Sermons from Moorpark Presbyterian Church

Persevering in Tribulation

by Dave Wilkinson

Romans 12:12b

November 14, 1999

This morning I want to share with you the very best illustration I have. It has been in my files for almost fifteen years but I have never used it in a sermon. Now I have no choice. My whole box of illustrations is scheduled to self-destruct at midnight on December 31 of this year. It’s a millennium thing.

I have to use this because it is a marvelous story that deals with some of the most difficult issues we face as human beings -- death, grief, God's healing, God's will. This remarkable example is found in a book titled I Gotta Be Me. The author is none other than Tammy Faye Bakker. It is the story of Chi Chi, the dog.

Tammy writes: "One day while eating supper, little Chi Chi who liked lima beans, ate some and ran into another room. I had noticed that Chi Chi had been losing weight and couldn't understand why. When the dog didn't return I wondered. Jim had seen the dog fall over on the carpet and not get up. Jim went and checked Chi Chi and then gently said, 'Tammy, Chi Chi is dead.'

"I thought my world had come to an end because that was the first time death had ever entered into me. I had never had anyone die that I loved so much before. I wanted to run out on the street and scream. As I started to run out of the door the Holy Spirit stopped me right in my tracks. I stood in the kitchen and couldn't move. I wasn't thinking about God, only about why was Chi Chi dead. The Holy Spirit began to speak through me in an unknown tongue. I couldn't stop. It helped to keep me from falling apart. God is so good. He is there even when we aren't aware of Him.

"At that very moment a real estate man wanted to show our house to someone (they wanted to build a house like ours). Jim handed Chi Chi to him and said, ‘Would you dispose of Chi Chi for us?’ (I love that part. That’s what you call full service real estate.)

"Jim put his arms around me and I cried and cried. I said, 'Jim, have them keep Chi Chi for a couple of days. Please, don't let them bury him right away because I know God can raise things from the dead. Please, don't let them bury Chi Chi.'

"I prayed and prayed and prayed. 'Oh, Jesus, please raise Chi Chi from the dead.' I expected Jim to bring Chi Chi home any minute. I knew God could do it, and Chi Chi would be all right again. I expected to open the door and there would be Chi Chi as usual. The fact was that Chi Chi was a naughty little dog. I loved him so much but several times I had wanted to give him away because he wet on our drapes, especially when he'd get mad at us. He'd chew on everything. We never knew what he would tear up next. But you see, God knew how to take care of Chi Chi for me. God knew that if He took him then that would be the end of the wetting all over the room."

Isn’t that powerful. Now you know the answer to pain and loss. We all have our Chi Chis and God knows how to take care of our Chi Chis for us. God wants us to have clean drapes and will do what it takes to give them to us.

Fortunately, there is more to the good news — and what the Bible says about out times of loss and pain -- than is encompassed by the offing of Chi Chi. That is a very good thing. Because life is a challenge. The Christian life is a special challenge because of the Lord we serve and what he wants to develop in us. us. It is very appropriate that I am preaching this sermon this morning because this is the Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. Jesus said, "In the world you will have tribulation."

Look at how Jesus related to His disciples throughout His ministry on earth. He could hardly be accused of pampering them. For example, Matthew 8 pictures them in a small boat late one evening. Jesus went to sleep on a cushion, and while he slept a furious storm came up. Several of the disciples were professional fishermen. They knew what a storm can do. But there was the master, unconcerned and uninvolved, sound asleep near the stern. They awakened Jesus and said, "Lord save us! Don't you care that we're going to drown!" Jesus said to His Disciples, "You of little faith, why are you so afraid?" Then he quieted the storm.

That's rough. My sympathies are with the Disciples. I don't blame them for being afraid. There was no Coast Guard or helicopter service to pluck them out of the churning sea. Still, Jesus was disappointed by their panic. Why? Because fear and faith do not ride in the same boat.

We need to know that because at times we are all in that boat. There are times when we are tempted to cry out, "Lord, don’t you care?" Look at the circumstances that confront each of us personally -- cancer, kidney failure, heart disease, sudden infant death syndrome, cerebral palsy, Down's Syndrome, divorce, rape, loneliness, rejection, failure, infertility, widowhood! These and a million other sources of pain produce inevitable questions that trouble the soul. "Why would God permit this to happen to me?" It is a question all believers, and many non-believers, have struggled to answer. And contrary to Christian teachings in some circles, the Lord typically does not rush in to explain what He is doing.

Helen Roseveare, was a British medical missionary in the Congo in the 1950's . When the Mau-Mau revolutionaries invaded, this pure, godly, gracious, innocent woman of God, was raped, assaulted, humiliated, hanging on with her life to a faith that would not be shaken. While recovering from that horrible event, Helen and the Lord grew closer together than they had ever been before. And she wrote a statement in the form of a question from God that every person needs to ask himself or herself. Here is God’s question to her: "Can you thank me for trusting you with this experience, even if I never tell you why?"

Dr. R. T. Kendall, Senior Minister of Westminister Chapel in London, writes of the "betrayal barrier." I referred to this some years ago. In his opinion, 100 percent of believers eventually go through a period when God seems to let them down. It makes no sense. It seems so unfair. The natural reaction is to say, "Lord is this the way you treat your own? I thought you cared for me, but I was wrong."

Another writer calls this the "awesome why". Sooner or later, most of us will come to the point where it appears that God has lost control or interest in our lives. It is only an illusion, but one with dangerous implications for spiritual and mental health. Interestingly enough, pain and suffering do not cause the greatest damage. Confusion is the factor that shreds faith.

James Dobson observes: "Unfortunately, many young believers and some older ones too - do not know that there will be times in every person's life when circumstances don't add up -- when God doesn't appear to make sense. This aspect of the Christian faith is not well advertised. We tend to teach new Christians the portions of our theology that are attractive to a secular mind. For example, Campus Crusade for Christ has distributed millions of booklets called "the Four Spiritual Laws." The first of those spiritual laws is "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life." That statement is certainly true. However, it implies that a believer will always understand the wonderful plan and that he or she will approve of it. That may not be true.

For some people, such as Joni Eareckson Tada, whom the staff head speak so powerfully last weekend in Pasadena, , the "wonderful plan" means life in a wheelchair as a quadriplegic. That’s the base from which she does her ministry. For the prophet Jeremiah, it meant being cast into a dark dungeon. For other Bible characters It meant execution. Even in the most terrible of circumstances, however, God's plan is wonderful because, as Paul writes in Romans 8 in all things good and bad God's ultimately "works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose."

On October 17 we saw from Romans 12:12 how love causes us to rejoice in hope. But we do not only have a great and certain future. We also have a purpose for living in the here and now — even when we are going through hard times. So Paul then says that one of the action of love is that we "persevere in our tribulations." This ties in to 1 Corinthians 13 where Paul writes that "love bears all things."

The word tribulation comes from the tribulum. This was a heavy threshing sledge that was drawn over harvested wheat to separate the grain from the stalk. That’s what it feels like to us when we are the wheat. It’s a heavy weight with sharp edges.

Perseverance is a translation of a Greek word which carries the idea of having the ability to abide under this pressure. Perseverance is the opposite of panic.

We can persevere because we can see the hand of God -- and what God is doing in our lives -- even through the pain. We can persevere in the suffering because of what we know or discover about the suffering.

First, as Paul writes back in Romans 5, "Tribulation brings about perseverance." In other words, when we have survived one storm through the help of God, we learn that we can survive all storms. Through God's help, we can hang in there when the going gets hard. And that ability to hang in there is the meaning of the next result Paul identifies in Romans 5, "proven character." Proven character means that we are reliable for God and for each other. Through tribulation God transforms us from rookies into veterans. For we know that tribulation is not a sign that we are not loved by God. Scripture makes it clear that God will allow suffering into our lives with the purpose of making us more whole.

Tribulation also allows us to share in all of Christ’s own experience — which is a part of our love for Him. Jesus told us flat out, "the servant is not greater than the master. If the world hated me, it will also hate you." Peter left no doubt about difficulties in this Christian life when he wrote, "Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice -- why -- that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when His glory is revealed." In our suffering we share with Christ who shared with us.

Tribulation also teaches us faith.

Many of you will remember baseball pitcher, Dave Dravecky of the San Francisco Giants. Dravecky waged a valiant bout with cancer, cancer which took his pitching arm and most of his shoulder and ended his baseball career. About that ordeal Dave Dravecky once said: "I' ve learned a lot in these past few years, but perhaps most of all, I' ve learned to put my life in God’s hands. The hardest part of it all has been the uncertainty. I had to learn to do what was within my grasp one day at a time, and leave control of the rest trustingly to God. Such are the lessons that come when a man faces adversity. I don't think I could have gained them any other way."

Proverbs 3:5 warns us "Lean not on your own understanding". Now this does not mean that we are prohibited from trying to understand. But we are specifically told not to lean on our own ability to make the pieces fit. Leaning refers to the panicky demand for answers -- throwing faith to the wind if a satisfactory response cannot be produced. It is pressing God to explain Himself --or else!

I am sure that every Christian who struggles with his or her own pain and the hurts of others wants to fit together the perfect mosaic. But in our most honest moments, we admit the edges are rough and that there are some really big empty spaces in the middle, and that we'll only understand when we are made perfect as we enter into the presence of the One who is perfect.

As Charles Spurgeon wrote "Any time you think life is unfair, look at the cross. It wasn't fair for a guiltless 33 year-old man to be nailed to a cross to die. But three days later, He rose from the grave, and God showed His triumphant power. He has promised us that if we walk by faith in Him, He will do the same for us". What we are talking about is grace.

Dr. Gerald Sittser of Whitworth College lost his wife, his mother and a child to a drunk driver. In his book, A Grace Disguised, Sittser writes about his experience of suffering and loss. In one section toward the end — after he had led us through his deep experience of grief — Sittser writes: "The problem of expecting to live in a perfectly fair world is that there is no grace in that world, for grace is grace only when undeserved. Victor Hugo's Les Miseralbes tells the story of Jean Valjean who spends nineteen years in jail for stealing a loaf of bread and then for trying to escape his imprisonment. His sentence and suffering are obviously undeserved, the result of living in an unjust society. His experience turns him into a brooding, bitter man. His bitterness only increases when he begins to suffer the ignominy of being an ex-convict in nineteenth century French society; which rejects disreputable people like Valjean.

"In desperation he seeks lodging one night at the home of a Catholic bishop, who treats him with genuine kindness, which Valjean sees only as an opportunity to exploit. In the middle of the night he steals most of the Bishop's silver, but he is caught by the police as he tries to flee. When the police bring him back to the Bishop's house for identification, they are surprised when the bishop hands two silver candlesticks to Valjean, implying that he had given the stolen silver to him for cleaning, and says, "You forgot these." After dismissing the police, the Bishop turns to Valjean and claims him for God. 'I have bought your soul for God," he tells him. In that moment, by the bishop's act of mercy, Valjean’s bitterness is broken.

"The rest of the novel demonstrates the utter power of a redeemed life. Valjean has every reason to hate and exploit, since fate so often turns against him; yet he chooses the way of mercy, as the bishop had done. He raises an orphan who is entrusted to his care at her mother's death, spares the life of a parole officer who has spent fifteen years hunting him, and saves a young man,

his future son-in-law, from death, though it almost costs him his own life. He fulfills his destiny with joy, returns good for evil wherever he goes, and then longingly enters heaven.

"At first, Valjean sought to get what he thought he deserved and raged with anger when he failed. He changed his mind, however, after his encounter with the merciful Bishop, becoming a merciful person himself. He never got what he deserved, either way. His life was both miserable and good. His suffering was undeserved, but so was his redemption."

Sittser writes: "Like Valjean, I would prefer to take my chances living in a universe in which I get what I do not deserve--again, either way. That means that I will suffer loss, as I already have, but it also means I will receive mercy. Life will end up being far worse that it would have otherwise been; it will also end up being far better. I will have to endure the bad I do not deserve; I will also get the good I do not deserve. I dread experiencing undeserved pain, but it is worth it to me if I can also experience undeserved grace.

Sittser writes: "So, God spare us a life of fairness! For to live in a world with grace is better by far than to live in a world of absolute fairness. A fair world may make life nice for us, but only as nice as we are. We may get what we deserve, but I wonder how much that is and whether or not we would really be satisfied. A world with grace will give us more than we deserve. It will give us life, even in our suffering."