1 Peter 4:12-19
A student once told me that he was giving up the Christian faith because he saw his grandmother, a faithful Christian, suffer before she died! His logic was, that if God allows good people to suffer, then he didn’t want to serve God! (Or was this just a cop-out to justify living without God?)
In the movie A Man Called Peter, Catherine Marshall his wife faced a similar dilemma! She was confined to bed with tuberculosis over a long period of time. No matter how much she and her husband prayed, she didn’t get any better! Let’s see what happened in the movie version of the story! This scene takes us from despair to triumph, when Catherine surrenders to God’s will! But we should not assume that when we surrender to God, life will be a bed of roses from then on! (This mistaken belief is called the Prosperity Gospel and is wrongly taught in a number of churches!
There are three reasons I’d like to consider for good people to suffer in God’s world:
1. Suffering teaches us to rely on God! One of my friends had been very self-sufficient until his wife contracted cancer! He suddenly realised for the first time that we don’t control our own lives after all! But even the death of his wife did not draw him to Jesus! It was only when he landed in hospital himself that the penny finally dropped, and convinced him to surrender to Jesus at last! Peter Marshall himself said that while life is a series of highs and lows, God relies more on the lows to bring us to Himself! And some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else! As we heard from 2 Corinthians 12:9 last week, He told the Apostle Paul, “My strength is made perfect in your weakness!”
2. Suffering Prepares us for Service! A girl in my youth group contracted a strange muscular disease which left her bedridden for twelve months – just as she was about to do the HSC! But instead of turning away from God, she dedicated the rest of her life to serving God as a hospital chaplain – ministering to the sick and dying and their families! A television movie tells the true story of Edna Gladney who lost her only son at age 5, and then her husband, who told her before she died, “God took your baby from you so that through you thousands of babies may have a chance! Edna spent the rest of her life caring for orphans and deserted children! (This should also remind us that God Himself lost His only Son so that millions could be saved from disaster!)
3. We Suffer Because the Enemy Hates Us! Satan hated Jesus enough to prompt one of His own disciples to betray Him unto death! Satan also sets out to destroy each of our lives by turning us away from God, as he tried with Job, for example! I once surprised a group of Christian young people in Papua New Guinea by telling them how my Christian group in the boarding school were persecuted for following Jesus! One of them said to me afterwards, “But I thought Australia was a Christian country!” As Christians, we must dare to be different! If we are doing God’s work, we can expect constant rejection! For example, I messaged some fifteen people during the week to invite them to our service this morning. Of those, only - have come along!
We are told in 1 Peter 2:21, that we are called to suffer for doing good, “because Christ suffered for you, leaving an example, that you should follow in His steps!”
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