Would you take your Bibles, please, and turn to James, chapter 5, as we talked today about learning how to suffer. All of us have been following the reports coming out of the Philippines in the wake of this Typhoon Haiyan. 10,000 people are more killed. 600,000 people homeless. There is an estimate between 80 and 90 percent of all of the physical structures in the pathway of this Typhoon were destroyed or leveled. Nine and a half million people are without water and food, electricity and medical aid. If we compare it to the Indian Ocean tsunami, the winds were sustained of 195 miles an hour and 235 miles an hour gust. I just put that in perspective, a full grown man could not stand up to a wind that is 85 miles an hour. And this was sustained winds of twice that and gust of almost three times that. One person, a small little eight month pregnant woman, watched as 11 of her family members and two of her little daughters were swept away simply because the wind caught them up and took them out of her sight and out of life. Such destruction is almost unimaginable and the human suffering that goes along with it is beyond our comprehension. I noticed this week on the show Pierce Morgan live that they had two men discussing the cause of this Typhoon. One was Dr. Roy Spencer. He was a climatologist for the NASA. He is a man who believes that he calls himself a global warming skeptic. He believes that climate change in our world is 50% cyclical and 50% exacerbated one way or the other through the actions of men and harmful emissions into our atmosphere. The other man who calls himself an independent environmental journalist Mark Hartzford believes that it was human beings and their irresponsible global warming that caused the Typhoon. They went back and forth in this debate. It got more and more surly as it went on until finally one man says everybody knows. That every single act of climate and every climate change is real and happening and man made and that people are responsible for every weather event that we experience 97% of all scientists accept this. Mr. Spencer said I happen to be among that 97% of scientists and I don't accept this. Mr. Hartzgard said I don't think we should talk to climate deniers about climate stories. It is journalistically irresponsible to have people on this show who will deny the facts of life. Pierce Morgan became irritated at that point and said thank you gentlemen. I think we've said enough. I think it's actually journalistically malpractice to not have a fair debate with respect to you Mr. Hartzgard. Thank you very much for your lecture on journalism. I sat there thinking here are all these millions of people suffering and all these men can do is to debate who is responsible. God is. God allowed this to happen. It's God who brings the weather and God who sovereignly controls his world. And therein lies the problem for many people. When we face some massive case of human suffering or some intense incident in our own life that is painful, we always ask who's to blame. And of course if we are consistent Christians, if we believe what the Bible says about God we have to say that ultimately God is. We can't have it both ways. God can't be sovereign over the good things of life but not over the evil things of life. He can't be a God who just brings blessing but never allows suffering to enter our life. It simply cannot be that way. I have noticed over the years that I've passed that suffering when it comes into a person's life inevitably does something to change them for good. No one that I've ever met has ever encountered some personal suffering and not been radically changed by it. It either drives them away from God and away from his church or deeper into Jesus Christ into the community of the believers. It does either or it never does nothing. Tim Keller in his book called Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering has noticed the same thing over the years of his pastoral ministry. As I took up a life of the minister, I tried to understand why so many people resisted and rejected God. I soon realized that perhaps the main reason was affliction and suffering. How could a good God adjust on a loving God, allow such misery, depravity and pain and anguish to exist? Doubt in the mind can grow along with pain in the heart. When I would sit down with sufferers, I often find myself fielding white-hot objections to God's existence and to the Christian faith. Some years ago, a Hollywood actress was interviewed after her lover had died suddenly in an accident. She had been living without thought or reference to God all of her life. But once this happened, she said, how could a loving God let this thing be? In an instant, she went from indifference to God to anger toward Him. It is this kind of experience that has led a host of thinkers to argue as the one writer does that the only excuse for God and all of this suffering is that He really doesn't exist. But at the same time, I learned that just as many people find God through friction and suffering. They find that adversity moves them toward God rather than away from Him. Troubled times awaken them out of their haunted sleep of spiritual self-sufficiency into a serious search for the divine being. The suffering plants a flag of truth in the fortress of a rebel soul. It is an exaggeration to say that no one finds God unless suffering comes into their lives, but it's not a big exaggeration. When pain and suffering come upon us, we finally see not only that we are not in control of our lives, but that we never really were. Looking back over our lives, my wife Kathy and I came to realize that at the heart of why people disbelieve and believe in God, why people decline and grow in character of how God becomes less real or more real to us is always suffering. When we look in the Bible to understand this deep mystery, we come to see that the great theme of the Bible itself is how God brings fullness of joy, not just despite suffering, but actually through it. Just as Jesus saved us not in spite of all that He suffered, but because of the cross and that there is a peculiar rich and poignant joy that seems to come to us only through and in suffering. This is all around us. As one pop singer said, every one of us was born to suffer, every one of us was made to weep. Before I finish this message, five children in our nation will be killed by their parents in an act of abuse or rage. Before I finish this sermon, more than 1,000 children will starve to death around the world and die in the arms of their mother. Before I finish this sermon, there will be an excess of 10,000 rapes and murders around the world all in the next 45 minutes. That's to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands who will die and over one million people this week who will enter into a Christless eternity because of dying outside of the Lord and will suffer for eternity. That's not counting the tsunamis, the earthquakes like Haiti had, the cyclones that Bangladesh had back in the 70s, each killing an excess of 300,000 people in one day, not to mention all the people whom we know who will get the news soon that someone has cancer. A loved one is dying, a son or a daughter has rejected the Lord and gone to the far country. I could spend the next 40 minutes listening out all of the tragedies and all of the pain and all of the angst that people will experience and not even scratch the surface. I have watched over the years loved ones how people respond to suffering. A woman will lose a child, for the one woman that drives her closer to God to the other, it causes her to be bitter and she leaves Christ in the church behind. I've seen young people receive the news that a roommate or a friend committed suicide, only to have one be drawn into Christian ministry and the other to drop out of the church. I've watched a man and news a job, only to make him reassess what really was important in his life and to discover these unsearchable riches of Christ. I've watched it make another man withdraw in pain and shame and watch his life and family his soul decline. Why is it that one young lady can dive off of a dock on a summer afternoon, swimming with her friends, hit her head on the sandy bottom and come up a quadriplegic only to find that one turns away from the Lord and the other becomes Johnny Erickson Tata and starts Johnny and friends to minister to millions of people who suffer. How can the same event cause these things? Well James is going to tell us, he's going to tell us that the answer can be found only in this one truth. Some people learn from suffering and it changes them for the better and other people resist suffering and it changes them for the worse. I want you to notice that the title of this message is learning how to suffer. It is not learning why we suffer.
James in this little paragraph tells us a lot about suffering. Chapter 5, beginning in verse 13, is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who was sick and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours and he prayed fervently that it might not rain and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again in heaven gave rain in the earth boards fruit. My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wanderings will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins. I want you to notice that his James addresses suffering. Two of the big things in his epistle. Suffering, financial wealth. As he addresses suffering, he never tells us why suffering comes. In fact, no writer in the Bible does not even the book of Job, forty torturous chapters of depressing poetry. I will never preach through the book of Job. I promise you that much but you get to the end and there's no answer. And yet that is the question that comes into our mind. It's the question called theotacy. Theotacy. It means literally the justification of God. Theotacy is the attempt to answer this question. Why does a good and loving God allow evil and suffering in our lives? There are only two answers. That God is not good in loving or that God is good in loving and we don't know why. Of course there's a third answer. God does not exist. And that is the answer that we are often pushed toward when the pain is intensive. Throughout the millennia of the Christian church at least. There were people who tried to answer this question. They tried to find it interesting that all of the questions about theotacy. Why a good God allows suffering? Happened to be wrestled with in the Christian era but not in the Old Testament era. I can't explain that. I probably shouldn't even mention that because now you go off on a rabbit trail and you won't hear anything else I've said. But it seems to be interesting that the Old Testament people didn't ask this question but we do. Now there are different answers. This came up with someone called the transformation of the soul theory. That God uses suffering to shape our souls and to help us grow spiritually and in faith. And that's partially true. The problem is, suffering and evil do not always strike where people have spiritual needs. Many evil people never seem to suffer. And many godly people suffer insufferably all the time. St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas had the free will theory of theotacy. That God gave humans a free will and if they violate God's standards then suffering results so that men cause evil God does not. Well, morally that would be true. But how can we cause a tsunami or cancer or the stillborn birth of a child? And why as long as we're talking about evil? Why didn't God create men incapable of evil so that none of this would ever happen? See, as Lewis and Richard Swinburne have their natural law theory. If we break God's laws of nature then we suffer. For example, if we were to pollute the earth enough to ruin the atmosphere then all of the bad weather would come about. And we would ultimately be responsible for evil if someone jumps off the Empire State Building. They're going to fall to the ground and die where the problem is most suffering does not come from the fact that people do stupid air responsible things. How can you say that someone who gets Alzheimer's broke a natural law? Or that someone who was born in African-American and plundered by people because of their race broke God's natural order? How can you say these things? See, the problem is all of these theories answer part of the question but none of them really tell us why. So for some people, a lot of people it seems. The logic becomes this. A truly good God would not want evil to exist and would not want suffering to happen. Evil does exist and people do suffer. Therefore the God who is both good and powerful cannot really exist. But perhaps there's another answer. Who's to say the 10,000 people killed by a big hurricane is a bad thing? We're overpopulated anyway, better than them than us. And what is that? One tenth of the 1% of the world's population? I lost one more than that in the stock market this month. Now the reason we say that's evil is because we know God who is good. We know that life is sacred. The God has made the world originally in the sinless and suffering free place. We have a sense of God's grace, his common grace is all around us and his love and his care. And when those things are lacking or they are violated or they appear to be overcome, we naturally ask the question, how can this be? Suffering does not prove the non-existence of God. It simply gives us evidence that something is wrong in the world that God has made. And it's not what God would want. And therein lies the problem. It's not what He wants and why doesn't happen. After all, if we're looking for evidence about a God who cares about suffering, all we have to do is look at the cross. Because there is evidence that God takes all of the suffering of all mankind and piles it on his young son. And no one has suffered like Jesus Christ. I'm afraid my friends, then when people come to the office and say, Pastor, why is this happening to me? My answer is, I don't know. I don't know why you suffer. But James can tell us how to suffer. Three things he says, first. Suffering drives us to prayer and to the fellowship of the church. That's his first point. He would say in chapter four, draw near to God and He will draw near to you. He would say in chapter five, verse ten, as an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Behold, we consider those blessed who remain steadfast. He says in chapter five, verse 13, if anyone suffers, let him pray. If anyone is happy and rejoicing, let him sing praises. If anyone is sick, let him call for the elders of the church. Here's what James is saying. In whatever circumstances we find ourselves in, suffering, times of great joy and pleasure, times in between when we're sick, not knowing if we'll recover, enjoy or suffer and die. Whatever the circumstances John Calvin says, he means that there is no time in which God does not invite us to himself for afflictions ought to stimulate us to pray and prosperity ought to supply us with occasion to praise God. There is no time in your life. No circumstance, no emotion or feeling where you should not draw near to God that he might draw near to you. I know that there have been five or six times in my life where I've felt the presence of God more than ever before when I was first converted. When I woke up on my hunting moon night and I saw this beautiful thing laying beside me and I figured why in the world would she marry me? When I held my children for the first time, my grandchildren, I've known these joys unspeakable and full of glory on a few occasions but there's also been times of great pain and suffering where I felt the presence of God. When I first heard that my father was dying of cancer that drove me to Christ into eternal life. When my children would go away from the Lord and behave in a way that I was worried their souls were in danger. When I would be in pain laying on the bed and saying to God, what's going on in my life? Sometimes I've had painful seasons in the ministry excruciatingly painful that took me deeper into the Lord. It can be joy and it can be sorrow. God shows up in both. In fact, it's the pendulum between these two. The joy is unspeakable and the suffering is unimaginable. That we learn the warp and woofer disciples life and we go deeper into God. Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing. Is anyone sick? Let him call for the elders and ask the church to help him. Here's the first thing we do when we suffer. We do not suffer alone. I don't know why. I don't know why this is the case. But I have noticed that people who suffer, I've watched it here in this sanctuary. People sitting up in front engaged. Difficulty comes in the light. They lose their jobs, their marriage are in trouble. Their kids are away from the Lord and I watch them move to the back. No offense intended here. And then do the balcony. And then do the sides. And then they're gone. See you later, folks. Why? Because when we suffer we tend to want to isolate ourselves. And James says that's the opposite of what we need to do. We need to draw near to God by drawing near to his people by asking the church of Jesus Christ to help me with my suffering. Now here's why we draw away. I think we find suffering embarrassing. We think people are going to say, well what did you do to cause this to come into your life? And if we go to the church, they'll begin to probe into our lives to find out what we did to cause this suffering. But James says that is not wise. Isolation from the church creates a breeding ground for all sorts of spiritual evils and dangers that could suck the life out of your soul. When you are suffering, when you rejoice, when you're sick, you go to the church and engage people. Isn't it interesting that he uses the example of Elijah? What did they say about Elijah? We always focus on the fact that Elijah was a powerful man of prayer. But I don't really think that's why he's using Elijah as an example. Elijah was a man who had a nature like ours. Remember the story of Elijah? You talk about a powerful man called down a drought upon the earth. For a couple of years, it didn't rain a drop. Called for this guy to open and it rained. Called down fire from heaven to consume the prophets of bail. stood up to a habit, Jezebel. Thus, say it for Lord. And then he had a depressing emotional meltdown. And went off by himself. And God came to him and asked him a probing question. Not once but three times. Elijah, why are you here? And Elijah said because I'm the only one who's being faithful. And God said, get up. Go and return to the way I sent you to the wilderness of Damascus. And when you arrive there, you shall know it has as hell as King Overseerium. Jehu, the son of Nimchi, you shall be make King over Israel. And Elijah, the son of Shabbat of Adbenallah. You shall know it to be the prophet in your place. And the one who escapes the sword for Hazal Elshel. But we put to that by Jehu and the one who escapes from the sword of Jehu, Elijah shall kill. But I will not leave you alone. I leave 7,000 people in Israel who have not bowed the knee to bail. They have not kissed him. They believe in me. He said, Elijah, why are you here isolated in your fear and suffering? Get up and go back to the church. Go do what you call to do. And I will surround you with powerful men and faithful people. And Elijah did that. We call that, by the way, the Elijah complex. Isolating yourself in times of distress and losing perspective about God and man and your faith. Sometimes suffering can be caused by our sin. James does not deny that. That's the second thing he tells us. Suffering should cause us to pray and draw close to the fellowship of the church number two. Suffering should cause us to examine our souls. And we should look carefully at 2 verses 15 and 16. And the prayer of faith will save the one who was sick and the Lord will raise him up. And if that's a key word, if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed. The prayers of a righteous person has great power as it is working. James does not say that all suffering is caused by sin. He says it could be caused by sin. God could and God does use suffering as an instrument to get our attention, to cause us to examine our lives, to bring us to confession and repentance and turning back to God. How do we know? Well, we don't discover it by ourselves. It's in the context of the church that we talk through things with pastors and elders. Friends and loved ones who know us. Sometimes there are prayers that lead us to repentance. There have been several times in my life, folks. I have to confess this. Where God in order to overcome my stubbornness and rebellion had to put me flat on my back to get my attention. It's as if he just laid me out and then stood over me and said, Look at me. You've been ignoring me. One of those times was on a guy named Dixon Skipper kept bothering me on the phone. He kept calling me and saying, Would you like to come and be the pastor of Christ? I was as rude and unkind to that man as I could possibly be and still keep my salvation. And then one day something happened to me that had happened ten years. I've been over to pick up a lawn mower and put it in the trunk of my car and I threw out my back and I was flat on my back for a week. And I'm laying there about halfway into the week and I said, Lord, It's only happened to me for one reason. Is it this Dixon Skipper? And the Lord said, I want you to talk to him. I just want you to talk to him. So it was the Lord and a lawn mower in Dixon who made me come here. God will use sickness, suffering to get your attention. Not always, but sometimes. And rather than resist it, yield to it and find that the will of God is good. Somebody asked me last week, Pastor, are you happy you're here? And I said, Jane and I are more delighted to be here than any other ministry we've ever had. That's the truth. We love you people. We love this church. But it took a slapping around to get my attention. And it may take that for you to come out of your routine and face what it is that you're ignoring or running from. That's keeping you from the pleasures of God. That's the last thing. And it's this little last paragraph, God uses suffering to bring us back from apostasy. Most commentators say that these last couple verses here, 19 and 20, are not connected to the rest of the passage. I find that hard to believe because of what they say. My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins. It is very, very much in keeping with the context of this chapter and in the theme of sin and suffering and the will of God that James says, here's the third thing, suffering will bring you back from apostasy. I want you to notice what he says here. Look again. My brothers, if someone among you wanders, that little verb in Greek, listen to this, is the word plena-o from where we get the word planet. A plenata in Greek were wandering stars. They were wandering in the universe, shooting stars as we would call them. James says, if one of you has become a shooting star, you've gone out of orbit. God is no longer the center of your life, for your life is revolving around him. No, no, no, you become your own little planet. Your own little universe where life is swirling around you. You have wandered from God. You've gone off to live a life as if God didn't exist. As if you controlled your own little universe. We say that about people. Oh, they're in their own universe. They're in their own world. They're in their own orbit. And James says, you know, God can use suffering to get a person's attention and to say, you are so far out of orbit that you were careening through this vast darkness, heading like a shooting star to a burned-out destruction, and you need to come back and get in orbit with me. I wonder how many young people, how many strange husbands, how many wives, darling with someone they shouldn't, has had some difficulty, some tragedy strike their life only to have them say, you know, Lord, I have drifted so far from you that I'm lost again, lost all over again if this vast darkness of my Christless universe. And God can use that suffering and the people who come and speak into your life to bring you back into orbit, back into a Christ-centered, a God-ordained world and save you from many sins, James says. Suffering should drive you to the church, should call you to examine your soul, should bring you back from the verge of destruction if you've gone astray. Keith Gettie, who was here a few weeks ago, said to me, when hard things come into people's lives today, they often leave the church. In my parents' day, when hard things came into their lives, it caused them to return to the church. The shallow and inauthentic worship of the evangelical church is not preparing our people to deal with the hardships of real life. You see, you and I were raised on a Christian entity, most of us, that said, God has a wonderful plan for your life, and we interpret that in terms of the American dream. Great marriage is great kids, great portfolios, fun churches like youth group and great jobs that led to satisfying careers in early-bit time and independent wealth to do whatever you wanted to the Lord whenever it was convenient. And it just didn't turn out that way, did it? Our broken marriages and our wayward children, our diminished portfolios, our jobs that are dissatisfying, our churches that become boring, they all give indication that God either did not have a plan for our life, or that we misconstrued what it was. The question is not, why does a good God allow evil to come into our life? That's the wrong question, loved ones. That question from the very get-go impunes the character of God and is vastly immensely disrespectful to him. It's a question rooted in anger. The question is, God, would you draw me in this hour of pain and sorrow and profound disappointment back to the fellowship of the church? Elders of the church, would you come and anoint me and lay hands on me and help me? I need your touch and your strength in these days of weakness. Jesus, would you recover my soul from wandering? I am careening through the vast darkness of this bleak world. I need you to rescue me again, just like you once came to me and saved me so long ago. Now, the question has never been, why does a good God allow evil in this world? The question has always been, why would a good and gracious God send His son into the world to suffer for you and me? That's the question. And the answer is because in the cross of Jesus Christ, slowly but surely, all suffering is coming to an end. Jesus Christ has conquered the ultimate evil death and all of her ugly siblings suffering, pain, sorrow and loneliness.
The question is, why would God love me? Why would He send His son to suffer for me and is because He is good and suffering? Let's pray. Father, these truths don't make suffering any less of a reality and the pain any less intense, but you do tell us what we can do. Define what the scripture calls relief and time of trouble by drawing near to you and to your church, by opening up our souls to the Holy Spirit for examination, by returning to the author and the perfector of our faith, Jesus Christ, in time of great need. There will come a day in the world yet to be when we will be able to look back with clear and perfect knowledge and see that these things, that people intended for evil, you have used for good. And all of these things that come from living in a fallen world, you have used because you love us and have called us according to your purposes. I thank you this morning that you cause all things to work together for the good of the believer and that you're always using the difficult things in life to draw people to you or to send them away. You're sifting out mankind, making a great division between those who draw near to you and love you and those who don't and won't. Count us, please, among the former. In work on our lives, repentance and faith, give us the gift of the Holy Spirit and a treasured steadfastness of soul. The through thick and thin, good and bad, times of praise and times of sorrow, we might consistently go deeper into Christ, into His church, and into the orbit that will take us to a new heaven and a new earth. And we thank you for that in faith and in Jesus' name, amen.