Search for peace, I search for hope, I search for love, and one
day for release. God give me strength to accept
the things that I just cannot know, that even when I lose
control, I will not let. You go.
Good morning. My name is Daniel.
I am one of the lead. Pastors.
Here at Res Church, welcome if you're visiting, welcome.
We are in the last and final week of our series, Sound Mind.
We are in week 6 of a series about mental health and the
intersection between mental health and our faith, where
we've been. Opening the Bible and looking at
hope. For all of these different
afflictions and things. That we, we are particularly in,
I think more modern culture, have begun to define and talk
through anxiety and depression, hopelessness, burnout.
And so today, as we finish up the series, we're going to talk
about hope for helping others, what it looks like to walk with
others through their suffering, to walk with others through
their affliction. And so I hope this has been
transformative for you. We, we've had some really
phenomenal conversations. We've seen God work in powerful
ways through the series as we have continued to go back to the
Bible to talk about what God says about these issues and
dealing with them. May 31st, which is about, I
don't know, 8-8 days ago. Yeah, about 8 days ago.
May 31st is my daughter Dansley's 13th birthday.
And Dansley is. Her birthday is only 14 months
after Kaya, my third daughter, and Quentin is 14 months after
that. So I think if it's under like 16
months, they call them Irish twins.
So I guess I have Irish triplets.
Is that how that works? So Dansley was, so it was a.
Friday, and it was the day before my wife was going to go
check into the hospital to give birth to Dansley, and I got a
phone call while I was at work and she was just sobbing.
She'd gone. To that last.
Check up before going to the hospital and found out that
there was no heartbeat. And so we found out the day
before basically that Dansley had passed away.
And so I, I, I raced down to the doctor's office and we like it.
It is the worst case scenario if you're if you're pregnant is the
worst case scenario that you know can happen, but you're
never prepared for it to happen. And we ended up having to go
into the hospital and I sat with my wife while she went through
the labor and delivery of a dead baby.
And so trying to trying to put words to grief is actually
really difficult because it doesn't affect everyone the same
way. And and because it's, it's hard
to articulate confusion, emptiness, numbness that is
involved because the, the, the shock of loss is often so
intense that you just want to feel something.
In fact, we see a lot, a lot of times we make a lot of mistakes
in our grief. But one of the things that I, I
never, I never really was prepared for it in those days
and weeks after our loss was the number of people that would come
and say, how can I help? Bro?
I don't even, I don't even know how to live right now.
I don't know how to do basic life function.
I, I, I feel helpless. I don't know how to tell you how
to help. I can't figure out my own life,
let alone tell you or guide you on a way to help me.
And I wasn't prepared for the number of times I would be
asked. Here's what the people closest
to us did. They just showed up.
They cleaned our house, they took our other kids places, they
made food, they made themselves available.
They didn't tell us anything profound.
They didn't try to to speak encouragement into our lives.
Like we were in shock. We couldn't have heard anything
anyways. Now, there were plenty of other
people that tried to help in plenty of other ways, and most
were not helpful. For me, this is my my first real
introduction to what it would look like to walk with people
through their suffering, to walk with people through their
affliction. And as a pastor, I've had an
opportunity to do this a number of times where I get to walk
with people. Here.
Here's one of the. One of the things that we, I
lament about our modern culture is that in, in kind of Western
civilization, so Europe and in the US now in this postmodern
world, we don't even understand what it means to grieve anymore
in the West. Now the, the, there was a study
a couple years ago said in our culture, now the, the, your, the
expectation in our society is that you're, you're allowed to
grieve for about 72 hours and we expect you to be done with it in
about 3 days. If you've been through any real
loss, you're not ready usually in three days to go back to
normal, but that's the. Expectations often put on us.
And So what I want to do right now is we want to open the Bible
and we want to take a look at what it talks about when it when
it, when we're looking at not just suffering, but how do we
walk with people? How do we comfort people when
they're suffering, when they're going through affliction?
Here's the big idea. It's in your hand out today.
It's this God prepares, provides and positions me to comfort the
afflicted. God prepares, provides, and
positions me to comfort the afflicted.
I'm going to be primarily going to be in Second Corinthians
chapter 1 today. This was a letter written to the
early church in the city of Corinth by a man named Paul.
He was a missionary who who started really most of the first
churches. In these cities, in these Greek
cities. And he is a guy who has, we
would call him an expert on suffering.
I don't know if they make experts in suffering, but if
they didn't, if they may, if they had experts in suffering,
it would be the Apostle Paul. Listen to his resume real quick.
He was imprisoned and repeatedly flogged.
That means whipped and beaten as well as he was stoned and left
for dead. He had been in dangers from
rivers and robbers as well as from Jews and Gentiles and false
Christians. He was shipwrecked.
He was snake bitten. He knew many cold and sleepless
nights and hungry and thirsty days.
And on top of all of that he was constantly anxious for the early
churches, that he had started praying for them and worrying
about them. And he, his ministry was under
constant attack, both from external sources, the Roman
government and the Jewish Pharisees, but also from
internal sources inside the church, from false teachers and
power hungry men that were inside the church.
He knew suffering. And so, so when he writes these
words about suffering, I want you to understand it as a man
who knew it well. Here's what he says in Second
Corinthians chapter 1, starting in verse 3.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the
Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all
our affliction. So that we may be able to
comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with
which we ourselves are comforted by God.
For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through
Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.
If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation, and
if we are comforted, it is for your comfort.
Which you experience when you patiently endure the same
sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken,
For we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also
share in our comfort. We spent a few minutes today
unpacking these words from the Apostle Paul A an expert in
suffering. He starts with this idea.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the
Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in
all our affliction. For as we share abundantly in
Christ's suffering, the universal truth of humanity is
that we will all suffer. Congratulations, welcome to
Resurrection Church. The Bible actually promises
this, that we will suffer. Why?
Well, look, I maybe you're new to the Bible.
Maybe maybe you've never read the Bible.
And if you turn to the very beginning and the very first
book of the Bible is called the book of Genesis.
And the 1st chapter, God creates the world and by the 3rd chapter
we mess it up. Like literally look at this.
We are this far into the Bible and we've already rebelled
against God and messed up creation.
It doesn't take us very long and and by Genesis chapter 3, as we
have rebelled against God, humanity who knew no death, knew
no pain, knew no suffering, rebels against God anyways and
falls under by Genesis 3A curse because of sin, that death
enters into human nature. And that means that every one of
us has now been born underneath the curse of death, the curse of
suffering. Here's the good news.
God does not let us go through this alone.
He actually prepares, provides, and positions us to help one
another. He prepares.
God is preparing you and I through our suffering.
In fact, both the affliction and the comfort are part of the
preparation. Both the suffering that you
experience and the comfort that you receive is part of the
preparation. And here's what I mean by that.
The word that's being used here in this passage for affliction
is the word phlipsis. It's a Greek word, phlipsis.
You need to spit just a little bit when you say it.
Phlipsis right over sitting in front of you in the Pew right
now is not happy and this word it means any type of suffering
any type of trials. In fact, it would mean any of
the three types of suffering in the Bible.
There are actually three different types of suffering in
the Bible. What are those you say well,
thank you for asking well timed three types of suffering are
mentioned in the Bible. Let's talk about all three.
The first type of suffering is this suffering because the world
is broken. That's, that's what Genesis 3
talks about is we are born under this, this curse.
Listen, the world tilts toward chaos and evil.
Can we all turn on the news? Things don't look good.
They never have the the world seems like it is devolving.
It is just always leaning toward chaos and evil and darkness.
This is what the Bible actually explains.
And so we should not be surprised that we might suffer
in a world that is under a curse.
So some of the suffering that you and I experience is because
we live in a broken world. But secondly, we also suffer
because of my own bad decisions. Amen.
Has anyone here made a bad decision?
Has anyone suffered because of it?
OK, can we stop calling that a test?
God is not testing me when I do stupid stuff.
I love having a truck. I don't have a truck right now.
Someday when they're cheap enough and Elon lowers the
price, I'm going to buy a cyber truck.
But years ago I decided I I would I would make an impulse
buy. Horrible decision.
Never do that. And I would buy this truck and I
bought like a an older used Ford F-250 diesel.
You already know where this is going.
I am also not mechanically inclined and I know nothing
about cars. So I bought this thing and I
mean within like 6 weeks it's spilling oil everywhere.
And I and I and I realized like there's more, there's more work
to be done to this engine than the whole truck is worth.
And I just have to get rid of it and I lose like thousands of
dollars in the process. OK, listen, God was not testing
me, was just an idiot. OK, so some of the suffering
that we go through is like, Oh my, is it?
If it's not the consequences of my own bad decisions.
So we suffer because the world's broken.
And often times we suffer because we make stupid
decisions. Amen.
What did you learn today at church?
I'm stupid. OK, But but there's a third
reason in the Bible we suffer, and that's we suffer because of
persecution for Christ. The Bible say to love Jesus is
to be hated by the world. And so.
So now we don't listen. Let's be real.
We live in America, so most of us don't experience a great deal
of religious persecution here because we love Jesus.
Amen. Like like literally persecution
here is like, Oh my God, they forgot whipped cream on my
starbees. I don't, I don't think that's.
Target got my order wrong. I got to walk inside.
But there is real persecution in this world.
Not, not just historically there, there are, there are
countries right now today where you can be imprisoned, where you
can be killed or beaten for declaring faith in Jesus Christ.
So three types of suffering or you can suffer for any or all of
these reasons that we do. But here's the here's the hope.
The hope is this. If you and I have put our faith
in Jesus Christ, if we are believers in Christ, we actually
suffer with a purpose. Now, even if we suffer because
of our own actions, God disciplines us to teach us
because He loves us. All suffering has a purpose for
the believer. This is what the Bible says.
If you turn to Romans 5, three and four, we'll put it on the
screen real quick and say this. Not only that, but we rejoice in
our sufferings. You're all like, well, I don't.
We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces
endurance and endurance produces character and character produces
hope. The apostle James, who is Jesus
half brother and James one, says it this way.
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various
kinds. For you know that the testing of
your faith produces steadfastness and lets
steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect
and complete, lacking in nothing.
What are these passages saying? We're going to suffer, It's
going to happen. But if we're believers, God will
actually transform us through our suffering.
That's what this is saying, that there is a refining that will
happen to us as we suffer. Now, how many of you have gone
like maybe you when you were younger, you went to like a like
a camp or you have to go to like a retreat or something?
Like you go in the mountains and you have this like phenomenal
spiritual experience. Anybody, 4 of you.
We got to do more camps apparently.
Holy smokes, guys. If you've ever had like, what I
would kind of call like a mountain top experience, when
you get away and like God is just moving in powerful ways and
you just like, man, this is such a great experience.
Look, I love those things too. But most often in my life, when
God has actually transformed and changed my character, it has
been in the valley of the shadow of death.
It has been in the suffering, it has been in pain.
It has been in difficulty. That requires great faith and a
desperate clinging to God. So, yeah, we love the
mountaintop experiences, but God does a lot of work in the
valley. Amen.
It is it is pain with a purpose because but it is in the
suffering that we begin to have real clarity about convictions.
That doesn't make the pain better necessarily, but it but
it's not senseless. But when I walked out of the
hospital room after we had lost our child and I went to the
waiting room, it was my my brother-in-law was one of the
people that met me in the waiting room.
And he's, he's mourning and he's crying and and he's trying to
make sense of it like all of us are and up talking to him.
And, and this is the most serious spiritual conversations
I ever got to have with my brother-in-law were right after
the loss of my daughter. And all of a sudden he's talking
to me about eternal things. He's talking to me about God.
And he begins to get serious about his faith over the next
few months. And he gets to investigate and
pursue the Lord and go to church and read his Bible.
And why did that happen? Because in loss there's a
conviction, A clarity about what's important and what's not.
And that that loss also galvanized my faith.
Why? Because I had to decide if God
was. Good, even when things were bad.
So I had to make that choice because it is a choice.
If you go back to verse three, I want you to, I want you to catch
a title that's used in here. It's very interesting.
It says the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort.
Now that's a really interesting word that's used there.
It's the first time it shows up in Second Corinthians, but it's
going to show up 10 times in this letter.
And that word comfort is a word paraclesis.
It's a Greek word, paraclesis, and it means comfort, not like
like you bought a new mattress and it's super comfortable.
Not that kind of comfort, but comfort, like encouragement,
like a verb, comfort, the God of all comfort, paraclesis.
Now, the reason that's such an interesting word and it's
repeated over and over and over again, the reason that's so
interesting is there's another word, another Greek word that is
the root of that word. It's called paraclete.
And Paraclete, we see that word show up.
Jesus uses it and he uses it in John 14.
In John 14, Jesus says this. He says, and I will ask the
Father and he will give you another helper to be with you
forever. And what Jesus is doing in that
moment is he saying, listen, I'm going to leave, but I'm going to
send you the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is what for
believers in dwells us, except the name that He uses for the
Holy Spirit is not helper, it's Paraclete.
It's capitalized like a noun, like a proper noun, like a name.
The actual literal name of the Holy Spirit is the encourager,
the comforter. So.
So if you're a believer, God didn't just save you from your
sin. He didn't just just raise you
from the grave to new life. He also took encouragement,
supernatural encouragement, and indwelt it into your life.
Truth alarm. Did you hear it?
God is not just the God of encouragement.
The very spirit that indwells believers is called the
encourager, the comforter. That is how God provides a
supernatural source of comfort for you.
So, So God, he prepares, He provides.
In fact, I was thinking, I can't even imagine going through
suffering. Without the hope of the Holy.
Spirit to encourage me, to teach me one of the most important
lessons that I have learned over the course of my life in
suffering is really that we find out in suffering, in difficulty,
whether or not we really believe in the Bible.
Like we really find out a lot about our faith in suffering.
And what I mean about that is like so like 8 years ago I had
an issue with my kidney. That put me in the ER and I'm in
the ER over the weekend and the pain had gotten so intense that
I end up rolling off the hospital bed and I'm like
rolling, rising on the ground just in pain.
And, and in that agony, God is speaking very loudly to me and
he's asking me about some very specific acts of obedience.
And he has called me to, and he's reminding me of scripture
and he's really pressing on whether or not I'm going to be
obedient in those areas. And, and, and really here's what
I would say is this. You can say you believe that God
is good, but do you believe it when the circumstances you're
going through aren't good? Like we say this a lot.
You only believe the parts of the Bible that you live out.
Did you know what I mean by that?
We live in kind of a pseudo Christian nation, you know,
where people are like, Oh yeah, I believe in the Bible.
And what they, what they mean by that isn't what the Bible would
say. Like, well, if you say you
believe in the Bible, but you don't want to follow the Bible's
guidance on the hard stuff, on sex, on marriage, on purity,
like you don't believe in the Bible.
If you say you believe in the Bible, but you consistently
follow your emotions or your pride instead of humility and
gentleness, you don't actually believe in this Bible.
Believing the easy stuff is in faith, It's in suffering that
the spirit changes our character.
He he's refining my character. He he's really pressing on the
stuff that I don't want to do. My faith in God, my faith in his
word, because the the Bible becomes entirely a different
book when instead of just reading it, I have to live it.
Amen. Like the Bible is perfect, but
lived out Scripture is potent, it's powerful and living out
Scripture is hard. Can I get an Amen?
Like you have read that whole love your enemies thing, right?
Like it's easy to read, but doing it.
But let me just let me, let me submit this to you because we're
talking about walking with others, right?
You know, the person that I will immediately pay attention to and
listen to when they speak is the person that I watch living this
out when it's hard. Do you know what I'm saying?
The the the person that responds to the conviction of the Holy
Spirit through obedience to the Scripture when they're suffering
that I mean, I that person has my attention that the spouse who
is faithful and enduring when their spouse is making life a
living hell and they're only doing that not because they want
to, but because the Bible commands it.
The the the sister in Christ who is praising God with all of her
might, even though after God made her a widow far too early,
because she believes what God has written in his Word.
The person who is hurt. And and it's suffering and yet
they they're extending forgiveness even though every
fleshly desire and emotion is screaming for revenge because
the Bible commands it the the person that is living out
scripture when it they do not want to that person I'm
listening to because I know that faith is real.
I know it means more than lip service.
You see if you'll do this, if you'll live the Bible out when
it's hard, not just when it's easy.
Not only will God change your character, but He will begin to
position you to help other people too.
What He's doing is giving you a testimony.
A testimony is a first person perspective of God at work.
And the third thing he's doing is he's positioning you.
He positions. Let me show you that again, if
you flip to verse four, he says God the Father who comforts us
in our affliction and then look at the so the word.
So it's leading us to the rationale for this comfort so
that we may be able. To comfort those who are in any
affliction we go through. Character refinement and
suffering. God comforts us so that we can
comfort others. So God doesn't just use our
suffering to refine our character.
He does that, but also he, he refines our character not only
for our benefit. He does it so that he can
prepare and position us to get ready to go pour ourselves out
for other people. We suffer, we are encouraged, we
grow through that, and now we're in a position to help other
people. Let me see if I can give you an
analogy that helps. This can be a tough analogy
because we live in Bakersfield, but imagine you're in a
Blizzard. See, I told you it was going to
be tough. Imagine get caught in a Blizzard
and maybe, you know, maybe you're at home, but like the
heat goes out, right? It's getting colder, it's
getting colder and it's getting colder.
And so, So what, what we were praying that God would, would
take the storm away, that, that, that it would stop snowing and
it would stop being cold because we're freezing to death.
And, and sometimes God does that, but sometimes God doesn't
remove us from the storm. Amen.
But it says he, he comforts us even in that.
So, so sometimes instead what God does is he gives us a, he
gives us a blanket. This is a prayer quote.
By the way. We have a quilting team.
If you know that they make, they make custom quotes every time
someone goes in the hospital or we get some sort of prayer
request, they make a quote specifically for that person.
And, and we, we pray for them and we tie a little knots for
every prayer and then we go give it to them to help comfort them.
Sometimes he gives us a blanket. So does it change the
temperature around us? It's still a storm, it's still
cold, but he actually gives us a way to be comforted through the
affliction. And, and The thing is that once
you have begun to realize this and participate in this, and you
begin to lean into the Lord as he comforts you, you're in a
position when other people are caught in a storm to teach them
how to use this. Does this make sense?
So sometimes our suffering is not only to refine our character
for our benefit, it's to refine our character so we now have
something to go teach other people.
Here's the idea. Everything that God does for you
is meant for more than just you. Everything that God does for you
is meant for more than just you. You see, we live in America, so
we're all egocentric. The world revolves around
Daniel. Oh God, how could you do this to
me? God's like because I have.
Something for you, you're going to go help other people and I
need to prepare you for it. So you're going to have to
suffer a little bit. Look at the verse Romans 15 one
and two. This is one of the toughest
verses in the Bible. You're welcome.
Here's what it says. We who are strong have an
obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to
please ourselves. Let each of us please his
neighbor for his good, to build him up.
How do you get strong spiritually?
How do you get spiritually strong?
What's the recipe? In the Bible.
For getting spiritually strong suffering.
Oh, no, thank you. Not none of that.
Please. I I like carrots, not suffering.
Nobody, no one wanted to voluntarily ask for more
suffering. Amen.
Like no one this morning in prayer time was like God, you
know what I need more suffering. No one wants this, but it's how
you get strong as you go through storms, you learn how to use the
comfort and you get stronger as he refines your character.
Let me explain how we talked about the Holy Spirit's name,
Paraclete is is is the encourager.
Let me tell you how how the Holy Spirit encourages you most of
the time, OK, most of the time, it's not some like super warm
and fuzzy feeling that your heart starts to glow like a
little Care bear Nobody. It's a pretty old reference, I
realize that. OK, sorry, couldn't think of a
new one. Iron Man is that Iron Man with
the little. You know, you got the little
thing OK. Most of the time it's not the
Holy Spirit like you get all warm and.
Fuzzy, right? You know.
How you get encouraged most of the time.
Let's do another believer. The Holy Spirit prompts another
believer and, and then they come up and they go, hey, I don't, I,
I just the other day, about 2-3 weeks ago, I was, I was on a
horrible week. I get a call out of the blue
from someone that's not even in the state and they're like, Hey,
I'm driving down the road and I just felt like God said call you
and you needed to be encouraged. And I was like, you were right.
I'm having a horrible week. And they just encouraged me.
After first service, someone came up to me and they go, I've
never done this before. And it was super weird.
But I, I just had this building conviction throughout the
service that by the end of the service, there's this person a
couple of rows in front of me. And I was supposed to go tell
them that God loves them and he's going to heal them and did
not give up. And he hasn't forgotten them and
he sees them and I don't even know who the person is.
And I was like, did you do it? He's like, yeah, I was.
Like what happened? I was like, they broke down
crying and they told me all the stuff that's going on in their
life. The primary way that the Holy
Spirit encourages you is through other believers.
So He prepares you and positions you to go use the power of the
encourager to encourage the body of Jesus Christ.
Does that make sense? Does that make sense to more
than four of you? 8 1/2 We'll go with it.
And here's the thing, you kind of already intuitively know that
that the people that have been through a lot of suffering and
become dependent on the Lord are absolutely the people that you
would depend on if you were hurting.
OK, You already know that like that.
I don't have to teach you that. You would know that
automatically. Like the people that are best
suited to comfort you to have the Holy Spirit and battle
scars. Amen.
Those are the people that you go to in a crisis.
I I guarantee you you'll already do this If you're having
marriage problems, you no one goes to the couple who's like
we've never had a fight. You don't want to talk to them.
You know who you go to? You go to the people who you
think that their marriage almost dissolved and almost got
wrecked. Maybe there was infidelity.
They were angry at each other. There was evil and God turned
that. Evil to good.
And he redeemed that marriage and he took that weakness and
that mess and he made something glorious out of it.
And they got scars. That's who you go to.
You know why you trust them. They've been through it.
If you lose a child, you don't go to someone who's never
experienced loss. You go to someone who's
experienced great loss and leaned on the Holy Spirit in
that process. You go to them for help, for
comfort, for encouragement. So you intuitively already know
that if you're going to go and look for someone to help in the
moment of affliction, you're looking for battle scars.
Well, often times as we're, we're, we're, we're suffering.
We see it as, as being senseless.
But, but, but God is refining. In fact, he's doing more than
just refining us through it. He's preparing us to pour out
for others. That that's, that's what this
text is saying. You don't just suffer for
yourself. You suffer to be ready to help
others who are suffering. God prepares, provides, and
positions me to comfort the afflicted.
Maybe you're maybe you're sitting here today listening or
you're online. You're listening.
You're like, man, I, I wish someone would do that for me.
Maybe you're, maybe you're new to church.
Maybe you're just visiting. You don't even know anyone yet.
Or maybe maybe you've, maybe you've been going here a while
and there's no one. You feel like you're forgotten
and you're overlooked and, and no one's no one's comforting
you. I have good news for you today.
This is what Jesus does for us. Jesus suffered more than any of
us, and he remained faithful. That means that you and I can
have confidence in his comfort because he can really relate to
us. He can relate to temptation.
He can relate to pain. He can relate to betrayal.
He can relate to suffering. Jesus is perfectly prepared,
provisioned, and positioned to offer you and I comfort in our
suffering. In a few minutes.
I want to I want to talk about the four practical ways to walk
with someone else who's going through suffering.
But, but first, let me ask you the most important question that
you're going to hear today. It's the most important question
you're ever going to consider. Do you know the God of comfort
personally? Do you know him personally?
Maybe maybe you walked in today or you're watching online or on
YouTube and and you're a skeptic or or you doubt this or you just
don't have a religious background and you're doubtful
that that anything like this could even be real.
And you came in with serious wounds or or suffering or
difficulty. And let me I cannot offer you
anything more powerful than Jesus, but you can only partake
in his comfort if you know him, if you have placed your faith in
Jesus finished work of salvation on the cross.
That's what the Bible says in Romans 10/9 and 10 if you
confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, believe in your
heart that God raised him from the dead, that you can be saved
for with the heart 1 believes and is justified, and with the
mouth 1 confesses and is saved. Do you know him not have you
heard about him not do you go to church?
Not do you read a Bible? Do you know him?
Have you given him your life to reign and rule over?
Because if not. Let today be that day so you can
partake in His comfort. The Bible says that you must
believe and declare. That's what those verses just
said. You must believe because you
must believe that you are in need of a Savior and you can't
save yourself. You must believe that you
rebelled against God and therefore do not have the power
to live perfectly on your own. Believe that He rose from the
dead in power and wants to save you.
You must believe that Jesus is God and you must declare.
Declare him as King of your life and Lord over you.
Declare to surrender your will and your desires to him.
You must declare him publicly and not be ashamed of Him.
And so if you would like the opportunity to surrender your
life to Jesus today, I want to give you that opportunity.
If you bow your heads and close your eyes for a brief moment, if
you're willing to ask Him for forgiveness and salvation with
every eye closed and every head bowed, I just want you to
quietly or silently repeat this prayer after me.
It's nothing magical, just a declaration of faith.
Jesus, I know I'm a Sinner and I can't save myself.
I want you to save me. I surrender everything to you.
I receive your promise of forgiveness, of adoption into
your family, of eternal life. Be my Lord.
Please, Jesus, if you prayed that prayer for the very first
time right now, would you be brave and raise your hand so I
can see it? Thank you, thank you.
You can put your hands down in Jesus name, Amen.
Jesus loves you more than you realize and more than you can
imagine. And if you gave your life to him
moments ago, welcome to the family.
In a few minutes when we respond to this message, if you gave
your life to Christ, we have something for you.
We have tables in the back that say I raised my hand and
there'll be people back there. We have a gift for you we want
to celebrate with. You and we want to talk about
what's next. How to?
Pursue a relationship with Jesus
ongoing and grow as a believer. So in just a moment, when we
stand, I want you to go back there and say hi to those
people. They love you.
All right, Maybe you've been listening.
And you've been thinking like this sounds great as a concept,
but I have a friend who's suffering and I still don't know
what to do. All right, four steps, 4
practical steps to walk with someone through their
affliction. Here we go.
Number one, serve. Don't speak.
Serve, don't speak. In 2020, it was a, it was a
Friday evening. I got this frantic phone call
that a really close relative of mine who lived right down the
street from me had taken his life.
And I remember getting the car and driving over to his family's
house. I've been there 100 times and it
looked completely different. The entire block is, is filled
with emergency vehicles and lights and everything going off
everywhere. And it, you know, and I and I
walk up the steps and I open the door and I walk into the living
room and the family sitting on the couch and everyone's shell
shocked. And I remember just thinking
like, I have no idea what to do. What do you tell kids who just
lost their dad? What do you tell a wife who just
lost her husband? But, but eight years earlier, I
had been the one in the living room when I lost my daughter.
I'd been the one on the couch. And so I I did what I wanted
people to do back then. I sat and I didn't say anything.
I just mourned and I just grieved.
And when I found an opportunity to serve them, I went in and I
was the one that cleaned the bathroom because I knew they
couldn't handle that. No one needed my words.
No one needed my advice. They just needed my presence.
Then he didn't know they weren't alone.
They needed to know it was OK to not be OK.
They needed to know that no one was going to put a time limit on
how quickly they needed to get over it.
They needed me to protect them from well-intentioned people who
would like to help and didn't know how.
And so Step 1 is that in the rawest of moments when people
are suffering, is simply to be present and be silent.
Secondly, don't offer advice. Answer questions when you have
earned. In fact, do you know how you'll
know that it's time to speak? They'll ask you.
And until they do, just be
there. The Bible says to be quick to
listen and slow to speak in the Book of Job.
After Job loses his entire family, his friends show up and
for seven days and seven nights they just sit with him morning.
He'll say anything. In fact, if they had continued
like that, the book of Job would have been very different.
They just. Sat and you wait until they ask,
and you're going to have an opportunity when they ask to
point them to the truth. That's Step 3.
Answer when you're asked with gentle truth, not opinion.
Gentle truth, not opinion. This is the inspired, inerrant,
infallible Word of the living God.
The Bible is perfect but lived out.
Scripture is potent and powerful.
We answer questions and doubts with Scripture.
But if you have lived out this scripture, it is so much more
powerful. That is the power of a
testimony. That's what God is preparing you
for. If you really want to help
people, you cannot offer them an answer from a Bible you don't
actually believe. If you really want to help
people, you have to not just learn your Bible.
You have to live your Bible. Man, every time.
And I get this all the time. This is this is multiple times a
week. Every time I'm talking to
someone about the really hard stuff, the stuff they don't want
to do, I get the responses like I don't care what the church
wants me to do or, or the church is pressuring me to do these
things. No, no, it's not.
The Bible is the Bible's pressuring me to do really hard
stuff that I don't want to do. The church is just encouraging
one another to do the hard stuff of the Bible.
When you'll do this, when you'll do the hard things when you
don't want to, you're going to have a lot more ground to stand
on when you have to go and talk to somebody else about the hard
things. Guys, I desperately need
encouragement from those closest to me to do the hard things that
are in here because I do not want to do them.
That's what makes them hard. I need to be encouraged because
I don't want to do that and you don't want to do it either, if
we're being honest. So so in those moments where
we're asked those questions and the and the truthful answer from
scripture is going to be difficult, we do it gently.
The Bible is non negotiable. It is not a buffet where you
take what you want and you leave the rest.
So regardless if that question is about mental illness
treatment, if it's about forgiveness, if it's about
walking in grief or just dealing with suffering because of sin,
we answer with gentle truth. And if you get a chance to speak
the truth into someone's life in the middle of suffering, we
grounded in scripture. We saturated in scripture.
We drowned in scripture. I got a message from a friend
this last week. They, they, they, they don't go
to our church. They live out of state.
And they're going through something awful right now.
And they watched my sermon on forgiving others.
And they have this really deep, really raw wound from someone
that betrayed them in such an intimate way.
And they show no remorse. And they're, and they're
actually blaming my friend. They're gaslighting them.
And so they listen to my sermon. Here's what they said.
No, I can't forgive them because they don't deserve it.
Now, that's not biblical. That's pain and agony and
emotion making an unbiblical opinion seem justifiable, and I
can't change that. I could gently.
Point back to scripture. And I can be patient and I can
pray for them. That's Step 4.
Be patient and pray we got to be patient.
Hearts don't change quickly. Amen.
They are a stubborn, fibrous thing.
Think crock pots, not microwaves.
You try to microwave someone's heart for three minutes, you're
just going to get something hardened and stubborn.
So instead it's low and slow. We walk with people through
their addictions. We walk with people in their
messes. We walk with people as they
grieve and as they heal. I can't.
I cannot force people to change. In fact, I can't make people
love Jesus. I can't change hearts.
I can't heal wounds. And you can't either.
Only God can do that. But you can pray for them.
And I mean actually praying for them.
I don't mean the little emoji thing on their social media
post. I mean you can take their names
and you can go into the throne room of the King of Kings and
the Lord of Lords with their name on your lips and in
humility and boldness as a child of God, you can lift up their
need to God over and over and over again.
You can pray for them and be patient.
And we're going to finish our sermon doing that today.
Go ahead and stand. We're going to sing a song.
And here's what we're going to. Do.
I want to offer you the opportunity, the chance to come
up to the altar today and pray for that person in your life
that you're trying to walk with. Maybe it's somebody that you're
close to. Maybe it's a friend, maybe it's
a relative. Maybe you're the one that's
struggling and you need to come up and pray.
Maybe you want to pray alone at the altar.
Maybe you want someone to pray with.
Our primary mechanism of encouraging is the Holy Spirit
through believers, encouraging other believers.
It is Christ in you, the hope of glory.
So we would love to pray with you.
We would love to encourage you. I want you to come and be
encouraged today. Let me leave you with one final
story and then we'll respond to this.
Every Sunday morning at 6:30, a number of us elders, deacons and
and church members join together at the church office and we pray
for about an hour. We, we just pray.
We pray for other churches and we pray for their congregations.
We pray for their pastors. We pray for this service.
We pray for the visitors and the volunteers and the speakers and
the worship. We just pray.
And as we were starting to pray today, I looked around.
I realized that every single person sitting in the room
praying for you was going through significant suffering in
their life. Children that have rebelled,
children that were far from God, significant health problems,
chaos in their life. And yet they were there at 6:30
to pray for you. Say me, they were being prepared
through their suffering and the comfort to be ready to comfort
you. And so early in the morning you
were on their lips and on their minds and on their hearts to
take you in to the throne room of God to pray for you as you
would come in today. That is the model the Second
Corinthians is telling us is that we will be comforted in our
affliction in order to prepare us to comfort one another.
So we want to pray for you. We want to pray with you so you
come as the Lord leads. We love you guys.