Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Tuesday, September twenty-fourth. Are you in pain? Struggling with some sort of adversity? Well, let's keep listening to get a fresh perspective on how God uses our suffering. If God is the God He says He is and that He loves us, cares for us, wants the best for us, there are a couple of things we don't quite understand. And that is, why does He allow all this suffering that goes on in the world if that's who He is?
He could stop it if He wanted to, but somehow He doesn't seem to want to. And oftentimes we go through times of suffering and heartache and pain and we pray and nothing happens. We ask other people to pray and nothing happens. And what we don't realize is that sometimes what appears to be nothing happening is God patiently doing His awesome work.
Well, this is the seventh message in our series on the ways of God. And we've been talking about His ways, what motivates Him. Why does He do what He does? Why does He act the way He acts?
Why does He respond the way He responds? What motivates Him? And so, in this message today, something all of us have to deal with in our life. All of us have to deal with suffering of some kind, whether it's emotional or whether it's physical, mental or whatever it might be. And so, when we think about the ways of God, today the title of this message is simply this, The Ways of God, He Uses Our Suffering. And I want you to turn, if you will, for the little book of First Peter. And I want us to look at the fourth chapter beginning in this twelfth verse. And it's interesting that fifteen times in this epistle He refers to suffering and He uses eight different Greek words to do so.
So, He's writing to people who are going through a great period of suffering. And here's what He says, verse twelve, Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, which comes upon you for your testing, as some strange thing were happening to you. He said, Don't be surprised, but to the degree that you share the sufferings of Christ, keep on rejoicing, so that also at the revelation of His glory you may rejoice with exaltation.
If you reviled for the name of Christ, you're blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rest on you. Then He says, But make sure that none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or an evildoer, or a troublesome meddler. But if anyone suffers as a Christian, he's not to be ashamed, but is to glorify God in this name. For it is time for judgment to begin with a household of God.
And if it begins with us first, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? And if it is with difficulty that the righteous is saved, what will become of the godless man and the sinner? Therefore, those also who suffer according to the will of God shall entrust their souls to a faithful Creator in doing what is right. So, Peter's writing to those who are undergoing suffering. Suffering is not anything new to the Christian life, or to the Lord Jesus Christ, or to the Apostle Paul, or any other saint who's lived all down through these ages. So, when we think about why does God allow these things to happen, we simply say God uses our suffering. And so, when you think about the ways He uses our suffering, there are many ways He uses it. But let's think about somebody who says, Well, how would you define suffering? Well, suffering, listen, suffering is the result of anything that causes us pain or irritates us in some fashion, whether it's mental suffering or whether it's physical suffering. And when you think about the general suffering that we all do at some point or the other, think about it in this light, and that is that you and I live in a sinful world.
That is, the evil that is within people reigns and rules oftentimes, and people suffer as a result. Sometime it's because of our own weaknesses and our sin. Sometimes we suffer because of God's discipline in our life.
Sometime it's persecution, especially because of what you believe in, your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And sometimes that suffering is because we violate good health principles. Then there are those times that we suffer and we are perplexed. In fact, if you'll think about the very nature of it, and that is that suffering is painful, we feel it, it's perplexing. We don't always understand and know why God is allowing it.
But it's always purposeful. That is, in the life of the believer, when God allows suffering in our life, He always has a purpose for doing so. You've searched your heart, you can't find any sin. You've looked around, you think, God, what are you up to in my life? Why are you allowing this to happen?
So, all of us have been through that. The issue is, what is He up to? It's one of His ways. And what I want us to understand is I want us to understand why God allows us to suffer, the length of time He does oftentimes or whether it's a short period of time. What is He up to?
What's He thinking? So, I certainly hope you'll be wise enough to write these down. There are quite a number of them. The reasons God allows us to suffer.
And the first one I want to mention is this. And that is, one of His reasons is to get our attention. And in the hundred-nineteenth Psalm, for example, David in speaking there of his own circumstance and situation and what God is up to in his life, in the hundred-nineteenth Psalm and the sixty-seventh and seventy-first verse says, Before I was afflicted, I went astray. That is, before God got His attention, He was out of the will of God.
He says, But now I keep Your word. I'm back in the Scripture. Verse seventy-one says, It's good for me that I was afflicted, that I may learn Your statutes. And so, one of the reasons God allows suffering in our life is this, He sees what's going on. He knows it's detrimental. He knows we're heading in the wrong direction. He sees sin and disobedience in our life.
And what does He do? He lays us out in some fashion or He deprives us of something or He lets a need remain there in order to do what? To get our attention, to look to Him, because once we begin to look to Him and give Him our attention, more than likely, He's coming after something in our life that does not belong there.
And I can think about some times in my own life when He's gotten my attention. And one of the ways He's gotten my attention is I've just been going, going, going, doing everything that I thought I ought to do and far more than God expected, I'm sure. And one Sunday morning I preach, walk back into my study, lay down on the couch, and they call the ambulance, put me in ambulance and carry me to the hospital. For three days, I didn't know anything was going on.
Absolutely out of it. On the fourth day, when I began to sort of come to a little bit, the doctor was there and I said, What's all of this about? He said, It's called the devil's grip. Well, that's what I thought. I thought he was joking. He said, No, there's such a thing as called the devil's grip.
You just can't do anything. Well, I stayed in the hospital about a week because it took me about that long to realize God was up to something to get my attention. He had something to say to me, which He certainly did, made an awesome difference in my life. And I can say this to you, if God has something for you to do and He has something specific in your life, He comes after you, it doesn't make any difference what you do.
He can lay you out flat. He's getting our attention that we don't like it, but the truth is it's an act of love on His part. A second thing He's up to when you and I are suffering is this, and that is that He's up to developing personal righteousness and maturity in our life.
And that's what's all through First Peter here about growing and so forth. And if you'll think about this, what is the will of God? The will of God for your life and mine is that you and I would walk righteously before Him, that we would be godly men and women.
And so, what does He do? He knows exactly what it takes to get our attention to stop us and to help us to realize where we're headed. And then if we keep going in that direction, we're going to be disappointed. We're going to stay out of His will. We're going to miss blessings that He has provided for us and prepared for us. And so, when you look, for example, also in James and First Peter, it's the same thing. That is, God is in the process of doing what?
He's in the process of building maturity in us. And when you were first saved, for example, you allowed things in your life that you didn't really know that were a sin. And you didn't, weren't mature. And so, you practiced things that probably were not the wisest in the world. So what happens?
All of us mature or we don't mature. What God is up to in allowing us to suffer, get our attention so He can show us and reveal to us what it is in our life that He's working on and what He's dealing with. A third reason He allows suffering in our life is what He says in the fifteenth chapter of John when He talks about what we call the whole pruning process. Now, you know what pruning is. If you let the grapevine just grow and grow and grow and you don't prune all the bad parts of it, it doesn't produce very good fruit after a while.
And the same thing is true with all kind of fruit. Pruning does what? It cuts back those dead limbs, those useless limbs that are producing nothing. And so, when Jesus spoke to His disciples in the fifteenth chapter of John and He spoke of pruning, here's what He says, I'm the true vine and My Father is the vine dresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes it away. And every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit.
Now, when you prune a tree, it bleeds as we say sap. When God begins to prune us, that is, what does He do? He sees attitudes in our life that don't belong there. He sees actions in our life that are not becoming to who we are. He wants us to be righteous and godly. To be righteous and godly in our conduct, we must be righteous and godly in our attitudes.
And therefore, our actions are going to follow. And so, He prunes it all. So, by pruning, what is He doing? He desires not just fruit, but in this passage of Scripture, He talks about fruit, more fruit, much fruit. What is God up to?
Watch this. He's up to maximizing your potential as a child of God. When He listens, for example, to your conversation and He hears things that are not becoming to a believer, He's coming after it. When He sees things in your relationship to other people that are not becoming to a godly person, He's coming after it.
And so, you could just go through the attitudes, actions, for example. He prunes them out. That is, He causes us enough suffering. He gets our attention. He points to that and then He asks us to lay it down. He calls out for repentance and confession of our sin because He wants us clean and pure.
Now watch this. Purity and power cannot be separated. There is no power in the life of a believer who is not living a pure life.
Oh, they may have some fruit and they may get by. They may be impressive and people may follow them and so forth, but the power of God is not there. It's one thing to have abilities and talents and skills. It's something else for the power of God to work in your life. And so, the pruning process is to do what? Clean off the dead stuff, things that do not fit who we are. And so, God works in our life to prune out things that do not belong there. And so, we don't like suffering, but the issue is this. You want to be fruitful?
Or you just be one of those trees where there's not much fruit. And so, many believers, because they resist God's pruning process, He sends suffering into your life and somehow you're able to handle it and you explain it away and you don't change. Well, He just does what?
He just prunes a little deeper. And finally, we begin to understand what He's up to. One of the ways of God is to prune out of our life those things that do not fit who we are because what's His goal? We said He wants to build righteous character into our life. Well, a fourth thing is this. And that is He wants to teach us obedience.
Why? Because He loves us. That's what His motivation is. And you can go through the Scriptures over and over and over again. It's amazing how much the Bible is full of suffering, but remember this. He said, My Son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are approved by Him.
For those whom the Lord loves, He disciplines and He scourges every son whom He receives. One of the problems today is that we don't recognize what God is up to. We think, well, this is just something that happened to me. Oh, we want to blame it on someone else. We want to blame someone's criticism or their gossip or their rejection.
We want to blame it on them. The truth is what we have to ask is, you know, God can stop that. God can heal anything and everything in an instant. He can stop people talking about you. He can stop anything that brings you pain.
But isn't it interesting that He doesn't? And He says, look, He says because He loves us, He allows these things into our life because He has a desire for us to be righteous and to be holy because that is a prerequisite for His blessing. And so in this twelfth chapter, He says, for example, that it is good for us to be disciplined because God is up to something good in our life.
So one of the ways that He's working in our lives is to teach His obedience. Think about this, that's what you did to your children, Lisa, I hope you did. You know why kids act the way they act today when they get sixteen, seventeen and living like the devil? Because you as their parent did not teach them to obey you when they were very small. And then you wonder why the kids do the things that they do and why they sort of get off course and almost wreck and ruin their lives when you think, well, I did my best, I gave them what they needed in life and I bought them clothes and I gave them my car and I did this, I did that, I did the other. The most important thing in the life of your children is to learn to respect their parents and the parental authority. Here's what happens when you don't.
Here's what happens. When you do not teach your children parental authority, you say to them, you're the most important person in their lives. And so, what you're saying to them is authority is not really all that important. If they don't learn to obey your parental authority, they will have a very, very difficult time obeying God. They got away with disobedience because you let them. And so, their idea is that you didn't do it, so I can't see God. So, their whole idea about God is confusing.
And so, what happens? God desires that you and I be obedient and He desires that every parent begin to train their children to obey parental authority, not please the children, not pacify them, not rationalize it, not try to get their acceptance, but to teach them obedience. Somewhere along the way, I learned earlier that my mother must have read that in the Scripture because I can remember as far back as I can remember getting it. That is, when I disobeyed her, she went, in fact, every once in a while she'd send me out to get a switch.
And you know what? Every time I needed it, and I learned pretty quickly, you can't hide anything from her, you can't lie to her, you better do what she says or you pay the consequences. Now, I didn't like it at that time and I thought she was just, that was just terrible and how in the world could she do that? It didn't take me very long, so I thought, that sweet, wonderful mom of mine, thank God she didn't let me get away with anything. It taught me to obey Him, to obey the living God. It was very easy for me to learn early in life that obeying God was the most important thing. And you've heard me say over and over and over again, the bottom line of my thinking, obey God, leave all the consequences to Him. I learned early in life that disobedience never did pay for me. Somebody says, well, it's paying for me.
No, it's not. It's working on you in ways you don't even realize. There's a war going on inside of you. When you're living in disobedience, remember this, there's a war going on inside of you because that's not the will of God. And so if you're living in disobedience, you don't have any peace, joy, happiness. You don't have any contentment in life.
You may have a lot of things, a lot of acceptance, a lot of praise and a lot of applause and all the rest, but there's something going on inside of you that's damaging your life every single day. One of the reasons, He sends suffering. He does send suffering. He sends suffering to teach us obedience. Then of course, that's one of His reasons is to teach us to trust Him. And in First Peter, that first chapter, and there are many verses, but for example, He says in the seventh verse, So that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold, which is perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
Now, think about this. Would you rather have this awesome, unwavering, fantastic, listen, faith in God? Or if you had to make a choice, or had you rather have riches and fame and all the rest? Or most people would probably say, well now, that faith business is one thing, but riches and wealth and all the rest, most people think that the happiest people are those who have plenty and lots of recognition and all the rest. They're not the happiest people. The happiest people in the world are people who have learned to obey the living God.
Because you know what? The war is over on the inside. There's not a civil war going on.
The war is over. And there's peace, peace between you and God. So listen, God makes no apology for sending suffering, whether it is physical, whether it is mental, or whether it's some kind of emotional things that are going on in your life. He does not deny that He sends it. He's going to send it for the simple reason He loves us enough not to let us get by with being disobedient to Him. And so when you look at the Scripture and what He says about testing our faith, let me explain that word testing. When God tests our faith, that doesn't mean He's trying to find out how much faith we have. He doesn't need any instruction or information.
He's got all of that. When He uses the word about testing, He uses a word which means, here's what it means, it means to test for approval. That is, He tests our faith in order to grow our faith and strengthen our faith and make us godly and make, listen, and so that you and I would believe Him and trust Him. What I want you to see is this.
Yes, He sends suffering to get our attention and to pinpoint those things in our life that are not right. Why? Here's what He says. And if I ask you, do you believe that God loves you, more than likely you would say yes.
Why? Because He says so in the Word. Do you believe, this verse, what He says, given it shall be given to you, good measure, pressed down, shaken, running over. Do you believe that?
Well, yes, then why not give? What I want you to see is this. He, watch this, He tests us, listen, in order to approve of us, not to disapprove of us.
So sometimes those tests that come, we don't like it, but what does God have in mind? He has something very good. Thank you for listening to today's podcast titled, He Uses Our Suffering. If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or InTouch Ministries, stop by InTouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of InTouch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.
