Is It Possible...? James 5:11

1. Read James 5:11. Blessed in Suffering. How is Job considered blessed in all of his suffering?
2. Where do you see God's compassion and mercy in Job's story? Where have you seen his compassion and mercy in your own pain?
3. Can you think of a time when you felt like throwing in the towel? What helped you to keep moving forward?
4. Read Job 23. Reflecting on Job's statement, 'But he knows the way that I take,' how can we trust that God knows what is best for us even when we don't understand?
5. How willing are you to follow God through suffering and trust him even if you never find out in this life what the purpose was?
6. What does it mean to you to doubt your doubts about God's goodness while facing suffering?
7. Consider, how deep does your soul go? And how far do you think God would go to heal your soul?
8. What can we learn about the nature of God's love from the fact that He suffers alongside us?

**Prayer + Practice: **

1. Scripture Meditation:

Begin by reading James 5:10-11 and Job 23. Reflect on the steadfastness of Job and the encouragement from James to remain steadfast. Spend a few minutes in silence, allowing the words to sink in. Consider what steadfastness means in your current life situation.

2. Prayer of Surrender:

Offer a prayer of surrender to God, acknowledging the areas of your life where you are experiencing trials or suffering. Pray for the strength to remain steadfast and for the ability to trust in God's purposes, even when they are not clear.

3. Journaling:

Write down your thoughts and feelings about the trials you are facing. Be honest about your doubts and fears. Reflect on how God has been present in past trials and how He might be working in your current situation, even if you cannot see it.

4. Doubt Your Doubts:

List any doubts you have about God's goodness or presence in your life. For each doubt, write a counterpoint that reflects a truth about God’s character, such as His love, mercy, or sovereignty. Use scripture to support these truths.

5. Gratitude Reflection:

Spend a few minutes each day this week reflecting on things you are grateful for, even amidst suffering. This can help shift your focus from the pain to the blessings in your life. Thank God for His presence and for the ways He is working in your life, even if they are not immediately apparent.

6. Community Support:

Share your journey with a close friend or your life group. Discuss the sermon and your reflections, and pray for one another. Encourage each other to remain steadfast and to support one another through trials.

Well, good morning. Great to see you all. If you're a guest with us, we're glad you're here.

We are. We've been studying the book of James, and we're in a paragraph that's in the last chapter. We've been addressing this very, very important topic to James and his overall theme, and of course, an important topic to us, too, about trials and suffering. And the whole overarching push, really, of his message is keep the faith. Don't lose your faith through your trials and your suffering.

And.

And he says something, I think we all sort of instinctively know it, that suffering is not the worst thing that can happen to us. Even as I say that, I, you know, I hate it because it will feel like it when you're in deep, deep pain, that it is the worst thing that can happen to you. And that is very real. But for James, there's something even, even worse. And that's why we need patience and steadfastness.

We have to be able to keep going. Faith is not static. It's not a resting place. You don't come to faith and then everything becomes okay. No, James is saying your faith has to be on the move.

It's. It has to work, and it has to be worked, and it has to be active. And you will need to be able to move in very, very dark times when you can't see in front of you. You will have to move in what will feel like incredibly dangerous and painful times. You won't always have answers, and you will need to keep going.

That's his message. Life will come at you. We've seen. He says people will cause you pain. Obeying Christ and living for him will cause you pain.

And now we look at the final piece of this picture, and I'm glad it's final because I truly have no more in me to deal with suffering. I can't talk about it anymore. I was going to do one more next week on the judgment of God, just to give you guys a sort of a theological picture of that. I'm done with it. We're moving on in James.

We're still in James, but this topic will be behind us. But Job now we deal with in devastating loss. And reading about that this week was just emotionally more than I could. I could handle. So we'll move on from that.

But today we need to look at this final sort of element of that.

Whatever you do, you got to keep going and trusting and believing. That's what James wants us to do. So this is how he concludes this Paragraph. If you.

When he's all done, he says, we consider those blessed who remain steadfast, because that's his message. Hang in there. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and he gives us an illustration. And Job is the one. And it's like, that's the last person we connect to Blessing.

But you've seen, you've heard and you've seen of that. God had a purpose. And we don't know all that God was doing, but we know some. And we also end up with this whole shift in tone. You have all this very judgmental and painful and suffering tone.

And then you get to this very. This sort of a shift in tone where we see a very loving and merciful God. And so, you know, there's a lot here to unpack. And it's kind of unexpected. You don't expect Job in the end to be the blessed guy.

And you don't look at the Lord as compassionate and merciful after he's put everybody through hell and he's standing at the door in judgment. That just requires some thinking. But this is how the scriptures bring this whole idea of suffering and pain to us. That's what it looks like at the end. So James says, hang in there, because at the end you'll be blessed.

And at the end you'll know God was loving and merciful. But. But all the way through, you won't feel blessed. And there will be many times you'll think God is anything but love.

So you have this Job who's steadfast and blessed. That's unexpected. And then the Lord loving and merciful. And it just turns out. It turns out at the end of the day that what God really, really is after is our steadfastness that really matters to him.

And it sort of reveals that he has a purpose and he's loving. If you'll just hang in there.

Now, these kinds of issues, of course, in our culture, for a long time, the whole topic of evil and suffering and pain, and they're a problem. They're a problem for everybody. They're a problem whether you believe in God or not. You know, the existence of evil doesn't disprove God, doesn't prove him, and it doesn't. Doesn't disprove them.

So you have to sort of land somewhere. You got to land somewhere in the neighborhood of pain. Doesn't mean anything, Just let it go. Or pain means something. And even though I don't know what it is, I got to live with a mystery because I Can't imagine life without God.

You're going to be in one of those two places. Either way, you're going to be really disheartened at times. You go through pain without God. You're going to be really disheartened at times. You go through pain with God.

You're going to be really disheartened sometimes because there will be very, you know, dark times. And what I want to encourage you to do and encourage people that you know to do when you have your doubts, and we all have them, I have them, too. And pain can bring them to the surface like nothing else. If you have doubts, you don't have to abandon the faith. You don't have to give up on God because you have doubts.

You actually need at some point to learn to doubt your doubts. That's important. And we're going to do that today. How do you doubt your doubts about God? And then I'll give you an illustration of what I mean by that.

Just because you can't see a rationale for evil doesn't mean there isn't one. God may have a reason you can't imagine, but don't think that because you can't see it, God doesn't have one. You ought to doubt the fact that you know exactly how evil works. And you ought to doubt that a little bit otherwise, because it requires incredibly deep faith in your own rational rationale to say, I know exactly how God should act. You ought to doubt the fact that you know exactly how God should act.

You can have doubts about what he's doing, but you should doubt your doubts.

It's also very likely, Very likely. I know this is true of me, but I don't have the full, adequate picture of God and all that he's capable of and all that he is. And when I say that God is loving, I don't even know all that that means.

And it. How do. How do you define any quality in an infinite being? I know what it feels like when I love. And I know God has taught me that he loves very, very similarly to how I love.

But he loves way beyond what I love or how I love. And that's why you have to sort of doubt your doubts. CS Lewis did this. So CS Lewis was an atheist, okay? And it was the existence of a cruel world and evil and suffering that made him come to God.

And this is how he writes about it. My argument against God was that the universe seemed cruel and unjust. But how had I got the idea of just and unjust? What was I Comparing the universe with when I called it unjust. In other words, he couldn't explain his rage at evil unless there was a God.

Of course, I could have given up movement, my idea of justice, by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. It's not a universal thing. But he said then I would have had to give up my idea of God too.

That would have collapsed as well. So the argument depended on me saying that the world really was unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. Just say it means nothing. It's going nowhere.

Why are you so mad at it? That was harder for him than believing there was a God. In a purely materialistic, naturalistic world, evil and death and suffering are just a natural part of existence, a necessary part of existence.

But there's no basis for outreach. So I say all that to say to you that if I were going to name this talk, and I very rarely give you a title of a talk because I don't usually know what I'm titling the talk is, is it possible? Is it possible that I don't know everything there is to know about God and I need to be careful about some of the statements that I make? And is it possible that you can still know God and still not know everything you need to know? Is that possible?

When we get to Job, you're looking at somebody who, at the end of the day, when it's all said and done, we don't have really concrete answers. What we have is nothing but mystery. And it's a terrible mystery that we live in with Job, that there really is no one clear, concrete answer to the problem of evil and cruelty in the world. And you'll be pinned down, as one writer said, pinned down to the ground, because part of you will say there has to be a God, and part of you will say, what I see doesn't describe a God I want, and that's just the reality. And the Bible gives us a number of things, and as I've interacted with him, especially this week, but for years, things that I think that are, they're adequate, they're not.

You could put them all together and they're helpful, but they're not emotionally comforting.

I can tell you God's sovereign, that's not emotionally comforting. When you're in pain, you know, when the. When you get the bad news, when your child is hurt or gone or the veins in your head thin and you get a blood bleed, they're not emotionally comforting. Kirk, you know, that hurricane hit all that neighborhood. He told us a couple weeks ago, you know, and we've talked all along.

And right at the beginning of this thing, his pastor that's there, the church he goes to, called him up and said, you know, they lost everything. Everything is standing out in the front yard, and everything he owns is out there in the yard in the dumpster. The pastor calls and says, it's just stuff, and God is sovereign.

That is not what you want to hear.

There are a number of things, and we're going to point them out a little bit today that, you know, I feel like this is the best illustration I could use. You're going through life and you feel like you're drowning sometimes and you're not going to stay afloat. And every once in a while, some piece of debris. It could be a branch, it could be part of a boat, it could be part of land. Something that comes across and you grab onto it and it holds you for a little while.

And then later on you're floating and you get something else. None of it feels like it's going to rescue you, but it keeps you afloat. That's what I think about. A lot of the things the scripture says about suffering, they just keep me afloat. They don't feel like they're taking me all the way to the land.

Now, that means I am incapable of understanding God, and God is beyond understanding. So I got both of those realities. And I don't think God is just philosophically complicated. And we've got to come up with answers to figure out how to explain evil. There's more to him than that.

There's much more to him than that that I think is useful. So staying with this theme that it is that it is possible and helping you doubt your doubts, it is possible. I want to give you some things. It is very possible to start off with, that you do not know the value of your life and your soul to God. That is very possible.

When I read James, God cares about me and my soul and my development far more, it seems, than I ever will.

And that's just a fact. And it is very possible that God sees things in me and knows things about me and wants things in me that I just can't possibly wrap my head around. And so he does things to help me with it. So I'm, you know, I tried to figure out what part of Job we ought to look at. And job 23 is a really interesting text because Job is, you know, in the middle of his pain.

And he realizes, I don't even know where God is. I just don't even know where he is. This is how everyone gets disoriented in their pain. And so he can't find God. And this is what he says.

And listen to these words. Behold, I go forward, but he's not there. I look in, I go backward, and I don't perceive Him. On the left hand, he seems to maybe be working, but I can't see him. I turn to the right, and I don't see him there either.

So I have no idea what he's doing.

But he says this. But he knows the way that I take. He knows something about me. He knows something about me that I don't know. But I don't know enough about Him.

And if I don't know enough about him, then I certainly probably don't know enough about myself. But he does. And I know that if he were to try me right now, if he were to put me on the stand, I would come out as gold. Because I'm. Because I'm steadfast and I'm hanging in there.

That's the message here. This is what Job does. He goes. My foot is held fast to his steps. Steadfastness of Joe.

I can't see him. I'm still going. I have not departed from the commandments of his lips. I've treasured his words with my mouth. But Job says he is unchangeable, and who can turn him back?

What he desires, that he does. He's going to do some things. He longs for things, wants things that I'm on no level wanting what he wants.

And he will complete what he appoints for me. How important is that to God? I don't always need it.

And many such things are in his mind. I love that line. He's just thinking things I'm not thinking for he will. He will complete what he's appointed. Therefore, I'm terrified at his presence.

And I love that line, too. Because nothing's scarier than knowing that God has these big ideas for you. And you can't see him and you don't even know what's going on. That is terrifying. God has made my heart faint when I consider.

When I consider it, I'm in dread of Him. The Almighty has terrified me. But I'm not silenced because of the darkness, nor because of the thick darkness that covers my face. In other words, I'm not going anywhere. That's.

That's what Job. That's what God Loved about Job. I love it. Job that you can't see me. And I love it that you can't enter my mind.

And I love it that, you know I'm doing things that you can't fathom. I love that that you haven't gone anywhere, even though it's dark and it's dangerous.

Yeah.

So is it possible that knowing God. Having God is really more valuable than anything else? You and I say that and we sing it, but do we really believe that? Is it really possible? Is it possible that knowing God and having him is worth him taking all 10 of your children, putting you through physical hell, and taking everything you've worked for all your life, including your reputation?

Really, Is it possible that that's true, but we have a hard time recognizing it. I read a book this.

I don't. If you're hurting right now, I don't necessarily think I would read it. It was incredibly painful book. I read it twice, and it was emotionally overwhelming. It's called Lament for a Son.

He's a professor at Yale. He's a religious professor at Yale. And he talks about pain in a way that I just never heard. And he said the ache sinks down into his soul. And then he asked a question that had me just all week long thinking.

He says, how deep do souls go?

Like, when you start. When you're in pain, you start to realize, oh, my goodness, there must be a. There's a whole lot more to me than I realize, because I've never felt this way or seen this or, you know, experienced that. You go, I have. Is it possible that I don't know the depths of.

Of my soul do. And it's possible that I don't know how far God will go to, like, heal that soul.

Gail and I are watching this show. These SEALs, Navy SEALs are, you know, on these missions, and they'll get to a spot sometimes, and they got to go underground, and they'll take out those, you know, those little glow sticks, and they'll throw them down to see how far they got to go. And it'll land usually on the bottom, and they can see where the bottom is, and they can also, you know, see how to get there, and they know how far down it is. And then on one of the episodes we saw in the last few weeks, I dropped one of those glow sticks down in there, and it never landed. And so they looked at each other, and I go, here we go.

We got to go down in there. And it made me think of our souls. When he asked that Question. How deep is my soul? I don't even know.

If I were to throw a glow stick down there, how far would it go? How deep is it? How important is it that that soul knows God at its depths? That I don't even understand its depths, but there's something so valuable, so precious, that God is willing to risk his own reputation, you know, to heal it or to fill it.

So it's very possible that I don't know how important it is that God do something in me. That pain is required. In fact, in chapter one of James, where he says, you know, hey, consider it joy when you encounter trials, because that's just God putting a glow stick down into your soul. Show you how deep it is. And he's going to do something down in there that you couldn't even imagine.

You didn't even know you had the depths to your soul like that. And you're going to let patience have its perfect work so that one of these days you're going to be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. And you're like, what does perfect and complete mean? I don't even think I grasp that. But God knows what it is, and he knows whatever it is about me, that what he needs to do to make that happen in me.

CS Lewis says, I find a good. Many people are bothered by the idea that God wants to make us perfect. Some of us think that unless we're perfect, God won't even help us. You got to be perfect for God to help you. No, here's what C.S.

lewis says.

Because we're not perfect. He says, I don't think that's what he meant. I think what he meant was, the only help I will give is help to become perfect. And you may want something less, but I will give you nothing less.

That is really difficult. So CS Lewis uses the illustration. He says, you know, when I was a kid, I'd get this bad toothache, and I waited till the very last minute to tell my mom because I knew she was going to give me something for the pain. But she was also going to take me to the dentist, and that dentist was going to meddle around in my mouth and find other problems and want to fix everything. And he said, God can be like that.

Sometimes we come to him with one problem. We say, God, can you just solve this? But God looks at us and goes no deeper. And it's bigger and there's more to it. And I'm about all of it.

I'm not just about that one sin you hate about yourself. You come to God because there's one sin you can't overcome and it's crushed your life. And God's saying, oh, I see that sin. We're going to take care of it, but we're going to take care of every other sin in your life, too. He's like the crazy dentist.

And is it possible? Is it. Is it possible that I don't know how dangerous it is to be attached to anything more than him? Is that possible?

Is it possible? Lewis quotes St. Augustine. St. Augustine would say something like this, God wants to put something in your hands, but your hands are full, so he's got to take something out of your hands in order to give it to you.

And then the most haunting thing I read in the Problem of Pain, that gets to the bottom of this, when we think about good people going through pain, C.S. lewis said, yeah, it's God who made these very good, deserving people.

But this God may really be right when he thinks that their modest prosperity, hey, everything going okay, and the happiness of their children, which of course, that's at the top of all of our priority list. When he says that, you know, kind of a modest prosperity and the happiness of our children. Maybe God's right when he says they're not enough to make you blessed.

I don't know what this means, but it certainly doesn't mean to me that I don't have my 10 kids. And CS Lewis is pointing out something that I don't. I think it's very possible. I don't understand that my moderate happiness and all of my children being happy are not enough to make you blessed. Whatever that blessing is, it means more than that.

That is something you and I, I know it's very possible. We don't understand that.

And so this is what he writes. And he knows that all those things must fall from us in the end and that if they have not learned to know him, they will be wretched. What's the opposite of that?

CS Lewis says it's wretched. I don't know my soul and I don't know what would happen to it in the end if it was attached to things it shouldn't be attached to.

But wretched is the opposite of blessed. Therefore, CS Lewis says he troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. One day you will learn it, and I'm going to teach it to you before you get there. That's what God says.

The life to themselves and their family stands between them and the recognition of their need, and he makes that life less sweet to them. Every once in a while, God will make your life a little less sweet to you so that you just get a little bit more of a feel for how the depths of your soul and how horrifying it will be if anything's in there but him.

It's very possible.

It's also very possible that I have no idea what God's doing in my pain. Sure, we love to say the story of Joseph because Joseph at the end, you know, he goes through all this, you know, trials in his life and everybody's looking at that going, oh my God, for what? For what? For what? And then eventually he becomes, you know, the lead guy in Egypt and he.

And because of him, the entire nation and nations survive a famine. And you get to the end of that and you go, yeah, God, I understand that you meant what we meant for evil, or your brothers meant for evil, you meant for good. But a lot of us will go through life. We'll, we'll end up in pits and in jails and in all kinds of things and get to the end. But nobody makes us the leader of Egypt.

There's no real purpose. When we get to the other end and go, oh, now I see why you did that. Most of us will go the majority of our life. Every once in a while we'll go, yeah, I see exactly why God put me through that. There'll be a lot of times in your life it will, it will be senseless to you until you hit the grave.

Just last Sunday, February 2, February 2, 2002, we had finished building that building and our first Sunday was going to be February 2, 2002 in that building in the front, the student building. Now this building wasn't here. It was midnight and everybody was working really hard to make that thing ready for the first service that we would have on this land. After seven years of a lot of difficulty. It was midnight.

I was on the stage getting stuff ready and I got a call from my mom saying that my 16 year old niece just had a brain aneurysm and she might not make it through the day.

And so here it was midnight and I was, you know, for my first service and I'm like, really? God? Like really?

So that morning I have to do the first message in that building and then I have to fly home and two days later do the funeral for my 16 year old niece that my sister, the last person on earth that needed to go through that.

And to this day I can't figure out A reason why?

No reason. Oh, I can come up with little things and they help me. They get me by. But this is how they celebrate every year. You know, on her birthdays, it's 23 years ago, but she loved smiley faces.

So they'll put the birthday cake up and they'll celebrate that. My mom and sister have been champions. They live with holes and pain, like you do with a lot of your pain. But you say, is it really possible that even though I don't see a reason why God would do that, that there isn't one? No.

I've thought to myself many times, I wonder what he was protecting her from. I don't know.

And many times I've had to share that story with a person hurting. And God used it like that to comfort. And to me, that's a really big deal. But you'll also just grapple with God. And that's been good for me, too.

I mean, Job isn't the only one that's got to find some way to hold on to God when you don't want to and you can't see Him. We all have to do that at some level. There is health in that.

But I don't see any good reason for it. That doesn't mean there is one. Is it possible that there is a good reason for it? Absolutely. Should I doubt my doubts on whether or not there's a good reason for it?

You better believe it.

Or how about this last? This last one? I guess it's the last. Maybe there's two. I don't know the nature or the extent of God's love.

God is loving. But let me ask you a question. If you're a person who thinks that God is a loving God and he wouldn't make evil and suffering in the world, where did you get the idea that God's loving?

I think that's a really important question. Because I'll tell you where you won't get it. You won't get it from looking around the world. You can't look at the world and conclude that God is good. You cannot do it.

Too much evil. There's horrifying evil in the world. And you go, oh, no, no. I could conclude very easily God doesn't look very good under that microscope.

Well, then where did you get the idea that he's loving? If you can't look at the world and find it, you didn't look at the world religions and find it, because most of the world religions don't. The dominant characteristic of their teaching is not that God is loving. It's very rare, especially in the mythological gods. For sure, he's not loving at all.

And in the major religions, it's not a primary focus at all.

So where'd you get it?

The Bible? The Bible comes right out and tells you God's loving. But if you believe that, hey, don't stop there. The Bible says there's other things about God that you ought to know about him. He's not just loving, he's also a God of judgment.

And it would take a great deal of faith, I hope you know this. A great deal of faith to look at God and say he can only be loving and nothing else. That takes a lot of faith. To imagine an infinite person is only one thing.

And, and is it possible that I don't even know how evil. Evil is as. As outraged as you are at evil when you see it, is it possible that you don't even know how evil it is?

And that's the reason you might say God's not judgment. Is it possible that in the face of that evil that God should only be loving you? Look at the Old Testament, you go, bam. God was violent. And there's a lot of problems with some of that.

And I'm not going to gloss over, cover that another time. But I can tell you right now, the people in the Old Testament, in the kind of world that they lived in, they couldn't tolerate. They couldn't. They couldn't handle the idea that God was not angry, couldn't tolerate it. Miroslav Volf, who's a Croatian theologian, and others have written about this too.

But he says if you're discomforted with the idea that God judges, that's usually due to our own parochial cultural perspective. It takes. This isn't. This is good. It takes the quiet of a suburban home from.

For the birth of the thesis that human non violence corresponds to God's refusal to judge. In a scorched land soaked in the blood of the innocent, that thesis will die. Where you and I are driving to today is not like waking up in a home in. In an Eastern culture where people are tormented and killed and cruelty is right outside your front door every time you turn around. Nobody in that culture is looking for a God that's only loving.

They want a God who's just and they want a God who's going to handle it. That's why Jonah was so mad at God. I'm not going to talk to you, God, because I know you're going to rescue those Ninevites who kill their Babies.

I don't want a loving God in the face of that. I want a God who's just, and I want a God who's angry, and I want a God who's going to solve that.

So is it possible that God cannot be only loving?

It would be very disheartening, C.S. lewis said, to have a God who was indifferent or unaffected by evil.

Doubt you. Doubt. So then how do you know? Then how do you know God loves? Well, here it is.

He suffers. That's the best thing you got. All the other stuff I just told you about, it'll help you. It'll keep you from drowning, but it won't emotion. But it won't get you to land.

I'll tell you what will get you to land, is to know that God suffers. And he's the only one who does. There's no other God in the universe who suffers. And that's why in a book called Unapologetic, it's kind of a crazy book, but Frank Bufford says, we don't have answers. We have a story.

I like that.

And in Lament for a Son, he says, I finally got to a place in my pain where I asked an even more disturbing question.

God, why do you put yourself through suffering?

He's not just the God of sufferers, he's the God who suffers. The pain and fallenness of humanity have entered into his heart. And instead of explaining our suffering, which he never seems to do anywhere adequately, he shares it. That's how you know he's loved, because he suffers. No one in here who loves well doesn't suffer.

Same with God. If he loves, he suffers. And he said, the writer said, it was through my tears that I finally come to see a suffering God. And then he said something else I thought was really powerful. He said, it's said of God that no one can behold his face and live.

You can't look at God. And I've always thought that meant because his splendor was so majestic, it would kill you, he said. But a friend of his suggested no. Maybe that means you can't look at God's sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is his splendor.

That's a great line. How do you see God? And what should you see when you can't see Him? You see a God who suffers. That's what sets them apart.

That's what will get you through your pain.

To love is to suffer. And if you don't see suffering, you're not going to find love. And so God is love.

Maybe better. God is suffering, love. So we're about to come to the table this morning couldn't be better. And what we find is God's participation in our brokenness. That's what you find at the table.

You won't find a bunch of answers. You just find somebody who loves and cares and knows. And at the end of the day, I want that more than anything else.