Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. James For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. While he definitely gives incredible comfort in all our trials see 2 Cor.
Matt Brown evangelistmatt is an evangelist, author and founder of Think Eternity, an evangelistic ministry that reaches thousands of people with the gospel each year through live events and online. Originally published by Outreach Magazine on March 16, Keyword: Suffering. Our service schedule includes Saturday night at p. For more information, go to www. How do we reconcile a God who has shown us such goodness with pain and suffering? Scripture is not silent about the pain and suffering in our world.
Suffering reminds us that this world is not our home. Paul says, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.
Third, our attitude in suffering should glorify God. People are going to watch us as Christians. Jesus suffered and died for us on the cross, but God raised Him from the dead. Jesus Christ now sits at the right hand of God the Father, and He sees our suffering.
He sees our life every day and knows exactly where we stand. The Bible teaches that we are to be patient in suffering. Ask God to help you have a trusting, patient attitude, and flee from bitterness. In suffering there is also, I believe, a message of warning. Are you prepared to meet God? What do you have to do to be ready? God took the initiative in giving His Son, Jesus Christ. I want to forgive you. I want you to go to heaven.
They are not following the belief that whatever is, is right. God does not desire evil, nor does he ever condone it. He hates evil, and Christians also are not only to despise evil but obligated to do something about it. Even though sin is real, it is not something that believers accept as the way things ought to be.
By identifying with Jesus, believers have a duty to call wrong things wrong and to speak out when evil is overtaking good. The Christian is not fighting against God by fighting social problems. However, some people are still bothered that God even allows evil in the first place.
They question his wisdom in giving humans a choice in the matter. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man.
New York: Harcourt Brace, , p. How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his ways! Although the Bible informs us how and why evil came about, it does not tell us why God allowed it to happen. However, we do know that God is all-wise and all-knowing and that he has reasons for allowing things to happen that are beyond our comprehension.
In this great book for new believers and evangelists, the authors tackle 65 of the most-asked questions about the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, miracles, other religions, and Creation in a question-and-answer format. The Roots of Evil. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, Lewis, C. The Problem of Pain. New York: MacMillan, Martin, Walter. The natural laws that operate are both a blessing and a curse.
Tectonic plate activity renews the surface of the earth with minerals, yet wreaks havoc when humans build cities on the fault lines. Cell replication allows our bodies to grow and develop, yet can result in cancer when natural processes misfire. Those are two very different responses. Coming to know and love God may be quite different to him keeping us comfortable and happy.
The reality is that comfort tends to make us forget about God. Yet Christianity often thrives in places which are experiencing the fires of persecution or hardship. For some, suffering leads to an abandonment of belief in God, but for many the opposite is true — it causes them to seek God in a world that seems absurd without him. Many people have counted pain and suffering as a crucial part of their journey towards Christianity. By the same token, it can be argued that meaningful moral and spiritual growth as human beings requires a world where some suffering exists.
I cannot be generous unless there is someone who has less than me. I cannot show compassion unless there is someone who needs caring for. Do these brief reasons answer all the questions posed by suffering? Of course not. There is much more that could be said, a great deal of mystery, and many more questions that could be asked. For instance, could God have created a possible world in which pain and suffering do not exist and still fulfils our human needs?
But what if we are already living in the best of all possible worlds this side of heaven? That may seem an absurd suggestion when we look at all the suffering and evil on our earth. Yet I would argue that a world in which Jesus stepped into his broken creation and freely gave his life on the cross to demonstrate the supreme love of God, is in fact the best possible kind of world we could hope for.
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