Does God really control our suffering? The answer to that of the questions are this edition of He-Light. I am Mike Kellogg and you are now listening to He-Light, where you can find honest answers to honest questions about God's word. Now, here is Steve. Thanks Mike and Pete. Thanks for coming in again as usual. I appreciate that. I know how busy a path. I am so glad I'm not a pastor anymore. Man, you guys, it's 24 hours a day. So to give, this term is greatly appreciated. Good to be here. If we love getting your questions, Pete comes in to Pete Owensen to answer questions on Friday. We love to get your questions, but you got to write them down. Send the key life post office box 5,000, Madeleine Florida 32794, or in Canada. Key life Canada post office box 32150, Cambridge Ontario N3H5N3, or you can email us Steve at keylife.org with your regular mailing address if you'd like a personal response. And you always get a response. And by the way, don't use the 1-800-Key life number. It's available to you 24 hours a day, but that's to make orders, or to get the tapes free, or to get the booklets free, or to get the magazines free, or to make a contribution. But you got to write your question down. And the only dumb questions, the one you don't ask. And we love to hear from you. Pete, lead us in prayer and we'll get to these questions. All right. Our Father, we bow in your presence today. Glad to call you Father and glad to be your children. And we stop, Lord, and recognize that you are in charge of our lives. You are in charge of the universe. You are the Supreme King of Heaven and Earth. You cause all things to work together after the Council of Your will. And so we worship you. And Lord, we tell you today as a matter of faith that we love you, and we don't know why you do everything you do, or why you allow everything you allow into our lives. But we know you're good. We know you're righteous. We know you have our best interest at heart. And so we ask you to give us your perspective on the events that we go through and the pain and suffering of our lives. So Father, we look forward to worship because that helps us to put things into perspective, to not have all the answers but to know that you do. And so we pray for this weekend that you would give us just a heart to give, praise, and honor to you. Be with our leaders as they set up and prepare for worship. May they speak the words that we need to hear, and may we hear them. And Lord, may you be honored. And so now we just ask for your grace in these moments where we look at some questions and pray that you would be honored. But we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Feed this as an email. Is God really in control even over our pain and suffering? Well, Ephesians 111. God causes all things to work together after the counsel of his own will. So yeah, he is in control of everything. All things work together for good. And the alternative is pretty horrible too. Yeah, what is the alternative? Yeah, the alternative is God doesn't know what he's doing or that he's surprised or that he would, you know, you got it. That is, and it's so easy for us to say because we're not suffering right now for us to say things like, well, but of course. But when you find out you've got cancer or when the pain is awful, you know, we had a luncheon here at Key Life today and Pete and I came after the luncheon and Tim and Eric to do this program. And I came here a little bit early and I had to return a phone call to a former student who just found out that his wife has leukemia and the bad kind. And so I talked to him on his cell phone. He's working in a church. And he just said, Steve, it's just awful. But it looks like the chemotherapy is going to work. I mean, it's really showing some good results. She's been in the hospital for three weeks. Oh, man. And so he gave me her number and I called her. And I want you to know, Pete, she just blew me away. She said, I want you to know, this has been an amazingly wonderful experience, been hard. And she said, I've been able to witness in ways that you wouldn't believe in order for, she said, in order for the chemotherapy to work, it has to kill off some dead cells. And then I allow my body to create the good ones. And she said, I told my nurse, that's what Jesus has done for me, that I had to die in order to live. And she went on and on and on and on. I'm thinking, I thought I called to comfort you. And God gave her amazing grace. It was God in charge of that.
And I don't like that. And I don't understand it. And I don't understand how it's all going to work out. But you've got to say that he is, because if he's not, then the pain and suffering that so many people I love and you're from. And when you're from thousands of you, some of the letters, I get, we got a prayer list that's sent to all the staff members here and all of our prayer warriors. And by the way, when you ask Mr. Prairie, we really do. And I can be depressed. I can take that prayer list of two or three pages and decide, I'm going to take this time, I'm going to pray through it. And by the time I get to the end of it, I'd say, Lord, Lord, this is awful. But you've got to say at the end, if God's not in charge of that, then we've got a bigger problem than all the bad stuff that's going on. You're, I mean, that is so powerful. What you have is despair. I mean, you have problems with an absolutely sovereign God who allows evil and bad to happen to us. That's true. But the alternative is worse. And so we, and the scriptures reveal him to us as in control. That's good. So we're not folks, we're not saying that in a flippant way. Not at all. That's not a pizza pastor and he sees stuff that you just wouldn't believe and so we don't say that flippantly. But that's the way you get through it. That's right. You don't have that, you don't. And that's what my friend who has leukemia said, how does somebody who doesn't know God deal with something like this? You know, I experience it the same way you do. Steve, I've got me, you know, 200 prayer requests that I'm praying. I'd 10 loved and people praying about cancer struggles. And I saw a good illustration of the day. Some guy wrote it about how he said, when it comes to prayer, I've come to see myself as the warehouse men and God's the warehouse. He says, I don't have to keep all these things in my I take these requests and I give them to God because he's the warehouse and he can handle them. He can store them. He can deal with them. I'm the warehouse man. I just got to get them to God. And that helped me a lot because I love that because I get so depressed, I read all this stuff and all these things. And we see God saying, you know, alleviating it. Yeah, that's right. You know, we have a lady in our church, Joyce Cushing whose daughter, you know, they say, you're going to die like yesterday. That's right. And she was playing tennis last week and they can't find any cancer. No, I didn't know that. Yeah, is that cool? That is incredible. It's because I'm grateful. That's right. It was me. It wouldn't know those other centers. It was key why. You know, right? Exactly. This is another email. Thou shalt not kill as one of the 10 commandments. Why then in the Old Testament does God tell the Israelite armies to kill all living things? And the enemy camps, all men, women, children, and livestock? Well, there's, you know, there's, there is a legitimate ground for life taking, for taking a life. And this is murder. This is, without due process, taking the life of someone. And but there are times when God commands the taking of the lives of the hordes of pagans who have rejected him and unbelievers. There's this tendency that we have. And I don't want to go too far explaining the ways of God, because I have my own questions. But we have this tendency to say this wonderful culture they went into destroyed. That's not true. God, God knowing that it was through Messiah, that literally millions upon millions of people would have eternal life made a decision. And he realized that his covenant people, and they still are, we're part of the covenant people. A stiff necked bunch attracted by sin. Just watch the church, man. You've never seen them drift in the right direction. You always drift in the wrong directions. You know, you've become a apostate. You know, you look at all the seminaries that were once faithful to Christ. There aren't any more. So it always goes in that direction. So, wouldn't it be different? But God, it was very important that Israel be preserved as a people because out of that people would. And so, you've got these cultures where children being sacrificed, paganism, debauchery, drunkenness, killing, you know, all that. And God knew that that was attractive. And he said, this cannot exist. Or my people. And I think that is one of the reasons. But there's a difference between murder. That's right. And sanctioned the taking of a life. That's right. But at minimum, the commandment to which our friend refers does talk about the importance of life. Yeah, and it does. And there isn't the sense that just because you tick me off, I can take your life, or you get in my way, or you know, it's the end in a sense, the blood feud, and instituting a more civilized process of due process of law. I agree. OK. Florida, can you make any suggestions for witnessing? I'll probably a bunch. You know, being people's lives and love people, and you know, be attractive and see what they say. And then look for open windows to open doors, to talk, and tell the truth. What is that? I figured that quote, you're saying, always freaks the gospel, use words if necessary. Who said that? Was it? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But when I quote him, people get angry. He probably didn't come up with it. Yeah. He's from somebody. I think it was a Presbyterian minister, something. Must have been. Let me tell you something that, and I don't want to get to cerebral here, but I teach a course for some of the Doctor of Ministry think, all communicating to postmoderns. And there really has been a change in our culture. A major shift in how people perceive things. And I think there was a time, and there's still some of that, where propositions were the most important thing in terms of representation. Today, living it is most important thing in a presentation, being vulnerable, being open, and then following that with propositions about truth rather than the other way around. Absolutely, absolutely. And I think in the process you get to explain some of the propositions, it takes longer because people don't have the Judeo-Christian basis in their life. It takes longer for somebody to convert, unless God just immediately does it right then and there. He always blows our paradigms, but we do need to give answers. And probably the same answer is four or five, six times for people to understand what it means. So true, so much explanation. And Peter said, you always be ready to get the answer. You know what I think we're supposed to create questions. Yeah, that's good. And bland, nice, sweet, always do it the right way, smile at everybody, doesn't create questions. I think subverting the culture since asking questions about why the world does what they do, why is that right? Yeah, good point. Hey, thanks for coming in, man. Appreciate it. Guys, we got to get out of here. Whenever you write a call, do give us the call letters of this great station. We like to know. One other thing before we go, key light is a listener supported production of key light networks.