Message by Pastor John Culp : March 2, 2008
“Behold, I Tell You a Mystery – Part 5”
Text – Hebrews 12:1-13
I earned my living as a musician for some twenty years before receiving a call to ordained ministry and going to seminary. My first professional engagement came during the summer of 1976. I remember that job largely for two reasons: because it was my first . . . and because I was fired from it.
The gig was at Kennywood, an amusement park near Pittsburgh. This was the summer between my sophomore and junior years at the university. For the engagement some buddies and I put together a five-piece ensemble to play at the park. And all that went well enough – musically speaking, at least. We played fifteen minutes every hour, leaving 45 minutes off every hour. And there’s where the trouble came about.
We did a lot of things during those 45-minute breaks throughout day. We strolled around the park. We rode on some of the rides. We made time with the young ladies who walked around the park as costumed characters. But we also took to lounging around on a grassy area near the small outdoor stage where we played. And as Shakespeare said, “Aye, there’s the rub…”
Early in the summer the Big Boss, a fellow named Carl who was, we understood, one of the owners of the park, saw us lying on the grass during a break. We were dressed in the colonial costumes the park had bought for us (this was the summer of ’76, which you may remember as the year of the Bicentennial), so we were clearly park employees. And Carl didn’t like the way it looked for some of his park employees to be lying on the grass in plain view of the paying customers. I can see why! So he got word to us through one of his underlings: Knock it off! Which we did . . . at first.
But then Carl had a heart attack, and was gone from the park most of the summer. The cat was away, so the mice began to play. Some of the other guys took to lying on the grass again. I recall that I was enough of a rule-keeper to not join them for a long time – until one Sunday afternoon in mid-August when I was feeling especially tired. I guess I thought, ‘Aw, why not…?’ So I sprawled out on the grass with my buddies. And that was Carl’s first day back on the job after recovering from his heart attack. Carl’s first day back was our last day!
The sacking was especially painful for me because we were scheduled to work a lot more frequently through those last few weeks of the summer – almost every day, I think And because one of the guys was leaving to go to grad school, I was to take over as leader of our little band, which meant that I would have earned a much higher scale – double per day I think, or close to it. Of course the steep financial cost was coupled with the trauma of being fired from my very first real gig. But I did learn a very valuable lesson from the whole sorry event, one in the harsh realities of life in the real world – costly though that lesson surely was. As Ben Franklin wisely noted: Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.
We have been talking about suffering through these weeks of Lent. So far we have seen that the universal reality of human sin means that we have no right to expect all good things from the hand of God. Also we have noted that there is great mystery here: God never tells us that He will explain all to us, at least not here in this lifetime. Last week, the conclusion of the story of Job showed us that suffering is at times the very tool God uses to draw us closer to Himself.
The wonderful, inspired New Testament letter to the Hebrews has a crucial lesson to teach us on this difficult topic:
God sends suffering into Christians’ lives
to make us not bitter, but better.
Let’s reflect on this teaching together, so that we can make that lesson our own.
The letter to the Hebrews is a wonderful blend of profound theology and eminently practical advice for life. We certainly see that combination here in the twelfth chapter of the book.
Our writer starts from the example of those who have gone before. The eleventh chapter of Hebrews is the greatest celebration of faith in the New Testament. The writer sings the praises of a long list of Old Testament saints – specifically of the great faith they showed in the midst of adversity. Then at the beginning of the twelfth chapter, he speaks of them as ‘A great cloud of witnesses’ (12:1).
Think of that notion for a moment. The ordinary events that fill up our hours and days have tremendous significance on the spiritual plane. It is as though day by day we are in the arena of a great athletic contest – competing not for some medal that will fade in time, but striving rather for the approval of God Himself, looking forward to those cherished words: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:21). And as we play out this great spiritual competition, we do not do so alone! In the stands are the great saints who have gone before, watching. The idea is not to frighten or intimidate us. Through this image the writer hopes to strengthen us, to encourage and even to inspire us!
And of course our supreme example, according to the author of Hebrews, is Jesus Himself. God will never call us to suffer as He did – not merely His physical torment, but far worse, His being truly forsaken by God on the cross. But Christ endured. And as we keep our eyes on Him in the midst of our hardship, so can we!
So what about suffering in our lives? What perspective does the author of Hebrews call us to take in all this? He wants us to see hardship not as some grim punishment for sin. Rather he calls us to understand that it is discipline from a loving heavenly Father.
As you know, wise people have always recognized the value of discipline. That’s true in particular of the wisdom of the Bible. In today’s Old Testament lesson from Proverbs, we read these gems: “Refuse discipline and end up homeless; embrace correction and live an honored life” (13:18 The Message). “A refusal to correct is a refusal to love; love your children by disciplining them” (13:24).
We readily agree with that wisdom, don’t we? We commonly speak of a child who grows up without proper discipline from parents like bad produce: We say such a kid is ‘spoiled.’ Now we all know how difficult proper discipline always is – on both the giving and the receiving end! But you can make a strong case that any parent who fails to properly discipline a son or daughter is not really showing that child love in the best sense.
So by the same token, we can and should see suffering in our lives as the very proof of God’s love! That is precisely the point of the author of Hebrews. New Testament scholar Fred Craddock puts it well: “When [our] suffering is understood as discipline from God, then it can be seen, not as evidence of God’s rejection, but as a sign of [His] embrace.” (Fred B. Craddock, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. XII, page 151.)
We often hear people say (or maybe we even say ourselves) when the storms of life roll in, ‘What did I ever do to deserve this?’ – questioning the judgment and the fairness of God. The lesson of Hebrews is that that is the wrong question to ask! Far better for us to take the perspective of the Apostle Paul: “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17 ESV).
How will all this play out in our lives?
It’s actually fair for us to see all hardship in our lives in this light. It is true that there may be an element of punishment in our suffering. At times that may even be what God most wants us to understand. For unbelievers, hardship is even more purely punitive. It’s also certainly true that the mystery of suffering remains. Life is complicated, and that is nowhere truer than in the slice of life we call pain. We should never pretend to have it all figured out, or act as though we’re Ping-Pong balls going over the Niagaras of life.
But it is fair to say that for all who are Christians, suffering always has a redemptive aspect. We should always see it as helpful discipline from a loving heavenly Father. We embrace the startling promise of Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.”
We should certainly acknowledge that hard times can make us bitter. Oswald Chambers (1874-1917) says it plainly enough: “It is nonsense to say that suffering makes saints; it makes some people devils.” (Edythe Draper, Draper’s Book of Quotations for the Christian World [Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1992]. Entry 10860.) Most of us know people in whose lives that is the tragic outcome of hardship. We need to be patient with such folks and to pray for them.
But for us as believers, in every hard providence of life, we need to ask ourselves: What is God trying to teach me here? How is He trying to make me better?
I would not dare to speak of being fired from a summer job at an amusement park when I was 20 years old, before I ever had a mortgage to pay or a family to support, as ‘suffering.’ Still, my Kennywood debacle was unquestionably an unpleasant experience. And out of that unhappiness, God certainly wanted to teach me a lesson – one that I’ve obviously never forgotten. May He give me the grace to faithfully apply that costly wisdom through all my days!
In fact in light of the wisdom of Hebrews 12, we can honestly say, in some sense, that suffering is actually good! Croft Pentz says it well: “If it were not for the hot water, the teakettle would not sing.” (Croft M. Pentz, The Complete Book of Zingers [Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1990.])
Robert Shannon invites us to imagine the stone complaining to the sculptor that the chisel hurts and leaves ugly marks and scars. The sculptor would reply, “You are only a shapeless stone. When I am finished with you, you will be a masterpiece.” So too when we have painful trials, it is possible that God is trying to make something beautiful out of us. (Robert C. Shannon, 1000 Windows, [Cincinnati, Ohio: Standard Publishing Company, 1997.])
How about you? What hardship are you facing these days? How is God calling you, as His ‘teakettle,’ to sing? Just what sort of masterpiece is He longing to carve out of you? And what suffering lies around the corner for you?
Live out your days in the strong confidence that God is never closer to you than He is when the skies are darkest. He never loves you more than He does in the midst of your deepest pain.
Scientists speak of the earth as one large ‘biosphere’ – a closed system in which myriad life forms interact with each other. As people began to think more seriously about expanding our human reach out into space, they started to wonder how our earthbound life forms might be able to survive a long way from home. So they decided to study the question in a very unique way.
Back in 1987 they started work out in a place with the interesting name of Oracle, Arizona. They built what they called Biosphere 2. Eventually it came to be the largest closed system ever created – an area equal to two-and-a-half football fields, all under an airtight glass enclosure. In various parts of the enclosure there were manmade areas of rain forest, wetlands, a savannah grassland, an agricultural parcel – even a small ‘ocean,’ complete with a coral reef.
In order to make all this work, they had to try to simulate just about every naturally occurring weather condition. And they did that – with one conspicuous exception. They had no way to really simulate wind. That omission had one surprising consequence.
We often think of wind as a negative thing – scary; even devastating. But within Biosphere 2, the lack of wind did something the scientists were not expecting. After some time, they noticed that a number of acacia trees bent over; many even snapped off. The scientists might not have put it in these terms, but the fact is that God made acacia trees so that the very stress of wind that bends them over time actually strengthens them. Without the ‘hardship’ of the wind, many trees couldn’t even hold up their own weight, so they didn’t survive. (Jay Akkerman in Fresh Illustrations for Preaching & Teaching [Baker], from the editors of Leadership.)
You may think the ‘wind’ of hardship in your life brings unwanted stress. You may consider it a curse. Be sure of this: If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, God wants to use that hardship, that suffering, as a blessing.
The table to which we now come is a powerful reminder of the One who came to bear God’s real curse for us – the punishment we deserved – so that He could be not only our Savior, but also our Example. He came to teach us that God brings suffering into our lives, not to make us bitter, but to make us better.
Let us pray. Thank You, heavenly Father, for the gift of life – especially the new and abundant and eternal life You give us in Christ Jesus. Give us the grace, we pray, to sincerely thank You even for the challenge of suffering, and the grace to allow You to bring Your eternal plans to completion as You use hardship to make us better, to the honor and glory of our Lord Jesus. We pray in His blessed name. Amen.