Learning to Trust God in the Midst of Our Trials: Let God Love You Through His People

Sermon delivered on Sunday, July 4, 2010 at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church, Lewis Center, OH. If you would like to listen to the audio version of this sermon, usually somewhat different from the text below, click here.

Lectionary texts: 2 Kings 5:1-14; Psalm 30; Galatians 6:1-16; Luke 10:1-11, 16-20.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

What is the Human Condition?

Good morning, St. Andrew’s, and happy Fourth of July! Before I begin, let us take a moment and thank God, either silently or aloud, for blessing us with this great country of ours [silence and then pray the Collect for July 4]:

Lord God Almighty, in whose Name the founders of this country won liberty for themselves and for us, and lit the torch of freedom for nations then unborn: Grant that we and all the people of this land may have grace to maintain our liberties in righteousness and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Two weeks ago you recall that I talked about how to respond in a biblical manner when bad things happen to us. We know that when bad things happen to us or to those we love, our natural inclination is to ask why—Why have I gotten cancer? Why did you let our economic security evaporate? Why are you allowing this alienation to exist between members of my family? But as we have seen, the Bible does not spend much time on answering our “why” questions. Instead, Scripture asks us to respond in faith by trusting God and seeking his good will and purposes for us so that we can allow him to demonstrate his trustworthiness to us. Last week we looked at how the discipline of daily Bible reading and regular prayer are essential means of grace in helping us establish and build this trust, and I offered some specific suggestions on how to improve your prayer and Bible reading skills.

Since most of you did not try to run me out of town on a rail for doing so, today I want to conclude this sermon series by talking about how God can use his people to help us develop a deeper trust in him that will help sustain us in our darkest hours. Specifically, I want to focus on offering some practical suggestions on how to let God use us to love his broken and hurting people. Like last week, the suggestions I offer are certainly not comprehensive or exhaustive. And no, you don’t have to worry about getting another whopper of a sermon. I’ll get you home in plenty of time to burn those weenies and shoot off your sparklers to your heart’s content.

This sermon, like last week’s, is aimed at those of you who are not quite sure how to love your fellow Christians when bad things happen in their lives. For those of you who know how to be a conduit of God’s love for your hurting brothers and sisters in Christ, please be patient with me again and like last week, consider this sermon to be (hopefully) a confirmation of that which you are currently doing.

So how can God use us to help sustain his people during our trials? We can look at all of today’s lessons because each lesson offers us insights into Christian conferencing or fellowship. As usual, our sinful and fallen nature often prevents us from benefiting from the grace of Christian fellowship. We see it exemplified in today’s Psalm when the psalmist brags about feeling secure when the good times roll. And we are just like that, aren’t we? When things are rolling along and we are enjoying success and prosperity in our lives, we tend to get fat and sassy, don’t we? We delude ourselves into thinking we are the agents of our success, that we don’t need anybody’s help or support. But then as the psalmist acknowledges, when disaster strikes and we are left in our darkness, our delusions quickly disappear and we realize just how powerless we really are. Try as we might, who among us can prevent the onset of old age, decay, or death? As our Lord himself reminds us, who among us can add even an hour to our life by worrying about it (Luke 12:25)?

Where is God’s Grace?

And so the first lesson we must learn if we are to let God use us to manifest his love to each other is to acknowledge the plight of our human condition.  In biblical terms this is called humility. When we realize that we have precious little control over the things of this life, try as we may (and boy do we try!), and when we recall that God made us for relationships, both with himself and with others, we are ready to let God love us through his people.

And we can have confidence that God will love us through his people. Did you hear what our Lord Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel lesson? He tells us that whoever listens to the ones he sends listens to him. And whoever rejects those whom Jesus sends rejects him—and the one who sent him. Yes, the context for today’s lesson is Jesus sending out the 70 to evangelize others. But that does not negate the principle that God can and does use his people as agents of his healing power. Does this mean that God only uses Christians as a means by which to love his people? Of course not. Scripture provides many examples of God using all kinds of folks to help him accomplish his will. But it is the consistent testimony of Scripture, especially the NT, that God uses his people as a means of grace to manifest his love for us in our lives. Even a superficial reading of Paul’s letters makes this principle quite obvious.

Where is the Application?

And so if we want to let God love us through God’s people, and if we want to let God use us to love his people, we must first acknowledge that God created us for relationship and then put ourselves in a position where we can love and be loved by others. This usually means that we need to get ourselves into a small group because these are the best venues for God’s people to love each other. We see this echoed in today’s Gospel lesson when Jesus sends out the 70 to proclaim the Good News. He did not send them out as individuals. He sent them out in pairs, in part, so that they could love and support one another, especially when they and their message were not welcomed. If our Lord recognized that rugged individualism was not a good way to handle adversity, we should certainly not think so either.

Once you’ve become ensconced in a small group, you will find that you have many opportunities to love and be loved by God’s people. What does that look like? Again, we take our cue from today’s lessons. As our OT lesson suggests, one way we can love and be loved by God’s people is to be willing to speak the truth in love to them. We see this vividly illustrated in Naaman’s servants. They risked their lives, literally, to speak to Naaman in his rage and gently urge him to do as the prophet Elisha asked him to do.

You see, Naaman had gotten it fixed in his mind that God should heal him in some spectacular way and when those expectations were violated, Naaman flew into a rage. He had faith that God could heal him but Naaman tried to pigeonhole God into healing him on his terms, not God’s. But his servants loved Naaman enough to reason it out with him and persuade him to do as Elisha had told him to do—and God healed him.

The principle here is not that God will always heal us in the way that we hope. Rather, the story of Naaman reminds us to love each other enough to speak the truth in love to each other when we see each other walking in darkness, even when it risks offending the person. It might be that we see a sinful pride in a person that is obstructing a clear view of God. It might be that we see our Christian friend falling into hopelessness and losing sight of his Christian hope. It might be that we see our loved ones develop a bad habit. Whatever the problem—and as Paul reminds us in today’s Epistle, we must be circumspect and check our own house first before we speak the truth in love to others—God can use the wisdom and insight of others to bring healing and relief to us if we are willing to listen. God can also use us to bring healing to others if we are willing to love them enough to speak the truth in love to them. This means that we ultimately are trying to build them up, not tear them down.

After all, isn’t that what our best friends do for us and we for them? We don’t want “yes men” as our best friends precisely because “yes men” cannot always speak the truth to us, especially when they think it risks raising our ire against them. Are you willing to speak the truth in love to your fellow Christians and let them do likewise with you? If you are, you are giving God a wonderful opportunity to love you through his people and this in turn can help you build up your trust and confidence in his ability to help you during your trials. Speaking the truth in love to each other can be especially useful if done in the context of mutual bible study and prayer  because both can sharpen our spiritual awareness and sense of direction as we minister to one another in love.

If God can use us to love each other by speaking the truth in love to each another, he can also use us to love each other by our listening to one another. This can be seen in today’s Epistle lesson when Paul tells us to bear one another’s burdens. In doing so, Paul reminds us that we are fulfilling the law of Christ to love one another (see, e.g., John 13:34-35). A simple but powerful way to bear each other’s burdens is to listen to each other.

When our Christian brothers and sisters come to us with their problems, hurts, and heartaches, the best thing we can do is to listen. This means that we don’t try to “fix” their problems or gloss them over by offering clichéd responses. For example, how many times have you been offended by some well-meaning person who tried to console you in your grief by saying something to the effect that it was God’s will for you or your loved one? We get a case study of how not to handle grieving persons in the book of Job in which Job’s well-meaning friends move from listening to him express his grief over his terrible loss to trying to tell him why he was being punished. Don’t do that to your Christian brothers and sisters.

No, one of the best things we can do is to listen to each other with compassion and empathy. Acknowledge that the person is suffering and remind yourself that you likely cannot fix the problem. Imagine yourself in his or her situation and how you would feel. If you must say anything to the person, tell him you are sorry or express how you sense he is feeling, e.g., “I imagine hearing that you have cancer is a very frightening thing.” This gives your Christian brother or sister a chance to express his or her feelings and thoughts. As Paul reminds us, weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice (Romans 12:15). This, of course, requires mutual trust and respect. Confidentiality is also essential for this to happen. Everybody must understand that what is said there stays there.

For example, when I was on the verge of committing suicide, I called up a friend from church and he came over and just sat with me. He listened to me as I told him once again how my world had been shattered and how I had almost lost all hope. He didn’t try to fix me by offering me pithy advice or telling me this was God’s will. He was just there. Had he not been, I am convinced that I would not be with you today. God used him to help me get over the hump that day and while my problems did not immediately disappear, I did start to get better, even though it took much time and effort on my part.

Or consider this excerpt from our own John Kasich’s new book, Every Other Monday, in which he tells how a priest ministered to him when his parents were killed by a drunk driver in August 1987.

At the hospital, I met a young assistant pastor from my parents’ new church. They’d moved on from Mother of Sorrows to an Episcopal church in town, and my mother had been crazy about this guy. He had come to the hospital as soon as he heard about the accident, to minister to the family, and I sat with him for a while. His name was Stu Boehmig. He tried to comfort me, but I was beyond comforting. He tried to talk to me, but I was beyond talking to. He tried to tell me he knew just how I felt, but I couldn’t hear it.

I actually lit into him at one point. I said, “How could you possibly know how I feel?”

As soon as I said it, I regretted it. I had no call to speak to Stu in such harsh tones. But he understood. He let it slide. He knew I was grieving, reeling, grasping.

After a while, he said, “John, your mother would be no place but with her Lord.”

Then we sat there for the longest while. Stu could see I was devastated. He could see I had no place else to turn, and yet at the same time, I would not turn fully to him. I couldn’t. There wasn’t a whole lot he could say that I was prepared to hear. But to Stu’s great credit, he did not give up on me, even as I appeared to give up on myself Every day for the next several days, he sought to counsel me. Every day, he tried to comfort me. And every day, at least for those first few days, I resisted. I was too angry at that drunk driver, too busy cursing my parents’ tragically bad luck to be pulling out of that parking lot at precisely the wrong time. I wasn’t open to anything but my own grief.

And yet his words left an impression. They kept me standing—not with any great strength or conviction, but at least I was standing. Stu must have sensed that I was lost. And I surely was. I should have known that I had moved away from God. That’s what happens when you allow yourself to get caught up in the material swirl of our society, the getting and spending and achieving that tend to define most of our lives. When you’re working in Congress, it can be a very isolating, very lonely existence. For some, it becomes a little too easy to look away from the core values that might have called us to public service in the first place. You get swallowed up by all this other stuff—which, of course, is just stuff. It doesn’t matter how big your office is, or how many points you’re ahead in the polls, or what they’re saying about you on the Sunday morning talk shows. But it took Stu pointing it out to me in these gentle terms to get me to realize that I had no place else to turn to get through the days ahead (pp. 38-39).

Notice how the priest didn’t try to sugarcoat the situation. Notice how he listened, while reminding John of his Christian hope in a very concise way. And notice the priest’s persistence and patience. He let John lambast him and didn’t get angry with him or give up on him. This is what Paul means when he tells us to bear each other’s burdens.

Compassionate listening can also lead us to help each other by praying for each other and reading Scripture to each other that helps build us up. If, for example, someone in your group shares that he is unemployed and afraid of going bankrupt—an admission that requires a huge amount of trust in itself—your group might pray for that person right then and there, laying hands on the person and using some of his language as the basis for your prayer, e.g., “Dear Lord, your servant Kevin has lost his job and is afraid that he will lose his home.” From there, you can use this language to petition God’s help, always acknowledging that God knows best how to help us. You might also find passages in Scripture to read to that person (and yourself), Psalm 27 or 31 for example, that speak to God’s ability to address our fears and that acknowledge God’s active presence in our lives.

You can then follow up during the week by talking to the person, asking for progress reports (or lack thereof) and use this as the basis for your continuing prayers for that person. Doing things like this is what it means to bear each other’s burdens. Notice that the person’s situation may not change immediately, but that is not the point. The point is that we are there for the person in need. To be present for a hurting brother or sister is to embody our Lord Jesus for that person and we should never underestimate the grace that Christ offers through us simply by being present to another. We dare not take lightly Jesus’ promise that where two or three of us are gathered together in his name, there he will be also (Matthew 18:20).

And if we really think about it, isn’t that precisely what God did for us in Jesus? Did he not take on our flesh and live among us, helping us, healing us, sustaining us? Did he not die for us so that we could live with him forever? Did he not give us his very Holy Spirit to be present with us to help us in the midst of our struggles?

Summary

We have seen that the Bible offers precious few answers to our “why” questions. Instead, Scripture calls us to respond to our trials by faith and hope. We have seen that through our reading of Scripture and prayer, we get to know God better and this in turn helps our trust in him to grow. God also ministers to us through human agency and this can be a wonderful means of grace for us because when we allow ourselves to love and be loved by God’s people, we allow God himself to love us.

When we allow God to love us through his people, we are also reminded that God loved us best through Christ. We remember how desperate is our human condition and how great a love God demonstrated for us by becoming human and dying on our behalf. We remember that we have an eternal hope and glory awaiting us because the blood of the Lamb has been shed to guarantee that future. In the interim, we can count on Scripture, prayer, and God working through his people to help remind us of God’s great love for us and his trustworthiness. We remember that God’s people are animated by his Holy Spirit and that we have the awesome privilege to allow Christ to be embodied in us so that we can minister to each other. And when you begin to plumb the depths of this wondrous truth, folks, if have not done so already, you will have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.