Joyfulness and God’s Sovereignty, Part II
Philippians 1:12-30
St. John’s United Church of Christ
Greeley, Colorado
Juvenal Cervantes, Pastor
August 7, 2022
Matthew West was inspired to write a song entitled “Wonderful Life” after talking with Ron Janca. Ron was diagnosed with a terminal illness and his foremost question was, “How will God use my illness to advance his kingdom.”
Here are the lyrics of “Wonderful Life”:
Run from Houston, Texas
Spent three years fightin' ALS
If you knew all that he's been through
You'd hardly say he's blessed
But smilin' through a phone call
He said, "Let me tell you, friend
This life ain't always wonderful
But what a wonderful life it's been"
It'll send you flyin' high
It'll bring you to your knees
It's the heartbreak and the happiness
And everything between
It's the laugh until it hurts
It's the hurt until you cry
Can't have one without the other
It's how you know that you're alive
In this broken and beautiful
Gone mad and magical
Awfully wonderful life
It's a mountain and a valley
It's a cradle and a grave
It's a blessing and a battle
And it's on any given day
It's messy and imperfect
It's a thief and it's a gift
Yeah, this life ain't always wonderful
But what a wonderful life it is
It'll send you flyin' high
It'll bring you to your knees
It's the heartbreak and the happiness
And everything between
It's the laugh until it hurts
It's the hurt until you cry
Can't have one without the other
It's how you know that you're alive
In this broken and beautiful
Gone mad and magical
Awfully wonderful life
This wonderful life
It's a wonderful life
Run, went home to Jesus
Got the call the other day
I sat and cried and thought about
The words I heard him say
I know there is a Heaven
Waitin' for us after this
This life ain't always wonderful
But this life ain't all there is
No, this life ain't always wonderful
But this life ain't all there is
So let it send you flyin' high
Let it bring me to my knees
Bring the heartbreak and the happiness
And everything between
Let me laugh until it hurts
Let me hurt until I cry
And when it comes my time to go
I'll smile and wave goodbye
To this broken and beautiful
Gone mad and magical
Awfully wonderful life
It's a broken and beautiful
Gone mad and magical
Awfully wonderful life
A helpful question to ask when we’re going through trials is, “How might this experience prepare me for other opportunities that lie ahead?
Opportunities to bear testimony, for example. Look at I Peter 1:6-7
In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials. So that the genuineness of your faith, being more precious than gold that, though perishable is tested by fire- may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.
I understand that Peter is talking about the persecuting they were dealing with , some of the suffering they were dealing with, as being like a test to prove the genuiness of your faith. It did not needed to be proved to God, God knows the genuiness of the faith. But it may have been to prove to them, the Christians, that this stuff is real that I’m dealing with, but it also proves the genuiness of your faith to those who are watching the suffering. To someone who sees a professed Christians to go through things and to find out they they go through that with a different attitude, with a different set of strengths, with a different response, is testimony and it may be that what we’re dealing in our suffering is preparation for an opportunity to bear testimony. A platform to witness in a way that we did not know before.
Also, we are being prepared to comfort others during this time. Paul writes,
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God.
Sometimes what we are enduring, the circumstances we go through is preparing us to be able to minister to people who are suffering in ways we can’t do right now because we don’t understand it ourselves. We go through it and God says, “I’ll use that.”
Now hear me, you may think differently about this, but this is how I think about this, I don’t think that God sends those afflictions in order to prepare you to do this. We go through life, like everybody else and we endure various kinds of suffering. But here’s the sovereignty of God: God says, “I’m not going to waste that. You endured and I’m going to use that.” God is sovereign and he can take the cross and use it to reconcile the world to himself. He is able to take your struggles and mine and use those in our future in a way that bring him glory, he will use, he will not waste, what we give to him. We surrender those times, those circumstances and we ask him to use them.
Here’s another question:
What is this experience teaching me about God I could not otherwise have learned?
If I’m going through something, I am going to learn something about God, not that’s not really appealing for a lot of us. Charles Dickens wrote the Pickwick Papers and he has a character named Samuel Wellers and, talking to another young man, he says, “When you’re a married man, Samuel, you’ll understand a good many thing you don’t understand now. But whether it is worthwhile to go through so much to learn so little as the charity boy said when he got to the end of the alphabet is a matter of taste.”
But God promises to teach us about himself. There are things that we cannot learn about God in a book, not even this book—the Bible, they are learned out of relationship. We learn God’s faithfulness. The writer of Lamentations, Jeremiah, watched the whole nation, the city destroyed, suffering unimaginably and writes these poems of lament of the city of Jerusalem and in chapter three he writes,
The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, and there I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
How do you learn that God is faithful without going through times that test that in our lives?
God’s sovereignty, we learn that. Paul testified in Romans 8:28
We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, who are called according to his purpose How do you learn that other than the fact in your head without having all things for God to work together?
“It all these circumstances,” Paul says, “that have turned out for the advancement of the gospel.” You learn that through walking through them. You learn that God responds through prayer.
2 Corinthians 1, Paul says:
He who rescued us from so deadly a peril will continue to rescue us; on him we have set our hope that he will rescue us again, as you also join in helping others by your prayers so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.
This is testimony. We despair of life, in the verses just before this, but what God did is he rescued us but he did it because you were praying and others praying and we learn that God responds to prayer to accomplish his purposes.
We learn that through experience, we learn of God’s strength. The end of 2 Corinthians, Paul tells about suffering in his life and he says,
Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”
“Three times,” it may be that he prayed in three times, but in Hebrews it says, “I prayed again and again and again and over and over and over, and he said to me, in the midst of my prayer, ‘my grace is sufficient for you, my power is made perfect in weakness.”
And so Paul says,
So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.
We learn of God’s strength in times of trouble. We learn of his love that never forsakes us, of his goodness that chases us down. These are not things that you learn in a book, not even just reading in the Bible. We learn these things, they become testimony for us only in the experience of life where we learn in the midst of trials to depend on God who answers prayer, who is faithful, who continues to love us no matter what, who offers us strength to sustain ourselves.
A good question to ask, “What is God teaching me through this that I could not fully learn by no other way and please Lord, help me to learn.”
Another questions, “How is God shaping my character, deepening me, maturing me as a person, conforming me to Christ’s image, making me more than what I was before? How is this experience actually shaping the person that I am?”
Paul says in Romans chapter five, “That’s what trials do.” He says,
Not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
He wants to produce character and live with hope and faith. Paul says, “The route to that is generally, suffering.
If you want to get strong, you can go to the FunPlex and lift weights and when you get to strength you can lift all your muscles can holed and you can add more as your practice. You don’t get that by getting Kleenex’s and squeezing them. It takes resistance, it takes struggle, it takes suffering, it takes pain at times to get stronger and that’s certainly true when it comes to our character as well. Character is the result of enduring suffering by trusting God.
James says the same thing in chapter one:
My brothers and sisters whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing.
These are questions to ask if we believe in the sovereignty to God: How is God using this experience in my life to make me more the person he wants me to be? How can I respond in such a way that these trials become shaping factors in the hand of the potter? Those are good questions to ask: Where is the kingdom begin advanced? What are the things that God is teaching me about himself that I could not learn any other way? What is He doing inside of me, how is he preparing me to be used for something in the future. Those are practical things that come out of confessing that I believe in the sovereignty of God. That’s what matters, where we look when circumstances are different. If we only look at the black dot we’re going to despair. But if we can learn to see the bigger picture, to look at the right places, we can see God’s hand at work. Places where God’s redemptive plan can be furthered by these circumstances. Ways that these experiences are preparing us for opportunities ahead, ways the experiences are teaching us things about God that we could never learn any other way. Ways that these experiences are shaping our character, maturing us as a person.
There’s no comfort or encouragement in all of that unless like Paul, Christ matters to us more than anything else. If we matter more than anything else, everything that I told you is hogwash, there is not point in this. Who wants to suffer for any reason? We just want to be comfortable. But if Christ matters to us, it may be during these times when we look around and ask, “What is God capable of doing here in this place?”
Many of you know the story of Corri Ten Boon, she was imprisoned by Nazis for taking care of Jews during the holocaust.
She lost her sister Betsi. She went through horrible suffering in there and then she eventually was released and she spent the rest of her life giving testimony to the goodness of God and to the power of God that he had demonstrated to her and to Betsie and to other believers, even in those Nazi prison camps.
She has a famous story that she told almost every audience. She had a piece of embroidery material that she had on it the image of the crown. And showed up that piece of cloth and showed the beauty of that embroidery with all the threads forming this beautiful picture and she described this as God’s plan, perfectly worked out. And then she would turn the cloth over.
To show how confused and tangled we often view our lives from a human standpoint, all tangled and confused in a hard to make out pattern. And then she would recite this poem, nobody knows if she wrote this or learned it.
My life is but a weaving, between my God and me. I do not choose the colors, He worketh steadily.
Oftimes he weaveth sorrow, and I in foolish pride, Forget He sees the upper, and I the underside.
Not till the loom is silent and the shuttles cease to fly. Will God unroll the canvas and explain the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful in the skillful Weaver’s hand, as the threads of gold and silver in the pattern He has planned.
Her life testified to that, her testimony gave her a platform to travel the world and speak of the goodness of God. God did not waste a moment of Corri Ten Boon’s suffering, but used that. And she would say like Paul, “What does it matter, only that Christ is proclaimed and in this I rejoice and I will continue to rejoice.”