of moments in life, he spoke those words into me, “Where are you?”

And the conviction that fell upon me drove me to repentance and to cry out to God, “Save me!” and in the course of those moments, the Holy Spirit revealed to me that my affliction and suffering was God calling me to Jesus.

And the words of the God-man Jesus Christ, upon whom the fullness of the godhead dwelled, suddenly made sense in light of this: Luke 19:10 “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.””

God uses affliction to sanctify his children

The second way God uses affliction and suffering is to sanctify his children.

Now, before I go on to show us this truth, I want to help us each understand a $3 theological word I just introduced - sanctification.

Sanctification is the process whereby God makes the follower of Jesus progressively holy.

God does not sanctify people who reject Jesus, God will use circumstances to bring them to their breaking point where they can do nothing other than cry out to God in faith, confessing “God, I cannot live apart from you any longer, I have defiled myself before you and I trust upon your Son and will follow none other than him.”

For the follower of Christ, when they have received the free gift of grace and God has brought life to their dead soul, God gives us his Holy Spirit.

One of the works of the Spirit is to make the follower more and more like Jesus.

So when someone has been saved by God, they have been redeemed by Jesus, but he or she is still raggedy.

They’re far from perfect.