Welcome to the MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my eleventh episode. Tonight I want to present a sermon. The topic of this sermon is suffering. Please enjoy.
Today’s message is going to take on one of the greatest challenges the Christian worldview faces. It is a question that is asked every single day through grief, through tears, and through anger. It is a problem that has sent people to the floor crying out for God – and has sent others crying out against Him. It is the problem of suffering, and the question is this: if God is good, if God loves you, and if God is all-powerful, then why does He allow so much suffering? Christian, how can you possibly reconcile an earth filled with death, disease and suffering with the loving God of the Bible?
Charles Templeton, the author of Farewell To God: My reasons for rejecting the Christian faith, puts the challenge like this:
Why does God’s grand design require creatures with teeth designed to crush spines or rend flesh, claws fashioned to seize and tear, venom to paralyze, mouths to suck blood, coils to constrict and smother – even expandable jaws so that prey may be swallowed whole and alive? Nature is, in Tennyson’s vivid phrase, ‘red with blood in tooth and claw,’ and life is a carnival of blood.
Jumping in on the conversation is Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s leading atheists, when he says:
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect to find if there is, at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no other good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
Let me ask you: where was God when you lost the one you loved and when your life was changed forever? When you woke up that day, trying to do the right thing and trying be a good person, and the innocent joy in your life was stolen from you – where was God? There is perhaps nothing that has been prayed about more than suffering and death. From Adam and Eve until those of us sitting in this room today, people have been asking why?
Before we approach the question of suffering, I’d like to preface my comments by saying that it is okay to feel confused and to grieve during tragedy and loss. It is a mistake to think that the Christian is called to be in denial of the pain of this world. Even Christ Himself shouted from the cross: Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? I believe this was the moment when Christ – for the first time in eternity – endured separation from the Father. Sin cannot be in the presence of the Father, and so in the moment Christ took upon Himself the sin of the world, the Father looked away. Knowing He had to go through that momentary separation from the Trinity is what made Christ so anxious that He sweat blood in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before. Sweating blood is a condition called hematidrosis. The capillary blood vessels that feed the sweat glands rupture, causing them to exude blood, occurring under conditions of extreme physical or emotional stress.
Something to think about – why would Christ, who is God, be asking the question My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? The Bible doesn’t give us a direct answer to that but we do get a clue. He shouted it. He shouted it in a loud voice and bystanders heard him shout it. God, throughout the Bible, has a history of asking questions he already knows the answer to so that he might provoke thought in the listeners. And when we hear Christ shout that question, we get a sense of just how far God is willing to go to sacrifice Himself so that we may have access to Him. We get a sense that Christ also felt the pain that we feel when we ask God why?
I want you to know that if you have gone through a time – maybe you’re going through it right now – when you find it very difficult to believe in God, you are not alone. John 6:60-69 says:
Many of his disciples said, “This is very hard to understand. How can anyone accept it?” Jesus was aware that his disciples were complaining, so he said to them, “Does this offend you? Then what will you think when you see the Son of Man ascend to heaven again? The Spirit alone gives eternal life. Human effort accomplishes nothing. And the very words I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But some of you do not believe me. (For Jesus knew from the beginning which ones didn’t believe, and he knew who would betray him.) Then he said, “That is why I said that people can’t come to me unless the Father gives them to me.” At this point many of his disciples turned away and deserted him. Then Jesus turned to the Twelve and asked, “Are you also going to leave?” Simon Peter replied, “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words that give eternal life. We believe, and we know you are the Holy One of God.
Here we see disciples of Christ – people who saw Him, people who walked with Him – turn from Him and leave Him. If you’ve felt this way don’t beat yourself up with guilt. Don’t make yourself feel like your faith isn’t strong enough or that you’re not good enough. Just go back to Him. He will have you and He will forgive you. English writer and philosopher G. K. Chesterton said it like this:
When belief in God becomes difficult, the tendency is to turn away from Him – but in heaven’s name to what?
So on to the question of suffering. Often you will hear people answer this question with: “It’s a mystery!” or “God works in mysterious ways!” There is a certain rationale behind that answer. It is foolish to think as finite beings bound to three dimensions and bound to linear time (past, present, future) that we could have a complete understanding of the workings of a being who is not bound to any of that existential substructure. Basically, God has no limits and we do.
Still, I’m not quite satisfied with the answer of “It’s a mystery!” I think we can get a lot closer to an answer than that. Knowing that we are limited beings, we are going to need to take on a presupposition in order to understand the answer. That means that we are going to take an idea and suppose that it is true – then use that truth to find our answer. Think of a presupposition like it’s a lens that we can look through to see the answer. We find our lens in the Gospel of John chapter 16 verse 33 where Christ says:
I have told you all of this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.
God is telling us that through our trials and sorrows we will find peace and take heart in Christ because Christ has overcome the world. That is going to be the lens we look through to see the answer to the problem of suffering. But as with any presupposition – it’s not of much value until we develop it by investigating the opposing views. Which brings us back to atheism.
Let’s start with Templeton – the guy who talks about predator and prey and the carnival of blood – he’s easy to deal with. Take a look at what he’s proposing: the act of predator consuming prey is an evil design because of the suffering involved on behalf of the prey. I agree completely. From our stance, we live in a fallen world separated from the Father by human sin and evil is rampant. We also believe that when Christ returns He will restore order and all of that suffering will end. Isaiah 11:6-9 puts it this way:
In that day the wolf and the lamb will live together; the leopard will lie down with the baby goat. The calf and the yearling will be safe with the lion, and a little child will lead them all. The cow will graze near the bear. The cub and the calf will lie down together. The lion will eat hay like a cow. The baby will play safely near the hole of a cobra. Yes, a little child will put its hand in a nest of deadly snakes without harm. Nothing will hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for as the waters fill the sea, so the earth will be filled with people who know the Lord.
So we agree with Templeton that the suffering of the prey brought on by the predator is not good. We begin to differ from Templeton when he implies this suffering is part of God’s original perfect creation. What you see around you on earth today is not God’s intended order – it is the result of a cursed creation. More on that later.
For right now, let’s continue with Templeton. His claim rests upon the idea that an all-loving, all-powerful God would not create an evil design of suffering. We know, that it is rebellion against God that curses creation – but let’s be generous and grant Templeton that God is directly responsible. How does Templeton know that the design is evil? If you assume there is such a thing as evil then you must also assume there is such a thing as good. When you assume there is such a thing as good you must also assume there is such a thing as a moral law by which to differentiate between what is good and what is evil. And you might say, well, no you don’t. You can just determine what’s good by treating others how you yourself want to be treated, right? The answer to that is no. Loving your neighbor as you love yourself is how you carry out that which has already been determined to be good. Take a look at Matthew 22:37-40:
Jesus replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind (and in Luke 10:27 it says all your strength as well). This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: Love your neighbor as you love yourself. The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.
The reason Christ directs our attention to God first and our neighbor second is because God is the source for determining what is good. Once you know what is good, then you can carry out that good by loving your neighbor as you love yourself. God is the source of determining good, love is the motive to do it.
Long ago there was a debate between mathematician philosopher Bertrand Russell and Jesuit priest philosopher Frederick Copleston. On the topic of a moral law, Copleston asked Russell: how do you tell the difference between good and bad? Russell replied: the same way I tell the difference between blue and green. Copleston asked: you tell the difference between blue and green by seeing, don’t you? Then he asked Russell again: How do you tell the difference between good and bad? To which Russell replied: On the basis of my feeling, what else? So here you have a brilliant mathematician philosopher in Russell, whose worldview requires him to abandon all logic and depend on feelings to determine right and wrong. Russell knew he was beaten because feelings are subjective – we all feel differently from one another.
You can’t use pleasure and pain to determine good because pleasure and pain are relativistic. What brings pleasure to you does not reliably bring pleasure to others. As Dr. Ravi Zacharias says: in some cultures they love their neighbors and in other cultures they eat them.
So, you need a moral law to differentiate between good and evil. When you assume there is a moral law you must also assume there is a moral law-giver. The atheist might say: no you don’t, you can use the compilation of human experience doing what is good for the advancement of humanity. Put simply, morality is humans doing what they need to do to form stable societies since stable societies give us the best chance of survival. It’s like a socioeconomic play on natural selection. Well that’s a nice idea, but it doesn’t work because it fails to take into account supererogatory actions. Supererogatory actions happen when you do something that is beyond the call of duty. Think sacrifice.
There was an Amtrak train that went down in the south and one car after another fell into swirling waters. Several people were killed. Inside one of the train cars there were three people – two parents and their little girl. Their little girl was wheelchair-bound because she had cerebral palsy. The parents had an easy avenue to escape the waters but for the little girl it was impossible. The parents stayed with her – refusing to leave her. They couldn’t get her free from the wheelchair so they tried to lift up her wheelchair to keep her above the water. The rescuers were working as hard as they could to get to them. As one of the rescuers arrived, the parents used their last bit of strength to thrust their little girl up into the arms of the rescuer. Both of the parents lost their lives in the process.
Biologically, physically, sociologically, there is no way to see what those parents did as being a good action. The little girl could not support herself, the weaker was protected by the stronger whose life was sacrificed. And yet, cross-culturally – maybe even universally – people do see what those parents did as noble and good. That’s because all people have the capacity to understand what it feels like to love – and love is the fundamental motivation of the moral law. Because the moral law-giver is God and God is love.
So, when Templeton attempts to say that suffering proves there is no God, he is making a value judgment based on a moral law that suffering is bad to begin with. And there’s no way he can do that without first depending on the very God he says doesn’t exist. Without the law-giver, it’s just chemical accidents eating other chemical accidents – which brings me to Dawkins.
With Dawkins, we have someone who is a bit more clever. You see, Dawkins doesn’t say that suffering is good or bad. Because he knows he can’t make that value judgment. Dawkins says: DNA just is. And we dance to its music. He wins a lot people with that because on the surface it sounds like an open and shut case. But let’s take a closer look. One of the five criteria for testing a truth-claim is experiential relevance. Does my worldview match what I experience in the world? Can I go out into the world and live according to my worldview?
Sometime in late 2013 the Australian cricket team was in England. Some of these cricket matches would last up to five days. At this event there was an English cricket player named Stuart Broad. Broad was at the crease, he was batting. The ball hit the bat and the catcher behind him caught it – making him out. Broad knew it, everyone who was watching knew it, but the umpire didn’t see it. The umpire said he was not out. At this point in the match the Australian team had run out of appeals and could not appeal the call. The bad call on Stuart Broad ended up being the difference between winning and losing the match. Guess who was watching this match? Richard Dawkins.
When Richard Dawkins saw this, he was outraged. He tweeted: I’m ashamed of being an Englishman here! This is not cricket! He should have walked! Stuart Broad is a cheat! When people saw his tweet he got a flood of responses – Richard, it’s okay, he’s just dancing to his DNA! Dawkins is a brilliant man and I’m not going to beat him up over one tweet. But this is the worldview he puts forward in his book The God Delusion. And I’m saying that if your worldview is in direct conflict with your own experience of the world then there is a big red flag that you have gotten something seriously wrong. If someone is just dancing to their DNA and you become the victim of it, and then you invoke the concept of right and wrong – your worldview of blind forces collapses.
Well now that we have devastated the atheistic perspective on suffering, we are ready to return to the lens that Christ gives us, remember, he says: I have told you all of this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.
If God is good, if God loves you, and if God is all-powerful, then why does He allow so much suffering? When I think about suffering in the Bible, the first name that comes to my mind is Job. Job is possibly the oldest book in the Bible and it is about a man who remained faithful through undeserved trials.
Job was a wealthy farmer who had seven sons, three daughters and a wife. He was an upright and blameless man – God even boasted about Job to Satan. Satan suggested to God that Job was only faithful because his life had been blessed. So God allowed Satan to attack Job – destroying his fortune, his children, and covering his body with painful sores. In Job chapter 2:3-10 we get a picture of Job’s suffering:
Then the Lord asked Satan, “Have you noticed my servant Job? He is the finest man in all the earth. He is blameless – a man of complete integrity. He fears God and stays away from evil. And he has maintained his integrity, even though you urged me to harm him without cause.”
Satan replied to the Lord, “Skin for skin! A man will give up everything he has to save his life. But reach out and take away his health, and he will surely curse you to your face!”
“All right, do with him as you please,” the Lord said to Satan. “But spare his life.” So Satan left the Lord’s presence, and he struck Job with terrible boils from head to foot.
Job scraped his skin with a piece of broken pottery as he sat among the ashes. His wife said to him, “Are you still trying to maintain your integrity? Curse God and die.”
But Job replied, “You talk like a foolish woman. Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?” So in all this, Job said nothing wrong.
The last three verses of this passage are powerful. Job is sitting in a pile of ashes. That’s what his life has come to – a pile of ashes and ruin. But notice, he can’t just sit there and ignore the suffering, he has sores all over him and so he has to scrape them with a shard of pottery – as a constant reminder. What’s really interesting here is what Job’s wife says to him: are you still trying to maintain your integrity? Curse God and die. How would she know to say that to him? The interaction between Satan and God was unknown to Job and his wife. It’s as if Satan himself spoke these words through Job’s wife. As a final push to break him. Spoken through the one person Job should have been able to depend on for support. Are you still trying to maintain your integrity? Curse God and die.
The question that eats away at Job throughout the story is Why am I suffering? What have I done to deserve this? Job has three friends and a young man named Elihu who come to him and give him bad advice. They try to make him think that sin has caused the suffering and that he needs to turn back to God. This is the wrong thing to say to someone who is suffering. It’s not right to think that just because someone is suffering, that means they are being punished by God for doing something wrong. In John chapter 9:1-5 we read:
As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man who had been blind from birth. “Rabbi,” his disciples asked him, “why was this man born blind? Was it because of his own sins or his parents’ sins?”
“It was not because of his sins or his parents’ sins,” Jesus answered. “This happened so the power of God could be seen in him. We must quickly carry out the tasks assigned us by the one who sent us. The night is coming, and then no one can work. But while I am here in the world, I am the light of the world.”
Christ tells us plainly that not all suffering is brought on by the sins of the person suffering. Thinking of it in that way will just add an unnecessary sense of guilt on top of the pain you are already feeling. With that said, it’s also wrong to think that pain and suffering serve no purpose.
When you consider it, pain has quite a bit of utility. If you put your hand in fire, it is pain that tells you something is wrong. If you drink too much alcohol, it is pain and suffering that tries to prevent you from poisoning yourself. Pain and suffering has a way of taking us out of the wrong and putting us back into the right.
There is a medical condition called congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis, or CIPA. It’s incredibly rare. There was a 5-year-old girl who had this condition. She had to be watched constantly. Her food had to be served cold – if it was too hot she’d have no way of knowing and it would injure her. In an interview, her Mom said she prays to God every night that her daughter will wake up in the morning and feel pain. Pain and suffering have a purpose that we can’t survive without.
Towards the end of Job’s story God reveals Himself to Job and something interesting happens. God doesn’t give Job the answer he’s looking for. Instead, God challenges Job with a series of questions that are meant to show Job that in his finite, human form he is so far off from a complete picture of God’s understanding that he would be unable to comprehend the answer even if it were given to him. The story of Job ends with him concluding that child-like faith in God is his best option. Because Job passed God’s test – for the remainder of his life, God blessed Job with twice as much as he had before his trials. Job was tested in one of the worst ways and he passed the test because his life was built on a foundation of faith.
There is a building in Ohio called the Wexner Center for the Performing Arts. It is known as America’s first postmodern structure. A postmodern structure is a building which the architect designs with no design in mind. The theory is that if life is utterly meaningless then why should our buildings need a purposeful design? Inside the Wexner Center there are pillars that hold nothing up and stairways that go nowhere. The building is full of arbitrary elements that have no meaning and serve no purpose. But here’s the snag: no matter what they tried, the builders could not use that principle on the foundation. The foundation could not be built unless it was designed with the purpose of holding up the building.
Life is not much different. You have free will to build whatever you want, but you must have a foundation that is designed with purpose. You must serve something. Whether its God, whether its culture, whether its drugs, whether its money, whether its other humans – even if you say you serve no one and you only serve yourself. That means you’re a servant to your impulses, which come from your sub-conscious – and we have no idea what that is, where those come from, or who controls them. That is worth thinking about. But If you build that foundation on faith in Christ, when the structure of your life burns down or is swept away you’ll still have something to rebuild upon. Job’s realization of his limited understanding in comparison to God sheds some light on the answer to the problem of suffering.
The first part of our answer is this: God is the author of life and the source of our value is given to us by God. Genesis 1:26-31 reads:
Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.”
So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.”
Then God said, “Look! I have given you every seed-bearing plant throughout the earth and all the fruit trees for your food. And I have given every green plant as food for all the wild animals, the birds in the sky, and the small animals that scurry along the ground – everything that has life.” And that is what happened.
Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good! And evening passed and morning came, marking the sixth day.
This is a description of God’s intended creation inside of the Garden of Eden. This is a description of the created order before the rebellion brought the fall from ought to is. Notice, there is not one mention of suffering. Nothing is eating each other and nothing is dying inside of the Garden.
While we’re on the pre-fall created order I feel compelled to address the idea of humans reigning over animals. An incorrect interpretation of this has led to some Christians having little or no respect for animal life or the environment. This misinterpretation wreaks havoc on the Christian worldview from the outside looking in because it makes secular people think that Christians have their heads in the sand about issues like animal cruelty and climate change.
Right now we all live in the fallen creation – we are not expected to be vegetarians, that’s not what I’m saying. But it was never God’s intention for us to abuse and destroy His creation. God is saying that it shall happen as a result of the fall – not that it is part of the intended order. That’s an important distinction to make because I’ve heard Christians talk like they are endorsed by God to do whatever they see fit with His creation. That perspective is very damaging to modern evangelism and we should speak truth to it every time we see it come up. Romans 8:18-22 says:
Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later. For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
To me, that sounds very much like animals in heaven. In the original created order (and today) human beings are created higher than animals – and that’s not a bad thing for the animals. I have a dog and I love my dog. Because I love my dog, I put her on a leash when I’m walking her near busy roads. If I tried to put a leash on my human friends they would not be happy about that. I love my dog and because I love my dog I don’t allow her to drive my car. If I told my human friends that they weren’t allowed to drive their cars they would not be happy about that. If you elevate animals to the same level of human beings then you force animals to take on more responsibility than they are capable of handling – and that leads to pain and suffering for the animals. As Christians, we are called to be stewards of the creation – caring for it and respecting it.
So if we suppose that God is the author of life and His intended creation had no suffering, no death, and no curse. The next question we have to answer is this: If God did not intend suffering, death, and curse in the Garden of Eden, does that mean that He made a mistake or that He didn’t know that humanity would rebel? In both cases the answer is no. He did not make a mistake and He knew ahead of time that humanity would break His perfect creation. So why would He let humanity do that?
This brings us to the second part of our answer: if God is the author of life then there must also be a script or a story line. If you walk into a movie theater half way through a movie that you’ve never seen before – you won’t have any idea of what’s going on. You’ll be like Job. Things will seem unnecessary and meaningless until you get an understanding of the plot of the movie. So it is with God’s script. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:8-10:
Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless.
Paul tells us that when we pass away we will receive full understanding or a complete picture. He also tells us that love will be an essential part of that picture. Anyone who has ever loved knows that love comes at a price. It is no different in God’s script. God created Adam and Eve as perfect beings in His image from the dust of the earth. It wasn’t until they rebelled against Him that they became sinners. God gave them free will knowing they were going to use it to sin. He could have kept them from sinning and prevented all suffering, all death, and all evil from ever entering the creation. But had He done that, He would have also made them incapable of love. The ability to love someone depends entirely on the free will to reject them. Being with someone when there is no other option is not love – it’s servitude. God is all-powerful, he absolutely could have created a universe where there is no pain, no suffering, no death, and no evil – but if He did we wouldn’t be in it. Without free will we are automatons. When you’re completely free to walk away and choose not to – that is love. C. S. Lewis put it like this:
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky said:
What is hell? I maintain that it is suffering of being unable to love.
And so we are beginning to see a more complete picture of God’s script. He’s created children He loves and He’s revealed Himself to them so that they might love Him. In 1 Corinthians 13:13 Paul identifies the three supremacies of life:
Three things will last forever – faith, hope, and love – and the greatest of these is love.
Notice: all three of these eternal characteristics are not possible without suffering, because each one of them depends on free will. In order to endow His creations with these eternal characteristics He knew they had to pay the cost of suffering, and so He chose to pay that cost with them. Where there is freedom there is a possibility of love. Where there is love there is a possibility of pain. Where there is pain there is a possibility of a Savior. Where there is a Savior there is a possibility of redemption. Where there is redemption there is a possibility of restoration. Restored, eternal beings who through Christ overcame death, suffering, and evil because they made a choice to love. That is a picture of where God’s script will bring us. In Revelation chapter 21:3-4 we get a glimpse of the new creation:
I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, “Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.
So at the beginning of this message we faced a question: if God is good, all-powerful, and all loving, then why does he allow so much evil and suffering into the world? The answer is that in this life suffering and the three supremacies: faith, hope, and love are connected. God chose to give human beings the freedom to love at the expense of preventing suffering. The road to God leads through suffering, and because He loves us He fed Himself into the system to come to us and carry us up that mountain. He chose to suffer because He knew that the freedom to love would result in us suffering.
Our English word excruciating comes from the Latin term excruciatus which means out from the cross. On the cross, Christ the Creator experienced: physical suffering, emotional suffering, abandonment, betrayal, loneliness, all of the suffering we ourselves go through. The Christian answer to the problem of suffering is that faith, hope, love and suffering are inextricably linked – and the cross is where they are all found together. The cross is where Christ’s love conquered suffering so that if we have faith in Him then we will have hope that when we die we may join Him in a world where suffering is no more.
Many people throughout history through many worldviews have tried to understand the problem of suffering. But the Christian worldview is unique among all the others because it gives you more than just an intellectual answer to suffering – it gives you a person. When you are going through your hardest times it is not a theoretical answer that comforts you, it is a person – it is Christ. It is a relationship. And now we know why our lens to the answer is found in John chapter 16 verse 33:
I have told you all of this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world
And so I want to leave you all with this: if you’re suffering now, focus on God. Shift your gaze away from your circumstances and towards Him. You’ll discover that not only do you know the harsh reality of where you are in life – but you also know where you’re going, and that will make all the difference.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Amen. Thank you.
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