God’s Faithfulness in Affliction (Part 2 of 2)

We all know that trials and hardships and if we let them, they can make us bitter. But the Bible tells us that God often uses suffering for our good, and today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg helps us better understand God's divine purposes for our pain, in a message titled, God's Faithfulness in Affliction. We continue in 1 Peter chapter 4. in the death of the saints. His faithfulness is so vast, it is so comprehensive, that it embraces not only our successes but also our disappointments, that his providence orders all things, the good days and the bad days.

The hymn writer says, Ill that he blesses is our good, and unblest good is ill, and all is right that seems most wrong, if it be his sweet will. So we need to have a biblical perspective. Now let me spend the rest of my time suggesting to you that we need to understand the purposes of God in this, and I have ten points for you. That'll make you look forward to your lunch, I know, but I'm not going to spend a long time on them. I tell you, when you're preparing to preach, that if you have something like ten points, and the people thought you were almost finished because of the tone of your voice, if you tell them you have ten points, it absolutely knocks the wind out of them. So why don't you just take a deep breath, get some more wind, and let me give you the ten points? This is not an exhaustive list.

It is a selective list. What can we say with biblical certainty concerning the purposes of God in the experience of suffering? Number one, that God chooses to use sufferings in our lives to develop perseverance.

Straightforward, you know that from James chapter 1. Consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you face trials of many kinds. Same phraseology as Peter, interestingly, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. It's the old thing in physical terms, you too could have a body like mine if you're not careful.

All right? The poster of the big muscle guy says you too could have a body like mine, but it involves pain for gain. No pain, no gain. My wife looks at me and says, There hasn't been a great deal of pain in your experience, obviously.

I'm prepared to acknowledge that. Secondly, God uses sufferings and afflictions in our lives to manifest his faithfulness in bringing us to maturity. Still in James 1, perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. Now, the staggering thing—and we can't delay on this—is that we discover there, in Hebrews chapter 5 and verses 8 and 9, that although Jesus was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered. And once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.

The writer returns to it in chapter 7 and in verse 28. Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, for the law appoints his high priest's men who are weak, but the oath which came after the law appointed the son who has been made perfect forever. And the sufferings of Christ, we're told, were the testing ground in which his obedience was manifested in its fullness. It wasn't supplying any lack in Christ, but it was within the framework of suffering that the perfection of his humanity was made visible for all to recognize. And if suffering was the means whereby the sinless Christ became mature, so much more do we need it in the experience of our sinfulness. In shunning trial, said one of the Puritan writers, we miss blessings.

All sun, all the time, and all you have is a desert. It really is such a tyranny, such a noose, such a mythology in which to try and live under a banner of Christian testimony which somehow holds out the people rose garden time. I don't know about you, but my life is not and has not been a rose garden. Great and wonderful days of encouragement, bad days, churches like that.

Did you pastor a church? You get enough little encouragements to keep you from committing suicide and you get enough of the other stuff to keep you from becoming an egomaniac. And that's a happy tension in which to live.

Somewhere between uncontrollable egoism and total nerve-jangling dejection. And what helps to that end? God's faithfulness in suffering. What did Augustine say? Trials come to prove us and to improve us. And many of us are tempted to run away from the very things that in the providence of God he has brought within the orb of our experience to fashion us according to the image of his Son.

The Father knows best. Thirdly, God chooses to establish his faithfulness in the experience of suffering to assure us of our sonship. Isn't that what he says in that glorious passage in the midst of it in Romans 8?

And I think 17. Yes. Now, if we are children, then we are heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. Then comes an if clause.

If what? If indeed we share in his sufferings, in order that we may also share in his glory. The assurance of sonship is in the experience of suffering, in the same way that the assurance of sonship is in the experience of discipline. Every son that the Father loves, he disciplines. You come home in the afternoon, there are a crowd of children in your yard.

They decided to take big lumps of mud and throw them at the neighbor's siding on the next-door house. You see your car come up the driveway, and all of them split, and only one gets a smack on the bottom. Why? Because you love him. Because you want the best for him. Because you know he needs it. And because it's the one thing in that moment that distinguishes him from all the other kids in the neighborhood.

It is an assurance of his sonship. Your hand on his bottom assured him that he belonged. Well, you could have given him an ice cream. Well, you could have given everybody else an ice cream.

Well, you couldn't give everybody else a cuff in the ear. It's sonship that makes that possible. Fourthly, to prove the genuine nature of our faith. God establishes this to prove the genuine nature of our faith. I have so many verses before me here. I'm sorry to take you all around the Bible, but Deuteronomy chapter 8, be careful to follow every command I'm giving you today, so that you may live and increase and me enter and possess the land that the Lord promised on oath to your forefathers. Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger, and then feeding you with manna. And the reminder is of this simple truth, that he was proving in that the genuine nature of their faith. The exact same thing that Peter says in this opening section of 1 Peter, verse 7, these have come so that your faith of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire, may be proved genuine and may result in praise and honor and glory when Christ Jesus is revealed.

Abraham and Isaac, Genesis 22, recorded again, reiterated in Hebrews 11, the wonderful story. God, why are you doing this? I waited for this boy all this time. I've taken him in my lap. I have watched him grow.

I've seen him come to manhood. And now the word is to go up here and sacrifice my only son. And remember, when the ram is caught in the thicket, God affirms, then, to Abraham his awareness of his genuine faith. Fifthly, to develop in us humility. To develop in us humility. It's a sad thing how little humility is sought as the soil in which God's grace flourishes. 2 Corinthians 12.

You remember this? He says, I was caught up in the body or out of the body. I don't know, God knows, but I know this, that I have been up in the third heaven, he says. I have heard inexpressible things that man is not permitted to tell. I'll boast about a man like that, but I will not boast about myself, even about my weaknesses. And the apostle says, To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassing great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me. And God determined that in that experience he would develop the posture of humility which was to be vital for Paul in his usefulness in the kingdom.

Let me do the remaining five much quicker. Sixthly, the faithfulness of God in the experience of suffering is there in order to keep us on track. Why does he allow these things into our lives?

To keep us on track. Psalm 119 and verse 67, Before I was afflicted, I went astray. But now I obey your word.

Before I was afflicted, I was off. But in the experience of affliction, when you manifested your faithfulness to me, then I lived a life of obedience. The psalmist is honest enough to acknowledge the way in which God used the experience of affliction to bring him on track. Proverbs 3 and verse 11, My son do not despise the LORD's discipline, and do not resent his rebuke, because the LORD disciplines those he loves as a father, the son he delights in, and by means of his discipline, he keeps his son on track.

That's why he goes on, then, in chapter 4 and in chapter 5, to establish the pathway of his Son. Seventhly, the faithfulness of God in the experience of affliction is in our lives in order to deepen our insight into the heart of God. If we had time, we'd go to the opening chapters of the book of Hosea, and we would do a little mini-Bible study there, but we can't, so you can do that for your homework. The amazing story of Hosea in these tragic, bizarre circumstances in relationship to the one who was his wife.

It's almost inconceivable stuff. And yet it was providing a dimension for Hosea of God's faithfulness in the experience of affliction, and it was providing, in the record that is left to us in Holy Scripture, that which enables us to deepen our insight into the heart of God. Eighthly, the faithfulness of God in the experience of affliction comes to us in order to enable us to help others in their trials.

Now, what Paul again says to the Corinthians, and now, with the comfort that you have received, you in turn will be able to comfort others. Do you ever wonder what it must have been like for the girl's mother when she was carried off into exile? How they must have stayed at home and said to one another, How could God be doing anything purposeful in the means of this? How they waited to see if there would ever come news of her? How eventually, with somebody who had traveled along the journey, perhaps, the news filtered back to her village and to her mother and father, and they found out that their girl was now a servant girl. She was actually the kind of immediate help to the wife of a fairly significant commander by the name of Naaman. What a tragedy they must have said.

To lose our daughter, to have her carried away from us, to be taken into a strange place. I wonder how she is tonight. I wonder how she's faring. I wonder if she remembers God's covenant promises. I wonder if she's trusting God. I think she was. In fact, I'm sure she was. If she had become embittered in her trials, then when the word went round the house that her master had leprosy, she would have said, Nothing more than what he deserves. But she didn't. She said, If my master would go to the man of God, I'm sure that he could help him.

Why? Because, presumably, in the experience of the emotional wrench and struggle and emptiness and bereavement of physical separation, she herself had turned with frequency to the living God. And only those who have and do will be able, empathetically, to turn others to the same source of comfort. The reason that many of us should bite our tongues and keep our lips tight in seeking to minister to those who are in deep affliction—because there may be from our mouths too much of a spirit of glibness, because we never got the soft eyes that were necessary for the task. Two more and we're done.

God expresses his faithfulness in the experience of suffering in order to reveal for us what we really love. I was with a fellow just the other day. He told me that he'd been playing softball. He was missing every ball in the outfield. His friend said, And what's wrong with you? He said, I don't know. My legs feel like they're a thousand pounds each.

I feel like I'm running in water. The following morning, he went to the emergency room in the hospital. Within an hour, he was in the office of the neurosurgeon, and within six days he was lying on a table. And they went in and took that piece off the top of his skull and removed a large brain tumor which had accumulated right in his frontal lobe. And I said to him, we were just in a grocery store, as it turns out.

We were waiting for somebody who was picking up some medicine. I said, Tell me what it did to you. He said, In an instant it showed me what I really love, who I really love, what I really want, and what matters most to me.

And in an instant, he said, it rearranged my priorities. Deuteronomy chapter 13 and verse 3, You must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The LORD your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. Isn't that the same thing that the Lord Jesus is doing, as it's recorded for us in the gospel records in the Luke's Gospel, chapter 14 and verse 26? The large crowds were coming in towards him, and he says, If anyone comes to me and doesn't hate his father and his mother, his wife and his children, his brothers and his sisters, and yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. It matters what we love. John chapter 12 and verse 25, The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

When I survey the wondrous cross, on which the Prince of glory died, in an experience the very apex of suffering, my richest gain I count but loss, in poor contempt on all my pride. See, when your husband or your wife is diagnosed with significant illness, it doesn't matter whether the rug is blue or white. It doesn't matter if the car has four doors or two doors. It doesn't matter if the tires need replaced, and it doesn't matter if the paint is chipping off the window ledge. And yet we want the paint to be fine, the tires to be right, the car to be clean, everything to be super-duper, so that the world may look on and say, Oh, what super-duper, people!

I would love to be super-duper as well. If I might say so, if God had operated that way, then the symbol that he left to us would have been a carnival, not a cross. And finally, the faithfulness of God in the experience of suffering is that into which we are brought in order that we might display God's glory.

You remember Joseph? Through it all, he comes to the final point, where in Genesis 50 he says to those around him, You intended it for evil, but God intended it for good. And really, what will help us more than anything else is a rediscovery in these things of the doctrine of providence and an understanding of the fact that God orders all things and controls all things and is present in all things for our good and for his glory. So we don't run out to seek sufferings.

That would be strange. We're not going to go out and buy hair shirts, get rid of our nice mattresses, and get a bed of nails. We're not going to become monastic.

That externalism does nothing to transform the soul. But we are going to be honest enough to say trials are going to come, difficulties are to be faced. I mean, the cumulative potential sadness of a group like this is staggering. If we were to go from row to row and just said, Will you just tell me one thing that is a real dilemma to you, either in your own immediate family circle or in one circumference removed from you? What a litany we would have. Are we then to deny God?

No. We are to bless him for his faithfulness, even in the midst of affliction. Father, turn our eyes upon Jesus. Help us to look full in his wonderful face, that the things of earth might grow strangely dim, in the light of his glory and grace.

For his name's sake we ask it. Amen. We can know that God is faithful, even in the midst of affliction.

You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. Well, when we are really struggling, it is hard to trust God's purposes. It can be even harder to praise him, to remember that he is always faithful. And that's why it's important for us to be reading and listening to God's Word every day. We hope that hearing Truth for Life every day is an important part of your Bible study routine. We know that God uses his Word to reach each of us individually, to meet us where we are so that we can become more like Christ. It's God's Spirit, working through God's Word, that converts unbelievers, brings existing believers into a deeper relationship with Jesus, and then strengthens the local church's commitment to the gospel.

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The address is post office box 39-8000, Cleveland, Ohio, 44139. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for starting your week off with us. I hope you can join us again tomorrow as Alistair talks about genuine love. It's a lot more than feelings and emotions, but what exactly are the characteristics of Christian love? We'll find out Tuesday. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.