Week 33 Sunday
Week 33 Sunday
Victory through Suffering
2 Corinthians 1:7; Philippians 1:29; 3:10; 2 Thessalonians 1:4-5
We come now to the question of pain and suffering. We shall meet them on the pathway to victorious living; it may be that they will be our constant companions on that way. The question is, What shall we do with them, and what will they do with us?
First of all, we must note that pain has probably saved the race from physical extermination. Had there been no such thing as pain, we should probably not have survived as a race. For if we did not know that thrusting our fingers into fire would cause pain to us, we should probably let our fingers be withered by fire. If disease did not cause us pain, we should probably think little about it, and we should succumb to it, because unwarned by pain. Pain says, “There is something wrong; attend to it.” So pain turns out to be our friendly watcher, guarding us against dangers to life. Pain is God’s preventive grace, built into the structure of our physical life, to keep us from committing individual and collective suicide.
Nevertheless, there is much needless pain; it is in the world far beyond its biological uses in survival. For we inflict it on ourselves and others needlessly. Much of this pain is curable and should be cured by individual and collective action.
Suffering is a broader term. It may be caused by pain, but it has other and deeper causes. Suffering may be intensely mental and spiritual. Suffering too may be a part of God’s preventive grace. It may be God’s danger signal that something is wrong. Were there no mental and spiritual suffering, the human race should probably have committed mental and spiritual suicide long ago.
Our first step, then, is to look on pain and suffering not entirely as enemies. They may become our allies in gaining fuller life.
O Christ, we thank you that here at this place of pain and suffering you have an authentic word to speak to us. For you know. Amen.
Week 33 Monday
Are Christians Exempt?
1 Peter 4:1, 12-16, 19
Pain and suffering are the common lot of all. We are environed by nature, by other human beings, by our own physical bodies, and through these avenues pain and suffering come to us. The fact of our being Christians will not exempt us from their coming.
A young man was stunned by failing his examination. He said: “I cannot understand. I prayed very hard before the examination, and I lived a very good life. Then why, oh why, should I have failed in my examination? My faith in God has gone.” He felt that if he only lived a good life, and prayed hard enough, he would be sure to pass examinations. When he was not exempt from suffering through failure, he felt that his religion did not work; it should have exempted him. Now, suppose it had exempted him and others like him, what would happen to the human race? If it could be proved that if you lived a good life and prayed hard enough, you would be bound to get through your examination, then our classrooms would be deserted before examination, and students would flock to the hillsides for prayer and meditation, and in the process their minds would dry up. Mental suffering through failure, because of slovenliness in study or incapacity, is one of God’s methods of keeping the human race mentally alive. It is a hard spur, but it is mentally redemptive.
I grant you that real Christians are exempt from sufferings that come from within, from their own wrong moral choices. This does save them from an enormous amount of suffering that comes upon those who sin and suffer as a consequence of those sins. But it does not save Christians from sufferings that come through nature, through other human beings, and through their physical bodies. Nor does it exempt them from the suffering that comes from the very fact that they are a new moral and spiritual creature, a departure from the world. That departure itself brings suffering.
O Christ, you are our way out. Help us to learn your secret. Amen.
Week 33 Tuesday
What Attitudes Are We Taking?
Acts 5:41; Romans 8:12, 18; Colossians 1:24
We said yesterday that sufferings happen to us all, the good included. But while the same things happen to us all, they do not have the same effect upon us all. The same thing happening to two different people may have an entirely different effect. It all depends upon inner attitudes. As someone has said, “What life does to us in the long run depends upon what life finds in us.”
Sorrow and suffering makes some people querulous and bitter, others it sweetens and refines. Same event, but with opposite effects. What happens to us from without does not determine the consequence. That depends on what life finds in us.
There were three crosses that day on a Judean hill. The same event was happening to three people. But it had three different effects upon them. One thief complained and railed on Jesus for not saving himself and them; another saw this tragedy as a result of his sins, repented, and through it saw an open door into paradise; the third through that cross redeemed a race. The same event, but with three entirely different results. So the thing that matters is not what happens to you, but what you do with it after it does happen to you. Your cross can become the bitterest of unrelieved agonies, or it may become to you the most blessed of unlimited opportunities. The same sunshine falls on two branches of a tree; in one it causes decay, in the other it causes growth. It all depends on the responses the branches gave. One meets the sunshine with inner life, and more life results. The other meets it with inner death, and more death results.
So we find life choosing one and rejecting another, not arbitrarily, but according to inward response. Suffering leaves some people writhing in helpless agony; others it leaves stronger and more capable of meeting more suffering, capable of meeting anything.
O Christ, give us such inner attitudes this day that we shall transmute the base metal of ordinary happenings into the gold of victorious living. Amen.
Week 33 Wednesday
Do You Know What to Do?
Acts 8:3-8; 2 Corinthians 12:7-10
In Christ and Human Suffering,* I took the position that we were not to escape suffering or merely to bear it, but to use it. We can take it up into the purpose of our lives and make it contribute to the ends for which we really live. The raw materials of human life, the things that come on us day by day, can be woven into garments of character.
All of this depends on what inner attitudes we take. Two women in a certain city in India, both intelligent and refined, suffer from practically the same illness. One it is making bitter and querulous and hopeless; the other it is making radiant. She will emerge from it pure gold. And her very attitudes are helping her to emerge. For nothing tones up the body as a peaceful, hopeful, victorious spirit. The other may not emerge, for she is handicapping her body in its fight with disease by dragging her body down by her despairing spirit. The difference is that one inner life is adjusted to the will of God, and the other is not. Same circumstances, two results.
Two families each lost an only son, one the family of a minister and the other a worldly family. A little boy of twelve years, talking to his mother about it, said, “Mother, it isn’t so hard on the minister and his wife, for they know what to do. But these other people don’t know what to do.” The little fellow had put his finger on the crux of the matter. He saw the same event falling on two families, each with a different result. Because in the one case they knew what to do. And what is the Christian to do? The Christian can say to herself or himself: “I cannot determine what happens to me, but I can determine what it shall do to me after it does happen. It shall make me a better person and more useful.” That is victory.
O Christ, help me this day not to be determined by my circumstances, but to determine them in that I use them. Amen.
* New York: Abingdon Press, 1933.
Week 33 Thursday
The Pain God Is Allowed to Guide
2 Corinthians 4:8-12; 6:4-10
In Moffatt’s translation of 2 Corinthians 7:10-11, Paul says, “The pain God is allowed to guide ends in a saving repentance never to be regretted, whereas the world’s pain ends in death.” Paul saw that some pain leads to life and some leads to death. And the difference was this: In one case, we keep pain in our own hands and deal with it on an entirely human level. This makes us bitter and cynical and full of complaints. It leads to death. In the other case, we take God into our pain and allow God to guide. God then turns what would have been senseless suffering into a spiritual discipline. A better person emerges. It leads to life.
So, in every happening that comes to you, there is life or death. The common places of life make us common—or Christian! A man’s wife called his attention to a wonderful sunset. The sky was streaked with fleecy clouds. “Yes,” he said. “It reminds me. Please have the cook see that my bacon is streaked with more lean.” He turned a radiant sunset into a reminder of bacon! Thus do some make the glorious into the commonplace. But some make glorious the commonplace. It is all according to what it finds within us. To the woman the sunset became aesthetic life, and to the man aesthetic death.
The pain from which we are suffering may have come from some evil source. But the question is not where it came from, but where it is going! Where it goes is determined by whether we allow it to be guided to life or guided to death. And that is determined by whether we put God into the pain, and offer it to God as we offer everything else, and make it a part of God’s redemptive purpose for us. The cross is an example of God-guided pain. It issued in salvation. So may our crosses issue in salvation, if God is allowed to guide the pain involved in them.
O Christ, who turned your cross into a throne, help me this day to wear my sorrows and sufferings with regal dignity. Amen.
Week 33 Friday
Will Life Always Be Just?
Job 12:4; John 16:33; 17:4; Acts 3:14-15
Yesterday we ended by suggesting that our sufferings might come from an evil source outside our own will. “This is unjust,” you reply. Yes, it is. But you must not expect life to be just. It isn’t. Christianity never taught that it would be. On the contrary, it has a cross at its heart, and that is the world’s supreme injustice. Don’t ask for justice from life; ask for power to turn injustice into fuller life. Then you have more than justice, you have life itself.
Life wasn’t just to Paul. He found life coming to him in the form of imprisonments, floggings, desertions, anxiety, and care. It wasn’t just. But he made it into something better than justice. “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God,” he exclaims in Romans 8:28 (KJV). The thing itself may not be good; it may have come from the very devil himself, but God throws in enough good to make it work together for good. Like two cogwheels that work together, God actually uses evil for the destruction of evil. He uses devil-sourced evil for the making of God-inspired men. If you work together with God, you can turn your very defeats into victories. That is what the cross is.
Here is an Indian Christian lady who has served others for many years, a beautiful character, but now she is blind. Life wasn’t just to her. No, but she made it more than just, she made it beautiful. “It’s all dark,” she said to me, “but then it’s all very lovely,” she added, thoughtfully, with a quiet heavenly smile. Don’t offer that woman justice; she has grace and that is more than justice.
So this day I shall not ask that life be just, I shall ask that power be given me to make its injustices into opportunities, its very impediments into instruments.
O Christ, to whom life was supremely unjust, help me know your secret this day so that I shall not whine for justice, but boldly turn the worst into the best. Amen.
Week 33 Saturday
Seizing Fate by the Throat
Acts 16:22-34
A doctor named Vail performed more operations, I suppose, than any other man in India, among them thousands of cancer operations. And yet he developed cancer and died of it. Unjust! Yes, but he flew to Germany, and while not cured, came back to India with a new treatment for cancer that will relieve thousands. Cancer struck him, and he struck back with a cancer remedy. And he struck back even while he was hopelessly stricken. He seized fate by the throat!
So did Beethoven. He had gone deaf by his forties. He is quoted as saying, “Oh, if I were only rid of this affliction, I could embrace the world.” But he also said, “I will seize fate by the throat; it will not wholly conquer me! Oh, how beautiful it is to live—and live a thousand times over!” A Beethoven biographer, himself a musician, comments on the above: “We are eternal debtors to his deafness. It is doubtful if such lofty music could have been created except as self-compensation for some affliction, and in the utter isolation which the affliction brought about.” Beethoven seized fate by the throat!
The first Sunday school pupil I ever had became an engineer. An explosion left him totally deaf and totally blind. There is no way to communicate with him, except to spell out the letters with your finger on the back of his hand. Is he shut off from the world? Not at all! He has gained more information and knowledge through other people’s fingertips and through his own inner meditations than 99 percent of those who have eyes and ears. Moreover, he has established a far-flung business for the blind. He seized fate by the throat!
When Denmark lost part of its territory in the nineteenth century, her leaders decided that, since they were a smaller country, they would make up in quality what they lacked in quantity. They have! They have produced a cooperative order from which the world is learning. They seized fate by the throat!
O Christ, help me this day to seize fate by the throat and make it serve your purposes and mine. Amen.