Grace is greater Ch.10.

Ch.10. More Hopeful Than Your Despair
           Hopeful > Your Despair

 In 1921 a missionary couple from Sweden named David and Svea Flood went with their two-year-old son to the heart of Africa, to what was then called the Belgian Conco. They met up with another missionary couple and the four of them decided to take the gospel to a  remote area where people had never heard about Jesus.

 Unfortunately, when they arrived, the chief of the tribe wouldn’t let them live in the village. They were forced to live about a mile away, and their only contact with anyone from the village was with a young boy whom the chief allowed to come sell them food. Svea ended up leading that young boy to faith in Jesus, but that was their only progress. They never had contact with anyone else from the village. Eventually the other couple contracted malaria and left. The Floods were on their own. And soon Svea, who was pregnant, also contracted malaria. She died several days after giving birth.

 

 Her husband dug a crude grave, buried his twenty-seven-year old wife, and went back to the main mission station. He gave his newborn baby girl to the missionaries there and said, “I’m going back to Sweden. I’ve lost my wife. I obviously can’t take care of this baby. God has ruined my life.” And he took his son and left. Missionaries adopted his baby daughter and brought her back to the United States to raise her.

 At this point in the story I can’t help but wonder why a man of such faith would respond this way. I have never had to deal with this kind of disappointment and heartache, but it seems like the pain was just too much. His life seemed completely ruined. Beyond repair. From his perspective this was how his story ended. There was no coming back from such loss.

                       The End or the Middle?

 When I was young, there was a series of kids’ books that was quite popular called Choose Your Own Adventure. Each story allowed the reader at different points in the story to choose between several different endings. So if you wanted the story to go one direction, you turned to page 73, but if you wanted it to go a different direction you turned to page 96. If you started reading the option on page 73 and didn’t like how the plot was unfolding, then you simply stopped reading and tried an alternate ending.
  
 These Choose Your Own Adventure books have sold more than 250 million copies over the years. I’m not surprised at their popularity, because most of us would prefer a story we can control. We like the idea that we can change our circumstances and decide our own outcomes. It would be nice if life had an Option B that would allow us to avoid adversity and dodge difficulties.
  
 Eventually we all reach a point in our story where we con’t want to keep reading. The challenge is too overwhelming. The relationship is too broken. The situation is too impossible. The pain is too much. I think David Flood had reached that point.

 Have you ever reached a point like that? You deal with as much as you can for as long as you can, but eventually the pain becomes too much. Here’s my question: What if what feels like the end of the story is actually just the middle?

 When God is the author of your story, you can trust that his grace will have the final word. God’s grace can redeem anything. One of the most beautiful verses about the power of God’s grace is Rom. 8:28:

 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been caleed accorging to
his purpose.

 Paul tells us that the author of our stories, the one directing our lives, is trustworthy and is going to bring a good ending to matter how bad the chapter we’re currently reading might seem. That’s the promise of grace. But let’s be honest:

   when you’re the one who’s hurting,
   when it’s your health that’s failing,
   when it’s your marriage that’s falling apart,
   when it’s your child who is struggling,
   when it’s your job that has been eliminated, and
   when the pain is too much,

 the idea that God’s grace can work thing out of the good seems at best naive but more likely offensive. When the pain seems too much, simple platitudes don’t do much to make us feel better.

 This promise must have seemed just as unbelievable to the Christians in Rome who first received it. Because of their faith, they faced potential loss of  their jobs, family relationships, and even their lives.

 Paul recognized some of the difficulties ther were facing when he mentions hardships, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, and the sword. He assures them that “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (v.37) and that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (v.39). Paul wants these Christians to understand that no matter how desperate things may seem in the moment, God’s love and grace will win the day.
 
 He wasn’t calling for blind optimism. He doesn’t say, “And we think that in all things God will work for the good.” He doesn’t say, “And we believe/hope/are pretty sure . . .” He says, “We know God works for the good of those who love him.”

 I dug into the Greek word that is translated “we know” and discovered it means an absolute, unshakable confidence. Paul is speaking with the certainty of a man who has glimpsed the redeeming work of  God’s grace in his life.

 This word translated “we know” is used one other time in Rom.8. In verse 22, Paul is talking about the pain of this life and how the world can be a pretty messed-up place. He writes, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning.”

In other words, Paul says two things are absolutely sure:

   1. Life is hard (v.22).
   2. God is good (v.28).

Paul is unshakably confident about these two truths. But sometimes the space between them feels like an eternity.

                          Just Keep Reading

 My middle daughter loves to read. When she reads a novel she enters into the story and emotionally engages with the characters. When she was younger it wasn’t unusual for her to become stressed out about halfway through the book and stop reading it. I found myself encouraging her with three words that maybe you need to hear at this point in your story: “Just keep reading.” 

 The story isn’t over yet. The final chapter has yet to be written. Trust the Author. If you’re in the middle of a chapter titled “Life Is Hard,” you can know for certain that you will soon come to a chapter titled “God Is Good.” Just keep reading.

 All this reminds me of the 2014 Winter Olympics, which were in China, so the events took place while most Americans were sleeping. I tried to avoid finding out who won each competition before it aired on TV, but it was difficult. One night my family was watching couples ice dancing. I had read earlier that Americans Meryl Davis and Charlie White had won the first gold medal ever for the United States in this event. But my family had no idea I already knew who won.

 

 As the Americans performed their ice dancing routine, I expressed my confidence that this was a gold medal perform-
ance. 

 I tried to impress my daughters with my understanding of the intricacies of ice dancing. When it was announced that Davis and White had won the gold, I couldn’t tell if my kids were proud or embarrassed that their dad was such an expert in ice dancing.

I have to admit: it was kind of fun knowing the ending before the ending.

 And it’s not just me. Two UC San Diego researchers conducted a study that suggested spoilers don’t actually spoil stories. They ran three experiments using twelve stories. They discovered people consistently enjoyed the story more if the ending had been spoiled than if they read the story in suspense. One of the researchers had an interesting theory about why people like to know the end of the story before the ending. He said, “So it could be that once you know how it turns out, it’s cognitively easier – you’re more comfortable processing the information – and can focus on a deeper understanding of the story.”1 Maybe he’s right. When a story has been spoiled, it’s easier to follow and understand. We lose some of the suspense, but perhaps knowing how it will end allows us to not just endure the journey but actually enjoy it.
  
 Paul doesn’t give a spoiler alert but he does tell us how the story ends. Because of grace, we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

Sometimes you just have to keep reading.

                         David Flood’s Story

 Let me finish telling you about David Flood, the Swedish missionary who moved his young family all the way to Africa to see just one child come to faith. Then he lost his wife to malaria soon after she gave birth to their daughter. Furious with God, David buried his wife, gave his baby away to a missionary couple from the United States, and went back to Sweden with his small son.

 Well, that daughter was given the name Aggie and grew up in the United States with Christian parents. One day she checked her mailbox and for some unknown reason found a Swedish magazine. She was flipping through it when a photo stopped her cold. It was a picture of a crude grave with a white cross. On the cross was the name “Svea Flood.” She recognized her mother’s name. She took the magazine to someone who could translate the story that accompanied the photo. Aggie sat and listened to the story about the work her mother had done as a missionary,

 Sometime later she traveled to Sweden to find her father. Turns out he had remarried, fathered four more children, and basically ruined his life with alcohol.

 After an emotional meeting with her half siblings, Aggie brought up the subject of seeing her father. They hesitated and then explained, “You can talk to him, but he’s very ill. And you need to know that whenever he hears the name of God, he flies into a rage.”
 Aggie wasn’t deterred. She walked into his tiny apartment, saw empty liquor bottles everywhere, and approached the seventy-three-year-old man who had deserted her years before.

 As soon as she said “Papa?” he began to cry and apologized profusely. She smiled. “It’s all right, Papa. God took care of me.” Instantly he stiffened and his tears stopped. “God forgot all of us,” he said, turning his face to the wall. “Our lives have been like this because of him.”

 “Papa,” Aggie said, “I’ve got a story to tell you, and it’s a true one. The little boy you and Mama led to the Lord grew up to lead his entire village to faith in Jesus. The one seed you planted just kept growing and growing. Today more than six hundred African people are serving the Lord because you were faithful to the call of God in your life. You didn’t go to Africa in vain. Mama didn’t die in vain. Papa, Jesus loves you. He has never hated you.” 2
                              footnote 
   2 Aggie Hurst, “A Story ofr Eternal Perspective,” Eternal Perspective Ministries, Feb. 18, 1986, 
      http://www.epm.org/resources/1986/Feb/18/story-eternal-perspective/
      Excerpted from Aggie Hurst, Aggie:“The Inspiring Story of a Girl without a Country

      (Springfield, MO: Gospel Publishing House, 1986).

 

 David was stunned.His  muscles relaxed, and their conversation continued. 

 By the end of the day he had come back to the God he had resented for so many decades, and within weeks he walked through the doorway of death and into his eternal home with God in heaven.

 I’m thankful for what God did as David Flood lived out his last weeks on earth. But I can’t help but think that David could have handled his pain so much better if he just hadn’t lost faith in God’s goodness. If only he would have believed that God’s grace is greater. What if, instead of closing the book, he would have just kept reading?

                       God’s Definition of Good

 One of the reasons we have a hard time believing that God’s grace is working for good in our lives is because of how we define the word good. We have our own ideas of how God should work for our good, ideas that range from a cancer-free report to an on-time flight.

 A few years ago I realized that my driver’s license had expired. (I realized this when the cop explained it to me.) I went to the DMV to get a new driver’s license and was told that since mine had been expired for so long, I would have to take the test all over again. Spending the afternoon at the DMV taking a driver’s test with a room full of sixteen-year-olds was not how I planned to spend the day, but I wasn’t worried. I had been driving for over a  decade and was sure I would breeze through the test.
  
 But as I started taking the test, I quickly realized I was in trouble. Then I took it up to the officer and she started grading it right in front of me. She had her red pen out, and I started keeping track of how many I’d missed. It reached to a point when I realized if I missed one more, I was going to fail. Not an acceptable outcome. I imagined calling my wife from the DMV and saying, “Could you come pick me up? I failed my driver’s test.” It would be a confirmation of everything she’d ever said about my driving, and I would never hear the end of it. As the officer finished grading my test, I began praying, Jesus, if you’re really listening . . .
 
 She got down to the last question, looked up at me with a slight smile, and said, “Did you mean to mark the letter B on this answer?” And I suddenly sensed God working in my life. The DMV office is not a place he usually frequents, but he showed up that day. 

 I looked at the question, but I still wasn’t sure what the right answer was. So I started stalling. “Did I put the letter B? That’s not what I meant to put . . .”
   
 She could see I was struggling. “Did you mean to mark the letter C?”  “I was going to say C right before you said C,” I said. “That’s what I was going to say.” She marked out B, circled C, and in all things God works for the good.

 I tend to think that if God is working for my good, then everything that happens to me should work out according to my definition of good, like my day at the DMV. But when something not so good happens to me, it doesn’t seem like God is keeping his promise. We tend to think God working for our good means we won’t experience pain and will somehow be exempt from the suffering of this world. But God’s definition of good is different from that.

                        The Goodness of Grace

 So what is God’s definition of good? Let me give you a few ways you can know that God’s grace is at work in the midst of your pain to bring about goodness in your life.

   1. You can know God’s grace is working in your pain to draw you closer to Jesus.
   God doesn’t waste our pain but rather can use it and work in it to call our hearts closer to him. Here’s how The Living Bible paraphrases 2 Cor. 7:10: “For God sometimes uses sorrow in our lives to help us turn away from sin and seek eternal life.”

 My guess is that this is exactly what happens for many of you. You go through something incredibly difficult, and in the midst of it you discover Jesus in a way that you have never known him before. What you thought was the worst thing that ever happened to you ended up being the best thing that ever happened to you because it brought you closer to Jesus.

 That’s the difference grace makes. It doesn’t always take away our pain but it does something better – it redeems it. In our pain, we discover the presence of Jesus in a way that we never would have otherwise.

   2. You can know that God’s grace is working in your pain to make you more like Jesus.
 God’s grace takes all the broken pieces of our lives and puts them together so that we look more like Jesus. After promising us that in all things God is working for the good in our lives, Paul gives us a further explanation of at least one way God brings about goodness. Rom.8:29 reads, “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.”

 Paul speaks of those God “foreknew.” God is all-knowing and his knowledge isn’t limited to a linear timeline. He lives outside of time and space and sees everything at once. He not only knows everything that has happened but also everything that will happen as if it already has happened. You’ll never hear God says, “Wow, I didn’t see that coming.” And in his foreknowledge, he knows everything, good or bad, pleasurable or painful, that will ever happen to you.

 Then we are told what God has done with that knowledge: he has predestined – that is, predetermined – that all things in life will work for our good by conforming us to the image of Christ. Knowing what you would go through, God made a decision ahead of time to use all of that to make you more like Jesus. That means your pain always has a purpose. There’s a big difference between pain that has a purpose and pain that seems pointless.

                         Pain with Purpose

 A number of years ago, when I was young and foolish, I got into a discussion with my wife about the pain of childbirth. She was fairly convinced that if men had to endure the level of pain that accompanies giving birth, the world have never been populated. I did a little research and discovered that the closest pain comparison that men endure is passing kidney stones. From a purely physical perspective, having kidney stones and giving birth are two events that are fairly close on the pain chart. Knowing that men pass kidney stones quite often, I thought it best to bring this evidence to my wife so that she could have the appropriate level of appreciation for the pain tolerance of the male half of the species.

 She considered the evidence, pointed out that the study was done by a man who had never been in labor for ten-plus hours and had never given birth. But then she made a great point. “There is a big difference in choosing pain versus having no choice.” Meaning that women are tougher because they consciously choose to endure pain, whereas no man has ever chosen to pass a kidney stone. “I’m excited to pass a kidney stone,” said no man ever.

 I didn’t admit it to my wife, but I thought she made a great point. Choosing to go through pain is a different level of toughness than being forced to go through pain. The question is: Why would a woman choose to go through pain? It’s because she know that the pain has a purpose.

 She is willing to endure the pain because she is more focused on what the pain will produce. In fact, after going through the excruciating pain of childbirth, a woman might say, “That was so rewarding. I hope God blesses me with another pregnancy.” But no man who has ever passed a kidney stone would say anything like that.

 The difference in the pain of childbirth and the pain of kidney stones is that the pain of childbirth produces something good and precious. There is a purpose that comes from the pain. As long as we can have confidence that pain has a purpose, we can find the strength to endure.

 Paul reminds us it is God’s grace that gives us this confidence. His grace in our pain is a promise that whatever pain we go through in this life does not get wasted. It will give birth to something good.

 As a pastor, I have had hundreds of people come to me looking for answers when their pain seems too much. One of the comments I often hear goes something like this: “Everything happens for a reason. I know God has a reason for this.” When the pain of life is overwhelming, we are desperate to make sense of it. We think if there is a reason behind it, the pain won’t hurt as much. But I’m not sure there is always a reason, and even if there is one, I’m quite sure we won’t always understand it.

 Here’s how I’ve tried to encourage people to reframe that question. Instead of asking “What is the reason?” we should ask “What is the purpose?” Because I don’t know if there is always a reason, but I know God in his grace always has a purpose.

 What’s the difference between “reason” and “purpose”? Reason looks for a because, but purpose focuses on the for. Reason wants a logical explanation that will make sense out of something that has happened. Purpose offers us a hope that whatever has happened God can work of good.

 Do you remember what Jesus said when he and his disciples camme across a man who had been born blind (John 9), or when he got the news that a tower had fallen over in Siloam and killed eighteen innocent people (Luke 13)? People came and asked him, “Why has this happened? What’s the explanation?” The people wanted a reason. But Jesus told them they were asking the wrong question. He explained, in so many words, “These things happen, but watch for the work of God to be accomplished here.” Jesus didn’t give them a reason but he assured them there was a purpose.

God’s grace to us in our pain is that our pain is not without purpose. God can work through it to make us more like Jesus.

                          When Grace Hurts

 Harold Wilke was born with no arms, and as he grew up many tasks that came naturally to other kids were extraordinary difficult for him. He tells of a time, as a very young child, when he was on the floor struggling to put his shirt on. His mom and her neighbor friend stood and watched as he writhed around on the floor. The neighbor said to his mom, “Why don’t you help that poor child?” His mom stood with her arms held stiffly at her sides and her jaw clamped tight as she resisted every instinct and finally, through gritted teeth, responded, “I am helping him.” 

 I know when you’re going through suffering or you’re living with pain it may seem that God, who is all-powerful, should do something to help. Consider the possibility that God in his grace is helping. Sometimes grace hurts so that it can help. It’s hard to find grace in cancer, but maybe God allows the cancer to help us take stock of our lives and help us and those around us think about eternity. It’s hard to find God’s grace when you can’t stand your boss, but maybe God allows a difficult boss to help us learn to be self-controlled and not find our identity in a job. It’s hard to find  grace in unemployment, but maybe he allows unemployment to help us understand that we are dependent on him. Maybe he allows the pain of a broken heart to expose our idolatry and help us learn to put our hope in him. The list could go on and on. How has this been true in your life? God’s grace to you is that he will work through your pain to accomplish his good purpose in your life.
 
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis gives us this imagery:

 

 Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what he is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is he up to? The explanation is that he is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing  out  a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage, but he is building up a palace.

He intends to come and live in it himself. 3
                              footnote
     3  C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 176
    
He is at work within us to make us more like Jesus. It may not make any sense now, but just keep reading.

  In some cases we’ll have to keep reading all the way into eternity. The tension between “Life is hard” and “God is good” won’t be fully reconciled until we are with him in heaven. But from the perspective of heaven we will finally be able to see the greatness of God’s grace. Paul talks about this in 2 Cor. 4:17-18:

 For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them

and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot
be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever. (NLT)

 God will bring good out of your bad. And even if you can’t currently see how God might be drawing you closer or getting glory from your pain, you still need to remember: you’re in the middle. This isn’t the end of your story. Just keep reading. Grace will have the final word.

                        The End of the Story

 A few years ago I performed a funeral for a member of our church named Craig. He had never had any health issues, but after he experienced a few weeks of feeling fatigued and having an upset stomach, his wife urged him to visit the doctor. He went the next day and was sent to the ER for testing and a CT scan.
   
 Within minutes he was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and given six months to live. He and his wife sat in a hospital room trying to process what they had just been told. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Craig told his wife what he was deciding right then to trust God no matter what the future held.
   
 I first met Craig four months before his funeral. He and his wife introduced themselves to me after a church service. He asked if I could pray for him because he had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Craig looked healthy and strong, and I immediately felt a connection to him. Besides being about the same age as me, Craig was a father to three beautiful girls, also just like me. I was a little more emotional than I normally would be as I prayed for God’s healing.

 I checked in with Craig and his wife from time to time in the months that followed. His treatment wasn’t working, and the started going downhill fast. His wife was brave but scared. We talked some about how to have conversations with the three little girls about their daddy being sick. What do you say? How do you prepare them?

 When I received the news of Craig’s death, I was not happy with God. I’d seen him work miracles before. Why not this time? And because I could identify with Craig, it felt more personal to me. If God’s grace is greater than pancreatic cancer, why didn’t God heal Craig and give him more time with his girls?

 As I prepared for his funeral, I wnet online and read a blog Craig and his wife had started as a way to process what they were going through and communicate with others about it. After a few minutes of reading the first blog entry, I got up and shut my office door so I could cry my way through it. I was so moved by their raw honesty and especially by their faith. I eventually came to Craig’s final entry.

 Just looking at myself in the mirror, I can tell my downward spiral has begun. I’m at my all time low of about 118        pounds. I have an awkward time shaving my face because it is pure bone and I feel like I’m having to shave every bony  contour my face has. My yellow eyes constantly remind me my jaundice is settling back in. This pretty much means        things are going to eventually start shutting down. There’s nothing out there that makes sense for me to do to treat this that we haven’t already looked at yet . . .
 

 The encouragement I have that my eternal life will be in Heaven and that I will be cancer free soon puts a smile on my face. . . . I am very motivated about what the future has to offer me that there is a lot of reason to be excited.
  
I finally arrived at the very last sentence. It was just three words followed by five exclamation points. Craig’s final words:

   God is good !!!!!

   life is hard.
   God is good.
   Just keep reading.
   Grace is greater.