A Sufferer’s Cry: Intimacy

In chapter nine of the book When God Weeps, Joni hits on the primal cry of a sufferer’s heart when she says that it’s intimacy (first with God, second with others). This chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

“Reasons reach the head, but relationships reach the soul. It’s the relationship of God reaching out to us through our trials that draws the bottom line of suffering” (126). 

“Suffering has no meaning in itself. Left to its own, it is a frustrating and bewildering burden. But given the context of relationship, suffering suddenly has meaning” (127). 

“Intimacy happens as two souls rub together. It’s what we long for more than anything else. To know and be known. Even in the best relationships, we are still left aching for someone to comprehend our world and enter our struggle—to embrace us with a passion that seizes and melts us into a union that will never be broken. God answers that ancient longing.” (128).

Precious Providence

How precious is it to know that God sustains all things and orchestrates all things for his purposes, that everything that comes my way today is by his appointment, whether joy or tears?

According to the psalmist, the knowledge of such things is a matter of life and death. And it’s only in God’s word that we find them (Ps 119:89-92).

“If your law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction” (Ps 119:92). In other words, if I didn’t know of God’s orchestrating, loving, good purposes in my agony, I would have died.

Reflecting on James 1:2-4 and the command to count all our trials as joy, Bruce Ware writes,

“What an incredible expectation and command. The only way that any person could find trials and affliction “all joy” is to know that they have been designed for great gain and ultimate joy. Clearly the joy does not reside in the experience of affliction taken by itself. James is not living in denial. He is not trivializing the agony of affliction or the pain often endured in trials. But he encourages all believers to look past the pain to the purpose, i.e., to see what God intends to accomplish through it” (God’s Greater Glory, 173).

Because God has ultimate control over all my sufferings and trials, I find life in the experience of death, joy in the presence of pain. If I didn’t know God’s providence, I would die.

Christ in the Wilderness

As I ponder what it means to walk through wildernesses of suffering in my own life, I was reflecting on Deuteronomy 2:7 this afternoon: 

For the LORD your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands. He knows your going through the great wilderness. These forty years the LORD your God has been with you. You have lacked nothing.

What God said to the people of God then, and to us now in our present trials: 

1) I know everything you’re going through. 

2) I am blessing you in your sufferings, even though you either overlook it or can’t see it. 

3) I am with you at every turn, with every step, and in every trial. 

4) I have given you all that you need; you have lacked nothing in your trials.

Where are you going?

“Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, where are you going?” Jesus answered him, ”Where I am going you cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterward.” Peter said to him, “Lord, why can I not follow you now?” (John 13:36-37). 

When Jesus told the disciples that His time to leave this terrestrial ball had come, it must have shocked them. They were known and identified as followers of Jesus because they were always with Jesus. Now He was leaving. And then the bitter truth that they would all fall away Peter simply could not fathom. 

I can’t fathom it either, how there are times when it seems like I’m on the dark side of the moon—questions about how things will turn out will simply have to wait, and what God has ordained in my life just doesn’t make sense. Like Peter, I wonder, Why not answer now? 

Though there are truths that get close to an answer to Peter’s question about God’s providence and why He times things as He does, it’s ultimately a mystery of His sovereign, gracious, good, will toward His children. “Little children,” Jesus says as He addresses His disciples, showing His compassion, yet leaving the ultimate purpose hidden. 

But it’s the same mysterious will that saved Peter—and me. And while I don’t know why God saved me, I do know, and am profoundly melted with gratefulness, that He did. There are more important questions to be answered than Why God does what He does when He does. Like Will God be my ever-present Refuge and Treasure and Joy, even in the midst of the worst kinds of sufferings? 

Jesus doesn’t tell Peter why it has to be this way, that He has to die and be crucified and the disciples have to not understand—at least not yet. He doesn’t tell me either. But there is a promise here of an “afterward.” There is a day when it’s going to make sense, and when the glory which I’ve been forged like steel to adore is set before me, there will be only joy.

But not only that; there is the promise that right here, right now, Jesus is my shelter in the storm. Not somewhere, someplace deliverance, but right here and right now. Jesus is the Life, Bread, Water, and Blood which is to be partaken of right now. Get grace.

With tears in our eyes, we go on sowing

There are those times when, despite the use of God-appointed means, joy seems to tarry. Darkness hovers all about us, and there is a serious threat to our souls that we stop doing what is clearly our duty to do. 

How do we press on when joy escapes us? We think and pray like the psalmist: 

“Restore our fortunes, O LORD, like streams in the Negeb! Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy! He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him” (Psalm 126:4-6). 

The real question in view is, ‘How do we plow and sow the seed of the Word in our hearts in seasons when heart work is tremendously hard work?’ Clearly our hearts need the work, for without breaking up the fallow ground or planting the seeds of the Word, there will be no rich harvest of joy in God. But what do we do when that work doesn’t seem to be producing any fruit? 

We listen to Scripture in faith. We keep sowing, and we keep plowing through the fields of our hearts, all the while with tears streaming down our brokenhearted faces, knowing that God has promised: as you keep laboring over your heart according to Scripturally appointed means, God will bring joy. 

Yes, there are times when it seems like all the work we do in our hearts is coming to nothing. But, ultimately, God who dwells richly in us through His Spirit will produce a harvest of righteousness through sanctification. So we don’t hide our sorrow. Instead, we keep on sowing, trusting in God’s promise: He who goes out weeping and sowing will come home with shouts of joy. 

There is a dark night, but there is always the light of the morning. 

Hope for the 11th Hour

Ever feel like it’s no use to keep fighting the fight of faith? John Piper had some encouraging thoughts today on the Desiring God blog about God’s deliverance in the last hour, and the importance of hoping till the end. 

When the Heart Rips Out.

Greatly affected as my wife and I were when we first heard about the death of Abraham and Molly Piper’s daughter Felicity, for whatever reason lately we have been freshly pricked in the heart by their story. Even though it’s been awhile since she died, whenever we stop and think about it, or read the poems or the blog, it always brings fresh grief and pain. And she wasn’t our daughter.

Just about every night this week it’s come up before bedtime, and it always ends in tears—both for the vividness of the pain of searing loss and for the steadfastness with which Christ holds on to them. This morning I listened to Watermark’s Glory Baby, until my heart felt like it was going to rip out of my chest. 

What strikes me is how much God has impacted us through their sufferings, and how much more we delight in the glorious mercy of Christ because of His work in their life. Likewise, there is another loss of great price that burns on my mind, the loss of another child—the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Both bring always afresh the burning grief that tenderizes the heart and makes the mercy of God that much more precious. 

And somehow, in the end, I’m grateful for the tears. Maybe it’s because I know they will be wiped away in everlasting bliss—for Abraham, for Molly, for me, for my wife, and every other saint in God’s kingdom. This was a poem written by Abraham at Easter: 

6 Months Gone at Easter Time

Empty hangers, empty closet, empty clothes.
Empty crib, empty bath.
Empty bottles, empty breasts.
Empty lungs, empty blood, empty heart.
Empty grave.