How God Uses Suffering, Part 2 B

Paul says, the dominant theme of my life is suffering.

Verse 10 sums it up. Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, persecutions, and difficulties for Christ's sake. Because when I'm weak, then I'm strong. That's the way to look at life. And again, I go back to the fact that this is the cornerstone of Christian living. Life is full of trouble and it's your perspective on trouble that is the bottom line issue here.

It is well with my soul. You may know this beloved hymn by heart, but you may not know that the writer, Horatio Spafford, wrote the lyrics at a terribly difficult time. He had just lost his children, who had been on a ship that sank.

What was it that gave Spafford the strength to say it was well with his soul, despite such a heartbreaking loss? And where can you find that sort of strength in your own hard times? How do you make sense out of suffering? That's John MacArthur's focus in his study on Grace to You, titled Making Sense Out of Suffering. Today John considers the example of Paul, who, except for Christ, probably suffered more than anyone else in Scripture. And yet Paul understood that making sense out of suffering was a glorious possibility for Christians. And so, with a lesson now, here's John MacArthur. Through the suffering and the terrible depression and sorrow of unfulfillment and brokenheartedness in which Paul was literally being shaped, he learned five great lessons. And that's what we're looking at.

Remember lesson number one? God uses suffering to reveal our spiritual condition. We saw that in verses 5 and 6.

I won't go over it again. Simply, the fact is if somebody wants to see what you're really like and the truth must be known, then let them see you in your deepest sorrow, in your greatest pain and suffering, and therein will come out the character that is really there. So, it was time for Paul to demonstrate his credentials. The Lord wanted the world to see what this man was made of. Every reason then to cause him to suffer because it was in suffering that the truth would be manifest. What you are comes out in suffering and Paul says, you can look at me in verse 6 at the end of the verse and you can judge me and credit me with what you see in me and hear from me.

That's the proof of the pudding. In the midst of the sufferings, what kind of man do you see? Secondly, God taught him that he uses suffering to humble us. Verse 7, twice he says, to keep me from exalting myself that was given me this thorn in the flesh. Paul, as he says in Colossians 2, would not take his stand on visions like so many do. He said, I did go to heaven.

I did have a vision. I went to heaven. I came back from heaven but that's not helpful because all that does is puff up my pride and so the Lord has to bring along these terrible things in my life to humble my otherwise proud heart. God wants us meek and God wants us humble and He will even use Satan and his demons if necessary and He will even use trouble in the beloved church if necessary to humble His servant. So when you're going through suffering, remember, it is here that your spiritual condition is manifest.

It is here that you can come to grips with what you really are in Christ and deal with it and it is here that others can see the true character of your faith. Remember also that in your suffering, you are humbled, you are broken and when you become broken and contrite, of course, you become useful to God and He gives grace, He says, to the humble. Thirdly, Paul learned that God uses suffering to draw us to Himself.

Verse 8, what did he do? He went to the Lord three times to pray. He drew into the Lord's presence to call on the Lord to deliver Him from this and this is the right place to go. What lesser sources do men find when they can go to the living God? He faced many trials, He knew where to go because therein could He find the strength and wisdom necessary. Point number 4, God uses suffering to display His grace. Now we're into verse 9, and He has said to me, my grace is sufficient for you.

He went three times and three times He got the same answer. Paul, I hear you. I know you're asking for the thorn to be removed. I know you're asking for the messenger of Satan to be removed. I understand all of that.

I'm sorry, however, I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to turn up the grace. Standing answer. God answers not by removing the pain because the pain was productive, not by removing the trouble because the trouble was productive. It really showed the true man and it humbled him and it drew him to God. And so God says, I'm not going to remove that.

The process isn't over. But what I am going to do is increase the grace so that you can endure it. He gave relief. God gave relief, not by removal, but by sufficient strength to persevere through the necessary humbling process. In those times is when God pours out the greater grace.

In those times, sometimes you find yourself with an exhilarating joy. I can't say it any better than to say it in the way that it's in Acts 16 where Paul is in stocks and his arms are stretched and his legs are stretched so the muscles are taught and locked in these stocks and he's kept there in excruciating agony and Paul and Silas are in that condition and you go into the jail and you hear them doing what? Singing.

Why are they singing? Because they have been given sufficient grace to endure it. And you're never going to know that grace if you don't have the exigencies that call for it.

You're never going to know that grace and you're never going to know the joy of that grace and the exhilaration of that grace until you have to have that grace. Sure, from a human standpoint, Paul says, get that stake out of my flesh. Get that agony out of my heart. It's depressing me and it's crushing me and it's breaking me. God says, I'm not going to get it out of there.

I'm going to leave it there. I'm just going to crank up the grace and in the midst of the grace, you're going to give me glory and you're going to endure and people are going to see the greatness of your God and the strength of your faith. 1 Corinthians 10, 13 remind you of this. There's no trial that will ever come upon you but such is as common to man and God is faithful who will never let you be tempted above that you are able and will with the temptation make a way of escape. But the Lord will bring trials into your life that you can endure. He will give you the grace to endure them so that in the enduring you experience the great grace.

What an exhilarating, what a joyous, joyous experience that is. Deuteronomy 33, 26 puts it this way, there is none like the God of Jeshurun or the God of Israel who rides the heavens to your help. Joshua 1, 9, be strong and courageous, don't tremble or be dismayed for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. God will always be there. He'll always be riding to your help, ready to just unload, to gushing grace so that you can endure whatever it is that you're suffering. I want to read a couple of verses out of Isaiah 43.

Listen to this. Verse 1, I have called you by My name, you are Mine, God says. When you pass through the waters, I'll be with you and through the rivers, they will not overflow you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be scorched, nor will the flame burn you for I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. God doesn't promise no waters and no rivers and no fire, He just promises to be there when we're going through. And the grace is there poured out on us in abundance. In 1 Timothy 1, 14, Paul says, the grace of our Lord was more than abundant. Wow!

More than abundant. Now folks, get this, would you please? Here is the cornerstone of Christian living. Here is the cornerstone of Christian living. It is...it is simply this, listen carefully, you will have trouble. In this life, it is inevitable and it is useful because it produces the evidence of your true spiritual condition, humility and intimacy with God and allows God to put Himself on display in His grace. This is the cornerstone of Christian living, folks.

You will have trouble. God does not promise to remove it, but He does promise to pour out enough grace to endure it. The word sufficient there in verse 9 is archē, it's enough.

You'll have enough grace. You will have trouble, you will have difficulty, you will have temptation, you will have pain and disappointment. But God promises not to take away all that. See, that is the...that's the current contemporary lie that God wants your life to be happy and peaceful and comfortable and successful and satisfactory and prosperous and it's the devil who wants all the bad stuff.

You want to know the truth? It's the devil who would like to make your life prosperous and successful and happy and tranquil because then you wouldn't need God and you wouldn't have to thank Him for anything. The prosperity message is the devil's message. God's message is a message of suffering and grace. God wants us humble and He uses suffering to humble us. God wants us intimate with Him and He uses suffering to make us intimate with Him. God wants our testimony made manifest, He wants our character on display and He uses suffering to reveal it. And the greatest testimonies that Christians ever have in history is when they're persecuted.

And the persecution of the saints, the blood of the martyrs becomes the seed of the church. God will crank up the grace in your life and He'll crank up enough grace for you to be able to endure. A songwriter put it this way, He giveth more grace when the burdens grow greater. He sendeth more strength when the labors increase.

In other words, you get as much as you need and more. To added affliction, He addeth His mercy to multiplied trials, His multiplied peace. When we have exhausted our store of endurance, when our strength has failed or the day is half done, when we reach the end of our hoarded resources, our Father's full giving has only begun. His love has no limit, His grace has no measure, His power no boundary known unto men for out of His infinite riches in Jesus He giveth and giveth and giveth again.

God just wants to flood you with grace and there's always plenty. In His inimitable way, Charles Spurgeon was riding home one evening after a heavy day at the church, a day full of work and hardship and some disappointment. He was feeling depressed and his biographer says he thought about the verse, my grace is sufficient for you. And in his inimitable way, he immediately compared himself to a little fish in the Thames River. Apparently, lest drinking so many pints of water in the river each day, it might drink the Thames dry. And feeling insecure in that event, only to have Father Thames say to it, drink away little fish, my stream is sufficient for you. The biographer says, and then he thought of a little mouse in the granaries of Joseph in Egypt, afraid lest it might also die by daily consumption of the corn it needed, it feared it might exhaust the supplies of all the corn in all of the silos and starve to death.

And then Joseph came along and sensing the mouse's fear said, cheer up little mouse, my granaries are sufficient for you. Or again he thought of himself as a man climbing to the top of the Alps, reaching the lofty summit and dreading to take a breath lest he might exhaust all the oxygen in the atmosphere. Only to hear the Creator say, breathe away, O man, my air is enough for you.

There's enough and more than enough and plenty. And you're never going to know it and you're never going to know the exhilaration of it and you're never going to know the thrill of it unless you can just rest in the suffering and let God pour out the grace. And you'll find yourself singing at the strangest places and times. And you'll find a peace in your heart that knows no explanation and you'll find a joy that's disconnected from your circumstances because this grace is an energy that transforms.

It's not in itself a static gift. Grace is an energy that changes you. It's an energy of being flooded with blessing from God that alters your thinking, changes you, transforms you. Yes, Paul was in his deepest suffering, but God was using it to put His grace on display. And that turns you into a worshiper, doesn't it? And God wants you to worship Him.

And you couldn't fully worship Him. You wouldn't know the abandonment of joy and the abandonment of heart that Paul and Silas knew in the jail unless you had sufficient grace in the midst of dire suffering. The people who worship God most deeply are those who have been through the deepest water and who have been flooded by His grace.

One last point. God uses suffering to perfect His power. God uses suffering to perfect His power. God wanted Paul not just to be a humble man, not just to be a man of prayer and intimacy with God. Paul was not only to be a man of suffering so that God could display His grace, but God wanted this man to be powerful. God wanted this man to be used to change the world.

God wanted him to impact individuals and families and cities and nations. And so we come back to verse 9. Power is perfected in weakness, God said to him. When He answered that prayer, He said, My grace is sufficient.

And the second part of it was, power is perfected in weakness. I not only want you to go through this so I can put My grace on display, but I want you to go through this so there's nothing of you left. I want you whittled down to nothing.

I want you down to the point where you have no self-confidence, you have no trust in yourself, where you have no self-esteem in the sense that you believe you're capable of anything eternal. I want you broken down, and I mean He broke Him down. You go back to Romans chapter 8 and remember Paul talking about tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword.

Then he says, you know, they've come after me, the angels, the principalities, the things present, the things to come, the powers, the height, the depth, and nothing can separate me from the love of God, he says in Romans chapter 8. But it all had come at him. And he was basically broken down. I mean, you remember part of the accusation against him in the Corinthian church was that he was weak and he was...he was contemptible and he lacked charm and charisma and oratorical skill and all of that. He had been pretty well hammered down to nothing. It was the suffering that crushed out his pride and crushed out his self-confidence that made him powerful. You see, when the Christian gets to the place where he's lost all human ability to deal with his difficulty, he's got nowhere to go.

Nowhere to go. When you realize you're weak, when you realize you can't fix it, Paul couldn't fix it. He couldn't fix it. He'd been there. He visited. He sent people.

He wrote letters. He couldn't fix it. And the rumors were getting further and further spread around about him, lies about his life, that he was a wicked man and he couldn't do anything about it. And there he was with nothing but God, and that was enough. He had to trust God's power. I mean, he'd been persecuted mercilessly.

He'd been battered and hammered. He had not only found sufficient grace, but he'd found that when he was finally crushed down to nothing, he became powerful. You see, when your human wisdom is out, when your human confidence is out, when your human ingenuity is out, when your solutions to the problems are out, when you have nowhere to go and nowhere to turn but God, you are now in a position to be most effective.

I'll put it this way. No one in the kingdom of God is too weak to be powerful, but many are too strong. Many are too strong. 1 Corinthians 1 27, God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things that are strong, the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not. God loves to work through nothings and nobodies.

And then he gets all the glory as he rightly deserves. Paul says, when I came to you, I was in weakness, fear and trembling. He had no confidence, weakness, fear and trembling.

He didn't come in thinking himself some great man with some great message and some great power in his life and parading himself around as if he were. He came in fear. He came in trembling. He came in weakness. He had had visions of Christ. He'd had a trip to heaven and back.

He never talked about it. He just spoke of his weaknesses. But when he was no longer able to do anything, then God was able to do everything. You see, physical suffering, mental anguish, disappointment, unfulfillment, failure creates a pressure that produces power.

It really does because it just squeezes everything out of us so that we become nothing but a clear channel through which the power of God can flow. Paul learned. He really did. He learned all his lessons. In the middle of verse 9, he says, most gladly, he's happy now. Circumstance hasn't changed.

Nothing's changed circumstantially, but most gladly he says, I'm happy now and I'd rather boast about my weaknesses that the power of Christ may dwell in me. I'd rather be powerful than anything else. And in order to be powerful, I have to be weak. I just want to talk about my suffering. I don't love the abuse.

I know it's satanic. I don't honor that. But I do know that God is using all of this to make me the man He wants me to be. And I love His grace, and I love His power, and I love the humbling process, and I love the intimacy with Him because I understand what it produces. So let me boast, he says.

We're going to compare notes and see who's the real apostle. Let me boast. I'll boast about my weaknesses. He goes back to that again, as he has every time. He's done it several times, as we have noted, always wanting to boast about his weaknesses because it was in his weakness that the power of God was seen.

Look at me, he's saying. You can't explain my life. You can't explain my effectiveness. You can't explain my ministry except for the fact that I am weak and he is strong because you know I'm not strong.

He says, I just want the power of Christ. His weakness was not self-induced. It was God-given.

It wasn't artificial. It wasn't a psychological game he was playing with himself. It was God-given weakness. He had been literally crushed by God so that he could be powerful. So when we have the deepest troubles in life and we go through these things, we go through those times of unfulfilled relationships and broken-heartedness and unsatisfied desires and we suffer from those who should love us the most. Remember, God is at work. The world can't fix it and probably shouldn't because God is using it to reveal your spiritual character, to humble you, to draw you to himself, to put his grace on display and to make you powerful. So Paul says, the dominant theme of my life is suffering.

Verse 10 sums it up. Therefore, here's the summation. I'm well content with weaknesses. Well content means I'm satisfied, folks. I am satisfied. I'm at peace. I'm at rest. I'm content.

It's a great word. I am content, perfect contentedness with weaknesses, insults, distresses, persecutions and difficulties for Christ's sake. He's not talking about the things that come as a result of our sin and iniquity and disobedience.

No. He's talking about those things that come for Christ's sake. They're undeserved sufferings and persecutions that aren't connected to our sins. He wouldn't be happy about his chastenings. He wouldn't be happy about sins.

He's not saying that. He's saying I'm content with all those sufferings that come when I'm faithful to the Lord because when I'm weak, then I'm strong. He wisely embraced his pain.

He wisely embraced his suffering as hard as it was because it was in that weakness that Paul died and it's when Paul died that Christ really lived. That's the way to look at life. And again, I go back to the fact that this is the cornerstone of Christian living. Life is full of trouble and it's your perspective on trouble that is the bottom line issue here.

Running all over the place to have your trouble fixed isn't the answer. Being obedient to the Word of God and letting God do His perfecting work in your life, that's the answer. You embrace your suffering like Paul did. You be content with it. You be thrilled with it. You sing hymns of joy to God for it.

You count it all joy because it's having a perfecting work. A few years ago, a song was written that really says it. I'll close with this. It's called The Refiner's Fire.

Listen carefully to the words. There burns a fire with sacred heat, white hot with holy flame, and all who dare pass through its blaze will not emerge the same. Some as bronze and some as silver, some as gold, then with great skill, all are hammered by their sufferings on the anvil of His will. I'm learning now to trust His touch, to crave the fire's embrace. For though my past with sin was etched, His mercies did erase. Each time His purging cleanses deeper, I'm not sure that I'll survive. Yet the strength in growing weaker keeps my hungry spirit alive.

And then this great chorus. The Refiner's Fire has now become my sole desire, purged and cleansed and purified that the Lord be glorified. He is consuming my soul, refining me, making me whole. No matter what I lose, I choose the Refiner's Fire. And when you can come to the point where you say that, you've reached a level of maturity and a grasp of the Christian life. No matter what I may lose, I choose the Refiner's Fire. The Refiner's Fire has become my sole desire because I want to become weaker so that He may become stronger. Revealing your spiritual character, humbling you, drawing you to Himself, displaying His grace, demonstrating His power, that happens through your suffering.

Embrace it and let God do His refining work. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur. Thanks for being with us. John's study has been showing you how to find genuine, profound peace even when you face trials. It's titled Making Sense Out of Suffering. You know, John, from what we've seen these past few days, it's obvious the question we should ask ourselves is not, will I ever enter a dark valley, but when will I enter it and how will I respond?

Yeah, I think that's very important. We need to live in anticipation of it. Jesus said, in this world you will have tribulation, trouble. You remember what Job said, man is born into trouble as sparks fly upward. You know, as surely as the sparks off a fire go up, so inevitable is trouble in the life of man. And we shouldn't expect to avoid it. After all, we live in a fallen world and we ourselves are fallen and surrounded by fallen people. We live in a cursed world.

Everything is not going to go the way we want it to go. And making sense out of suffering means you've got to turn to the Word of God and you've got to go to the source of life and the solution to trouble, which is the Lord himself. That's what we've tried to help you do in this wonderful series. We've been looking at 2 Corinthians 12, which shows us all how to face the most painful issues of life and be triumphant and joyful in the midst of that. We looked at five purposes that God has in our affliction. Now, all of this that we've been covering is available in a two-CD album. Really important for everyone to know these truths. MP3s are also available and can be downloaded off our website. But you can order the two-CD album today from Grace to You, reasonably priced.

That's right. Young or old, married or single, rich or poor, you will face trials in your life. And this study can help you get through the unavoidable and even thrive as a result. To purchase John's series Making Sense Out of Suffering on two CDs, contact us today. Our toll-free number is 800-55-GRACE and our web address, gty.org. The two-CD album is a great gift for a loved one who's struggling, or you can pick up a copy for your church library.

Again, the title to ask for, Making Sense Out of Suffering. Call us at 800-55-GRACE or go to our website, gty.org. And if you'd like to download the messages right now on MP3 or the transcripts, you can do that for free at gty.org. And in closing, let me say thanks for supporting Grace to You financially. We are able to broadcast on radio in this community and hundreds of others just like it, because friends like you stand with us. To help connect people like you with biblical teaching that changes lives, you can make a tax-deductible donation when you call 800-55-GRACE or go to our website, gty.org. And as always, thank you and thank you especially for your prayers. Now for John MacArthur. I'm Phil Johnson encouraging you to come back tomorrow for a practical look at the purpose of trials. Join us for another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Grace to You.