14 The Comfort of a Heart at Rest
14
The Comfort of a Heart at Rest
Suffering is the intersection where life’s deepest pains meet with the most wonderful blessings of grace. It’s the ground where mournful cries echo alongside heartfelt praise. It’s the place where God seems absent and his presence is most clearly seen. It’s the location of deep aloneness mixing with awareness of glorious love. It’s the place of raging spiritual war and miraculous peace. Suffering is where weakness intersects with strength, confusion intersects with wisdom, sorrow intersects with joy, and despair intersects with hope.
Suffering has a unique ability to expose inadequacies in all the places we tend to look for life, hope, identity, joy, peace, motivation, and our reason to continue. If you’re looking horizontally for what can only be found vertically, suffering will pick your pockets and leave you empty. Suffering shocks you into admitting that no human being can give you life. It forces you to acknowledge that your job can’t give you identity. It shakes you into the realization that your physical body isn’t the center of your true strength. It requires you to acknowledge that rest of heart isn’t found in financial stability. It confronts you with the fact that personal peace doesn’t come from what people think of you.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons that suffering is so painful. Suffering slaughters all our subtle God replacements. It exposes their utter inability to deliver what we’re asking for. We live then with the pain and dismay of how quickly they’re gone. We’re left mourning, calculating the size of our loss. But we’re not just mourning the person or the thing lost; the deeper mourning is the loss of what we were asking that person or thing to give us. In the face of losing what got us up and held us there, we wonder how in the world we’re ever going to be able to continue. It’s right then, in the darkness of our aloneness, loss, and fear, that the light of the gospel of God’s presence and grace shines most brightly. It’s one of the most profound paradoxes of life, that out of the darkest travail glorious beauty shines.
Tragedy and Beauty
No passage captures how beautifully rest and peace of heart can live in the middle of the unwanted, the unthinkable, and the unplanned hardships of life like Habakkuk 3:17–19:
Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the deer’s;
he makes me tread on my high places.
To the choirmaster: with stringed instruments.
Few passages in the Bible are more important and encouraging than this passage, but you have to understand that it was written in the context of an agriculturally based economic system. If the fig tree, olive trees, and fields have completely failed, and all the livestock are gone, then there’s been total cultural and economic devastation. There’s nothing left. There’s nowhere to look for help and hope. You couldn’t find a scarier picture of hardship and loss. Yet in the middle of this horror, the prophet speaks of joy, of strength, and of leaping like a deer.
You can explain the stark contrast of total devastation and heartfelt joy in only one of two ways. Either the prophet is in complete denial of the inescapable, widespread loss around him, or he has learned something deeply healing and restorative that every sufferer desperately needs to know. Clearly the prophet isn’t in denial but has come to understand life-altering truths rooted in the existence, presence, and power of God. These truths aren’t impersonal, abstract items on some dusty theological outline. They’re God’s gracious gift to all his children as they encounter the difficulties of life, difficulties that no one is able to escape. These truths brim with life and hope at street level, where we all live and suffer. Let’s consider the hope-giving lessons that are embedded in this wonderful passage.
1. Suffering Is Not Ultimate; God Is
The ultimate, eternal creator and controller of all things is God and God alone, and nothing exists outside the protective umbrella of his wisdom, power, and authority. God existed before his creation, and he’ll live with eternal power after the world as we know it is gone. The hard things we face are neither eternal nor ultimate. No suffering lasts forever, and no suffering is the lord over our life. What may seem to have controlling power over us does not. What feels as if it will last forever won’t. This means that even in the deepest, darkest suffering, there’s hope and help to be found because God is bigger and more powerful than any awful thing we will ever face. Because this is true, Habakkuk can rejoice even in the midst of economic ruin.
2. Difficulty Doesn’t Control Your Fate; God Does
When we’re going through hardship, it seems that we’re under its control. It seems to be the lord over your schedule, finances, decisions, strength, and relationships. When we’re in the throes of suffering, it feels as if an evil master has entered our house, bringing pain and chaos with him. But this passage reminds us that suffering doesn’t control and determine our future; God does. The prophet chose his words carefully here. He could have called God many things, but he announces him as “the God of my salvation.” Habakkuk is saying that our destiny is not determined by the disasters around us. Rather, any present help and any future hope are in the hands of God alone.
It is wonderful and life changing to know that we’re not controlled nor is our life determined by what we suffer but by the One who rules all the situations, locations, and relationships where that suffering takes place. Salvation isn’t found in our ability to escape suffering but in the presence and grace of the One who meets us in it. This is why the prophet can have joy in the middle of such devastation.
3. Hardship Doesn’t Define You; God Does
It’s easy and quite normal to take on our difficulty as our identity. Divorce is a shocking and sad experience, but it isn’t our identity. Systemic racism is horrible and demeaning, but as powerful as it is, it does not define you. Being continually bullied is a hardship difficult to bear, but it’s not an identity. Whether it’s the loss of a loved one, the betrayal of a friend, physical sickness, or financial ruin, no hardship in this fallen world has the power to define you or determine your potential. When you take what you’ve suffered as an identity, you tend to restrict your hope and potential to the confines of that experience, and in so doing you trouble your own trouble.
It is one thing to say, “I’m depressed,” but quite another to say, “I am a child of the King of kings and Lord of lords, and I struggle with depression.” This is why the prophet says, “God, the Lord, is my strength.” He’s saying that his power and potential aren’t determined by his hardship but by his relationship to God, who not only created and controls all that is, but who has also promised to never forsake his children. This is why Habakkuk can speak with such hope when it seems there’s no hope to be found.
4. What Will Truly Satisfy and Give Rest to Your Heart Cannot Be Taken Away
Here is the bottom line of what Habakkuk communicates and what this book is about. It’s the only reason, in the middle of my own travail, that I would have the courage to write a book about the painful hardships that touch all our lives between the “already” and the “not yet.” It’s the thing that gets me up in the morning, infuses me with joy as I put it down on the page, and gives me rest of heart as I close my eyes to sleep. It’s what I’ve grabbed hold of again and again when my suffering seems too hard to bear. It’s what I long for others to get hold of as well. It’s the message that I pray my life would preach. It’s the most beautiful and practically helpful thing you could ever come to understand. If you get it, it will fundamentally transform the way you suffer. It will make your life an intersection where sorrow and joy meet. It will comfort you when there seems to be no comfort, and it will fill you with hope when it seems that all your hopes and dreams have died. To come to know this is much better and more beautiful than to live free of suffering. It’s an honor and joy to be able to write these words with confidence. I hope you will let them sink in and settle in your heart. The one thing that will bring peace, joy, rest, and lasting satisfaction to your heart, nothing or no one can take away. In fact this thing is not a thing at all; it’s a person, the Lord himself, who enters your life by grace and who will never, ever go away. When you find your hope and satisfaction in him, not in people, possessions, money, success, or physical health, no pain or loss can take that satisfaction away. When you truly place your hope in him, nothing is able to plunder your hope. When he holds your identity, nothing in life is able to rob you of meaning, purpose, and potential. His presence, power, and grace change everything. No wonder the prophet had joy in the midst of misery.
Here is the comfort for every sufferer: hope is a person, and his name is Jesus. Life is a person called Emmanuel. God enters your life by grace and by grace makes you the place where he dwells. So he goes wherever you go; he’s there with you in whatever you’re facing, and he lovingly provides you with everything you need. You don’t have to search for him; you don’t have to wonder if or when he will come; you don’t have to earn his presence. His presence with you has been purchased by his own blood. In your suffering he gives you the best of gifts, the gift of himself. To be in him and he in you is infinitely better than having an easy, predictable, trouble-free life. And if hardship has been the tool that forges in you an unbreakable trust of him, then your hardship hasn’t been for naught. My prayer for everyone who reads this book is that you would rest, knowing that the most important, wonderful, and life-giving thing you could ever experience, no one or nothing has the power to take away. God is with you in hope-giving, rest-producing grace, and he is simply never going away!
Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.
For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
I awake, and I am still with you. (Ps. 139:7–18)
Review and Reflect
1. Since suffering isn’t forever for the Christian, how can you look at it in a more practical way?
2. What difficulty have you given too much power in your life?
3. What is defining you instead of God?
4. How do you need to rewrite your situation without denying it?
5. How has this book encouraged you about God and his character?
Heart Reset
2 Samuel 22:20
Psalm 139:7–18
Habakkuk 3:17–19