SORROWFUL BUT ALWAYS REJOICING

Two days ago a precious girl I have known all her life died tragically and prematurely. I cannot even imagine the inconsolable grief that her family and friends must feel at this moment,

It caused me to think about how the very things in this life itself that make you happy, will eventually make you sad. The birth of this girl, the pleasure of her company, watching her grow into such a good and decent woman are among many things that brought such joy to her family and friends, and now her death has brought so much sorrow.  Oh how I have discovered this the past four years in my own life as I get older and have experienced my own loss of so many things that once made me so happy. Nothing that brings happiness on this earth can sustain itself.

Nevertheless Paul makes the astonishing statement in 2 Corinthians 6:10 that what marks his life and can mark ours as “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” Perhaps there are those of you reading this right now who resonate in your own experience what the apostle Paul was speaking of. Only a Christian can actually be happy and sad at the same time. I call it happy sadness or sad happiness. It seems so paradoxical, but oh what a precious experience for the believer! 

I do  not glibly claim that this experience is simple or that we can even put it into adequate words, what it means to be joyful in sorrow; but in our experience we know it can ring true. Much like the Macedonian Christians, who in loss of property, mopersecution, extreme hardship and poverty, "their abundance of joy...overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part"(2 Corinthians 8:9-10). 

I think we all who are believers understand and have experienced this. When I lost all that mattered to me and weeping with sobs of inconsolable grief with all the loss I can certainly tell you that did not look or feel any way like joy.  But, the joy that has manifest and endured through my sorrow is the foretaste of a future joy in God which I hope. We are promised that there will someday be an experience of joy in its complete fullness, John writes that it will be an experience that we will know where "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4). 

Jesus Himself, who suffered incomparable grief and loss, was sustained by “the joy that was set before him” (Hebrews 12:2). This does not mean that he felt in the garden or on the cross all that he would feel in the resurrection. But it does mean that He hoped in it and that this hope was an experienced foretaste of that joy. 

I have learned that true joy does not come in the experience of sorrow in itself . Is it no wonder why so many of us have a huge disconnect when some preacher or Christian glibly tells us to rejoice when we are so sad, hurt, broken, lonely, grief stricken, and depressed. They expect us to put on a happy face and find joy somehow in the sorrow itself. At least for me, it always has been unrealistic, shallow, it has never worked, nor is it helpful. But I have learned a secret; the only way that joy can come in my sorrow is  in the anticipation of future joy. 

When I am suffering I have many times looked to the Word of God, the promises of God, the person of Jesus with my future hope in Him and His promises and His grace to lift me with joy out of and above my present sorrows. Oh how often doing this in my tears and it has for brought joy to me. 

The best example I can give is when my father went to war twice in Vietnam when I was a little boy. He was gone for over a year each time. Whenever I would get sad, scared about him getting killed, or lonely about his absence, I would think about his future return, and the thought of his return would bring me present joy in my sorrow. So I was able to be sorrowful but rejoicing at the same time. 

The fact is that we groan here in this life and in this world, waiting for the redemption of our bodies and for the removal of all our sins (Romans 8:23). This groaning and grieving is godly if it is molded by our joy in hope of future glory (Romans 5:2-3). The delight is subdued by all the pain, but it is there in seed form. It will one day grow into a great vine that yields wine of undiluted delight. 

So let us learn to embrace whatever sorrow God appoints for us with joy. 

Let us not be ashamed of tears. After all, God says that He keeps our tears in a bottle "You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle.Are they not in your book? " (Psalm 56:8). 

Let us sow our seeds in tears and do our work in tears. 

"Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy! He who goes out weeping,bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy,bringing his sheaves with him."(Psalm 16:6-8). 

Let the promise encourage you in your present sorrows that joy will come with the morning "Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning" (Psalm 30:5). 

Let us learn to be looking not only at our sorrows, but looking to Jesus and remembering his kind, merciful, and loving nature and promises in order to be, 

“sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” (2 Corinthians 6:10) 

Let us through our tears, the comfort, and joy God brings us, serve others in their sorrow by giving them comfort and joyful hope. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God."(2 Corinthians 1:3-4) 

May God help you to sustain and shape your grief with His joy, His power, and His goodness this day and every day in your present sorrows. 

Sorrowful but always rejoicing, 

Pastor Bill 

THE SEEMING SILENCE AND DARKNESS OF GOD

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you which shall be the darkness of God...I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
 T.S. Elliot
The speaking God can be maddeningly silent at times.  Often times when I have been the most desirous to hear Him, the silence has been deafening!  There have been times where His voice seems so loud and clear to me and His presence so real. Those moments I can say like the hymn writer that "He walks with me and talks with me". But, other times I have seen, felt, or heard nothing and I have cried to God in my confused anguish and He just seems silent and seems absent.

All of God’s saints, if allowed to live long enough, are led into the lonely, disorienting, weary wilderness. It has been called the dark night of the soul. And while there, we deeply and mournfully lament. Job and David sang deep laments.

Job: “I cry to you for help and you do not answer me; I stand, and you only look at me.” (Job 30:20)

King David: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest.” (Psalm 22:1–2)

 

What we experience as God’s absence or distance or silence is phenomenological. It’s how we see and perceive it. It’s how at some point it looks and feels to us but it isn’t how it really is. If you never knew, you would look out at the horizon and determine that the world was flat, so likewise, we can deduce because of what we see, feel, or experience that God is not present or does not exist.  Just like we can experience the world as flat when in fact we are walking on a huge spinning ball, we can experience God as absent or distant when like Paul says, “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

Yes, Job, King David, and I have felt God's absence, silence, or indifference; but in reality, God wasn’t absent or silent or indifferent at all toward Job,King David, or me, it’s just how it felt to them at the time. Yes, those feelings are deeply and painfully real. When we feel forsaken by God the fact is that we are not forsaken (Hebrews 13:5). We are simply called to trust what God promises more than our perceptions.

But why does God seem silent? Why the perceived silence? Why can it seem like God is just standing aloof there looking at us when we cry to him for help?

I don’t claim to understand all the mysteries of this experience. No doubt we underestimate the effects of remaining sin on us and our need for this discipline in order to share God’s holiness (Hebrews 12:10). But I believe there are clues for another purpose as well. I’ll phrase them as questions.

Why is it that “absence makes the heart grow fonder” but “familiarity breeds contempt”?

Why is water so much more refreshing when we’re really thirsty?

Why am I almost never satisfied with what I have, but always longing for more?

Why can the thought of being denied some dream create in us a desperation we previously didn’t have?

Why is the pursuit of earthly achievement often more enjoyable than the achievement itself?

Why do deprivation, adversity, scarcity, and suffering often produce the best character qualities in us while prosperity, ease, and abundance often produce the worst?

Do you see it? There is a pattern in the design of deprivation: Deprivation draws out desire. Absence heightens desire. And the more heightened the desire, the greater its satisfaction will be. It is the mourning that will know the joy of comfort (Matthew 5:4). It is the hungry and thirsty that will be satisfied (Matthew 5:6). Longing makes us ask, emptiness makes us seek, silence makes us knock (Luke 11:9).

Deprivation is in the design of this age. We live mainly in the age of anticipation, not gratification. We live in the dim mirror age, not the face-to-face age (1 Corinthians 13:12). We deeply groan with all creation for the consummation of the ages. (Romans 8:22-23). The paradox is that what satisfies us most in this age is not what we receive, but what we are promised. The chase is better than the catch in this age because the Catch we’re designed to be satisfied with is in the age to come.

And so Fredrick William Faber wrote in his poem, “The Desire of God”:

Yes, pine for thy God, fainting soul! ever pine;


 Oh languish mid all that life brings thee of mirth;

Famished, thirsty, and restless — let such life be thine—


 For what sight is to heaven, desire is to earth.

 

So you desire God and ask for more of Him and what do you get? Stuck in a desert feeling deserted. You feel disoriented and desperate. You feel blind and lost. Dear reader, don’t despair. The silence, the absence is phenomenological. It’s how it feels, it’s not how it really is. You are not alone. God is with you (Psalm 23:4). And He is speaking all the time in the priceless gift of His objective Word so you don’t need to rely on the subjective impressions of your fluctuating emotions. I personally, in times of silence and darkness do not know what I would have done without the Word to anchor and sustain my wandering, clueless, lost soul.

If desire is to earth what sight is to heaven, then God answers our prayer with more desire. It’s the desert that awakens and sustains desire. It’s the desert that dries up our infatuation with worldliness. And it’s the desert that draws us to the well of the world to come. C.S. Lewis said that our greatest "havings" are our "longings"

“In the path of your judgments,O LORD, we wait for you; your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul.My soul yearns for you in the night;my spirit within me earnestly seeks you.For when your judgments are in the earth,the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness.” Isaiah 26:8-9"Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied.”Luke 6:21
“Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.”Psalm 90:14
"My soul longs and even yearns for the courts of the LORD; My heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God."Psalm 84:2

O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water…as the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God… " (Psalm 63:1; 42:1)

Pastor Bill (Much of this was taken from Jon Bloom "When God Seems Silent")

MORE, MORE, MORE,LORD!

Several times a year God brings me to a place where I am utterly dissatisfied with my life, my walk with Christ, and the levels of intimacy and experience of Christ in my life. Do you feel this way as well? Most of all, I find myself longing to experience and show more of the love of God in my life. That is where I am at this week in my life. There is this insatiable desire for love that causes me to cry out "MORE LOVE!" The apostle Paul prayed for more in his life both because of his need, but also because of God's offer (See Ephesians 1:15-22; 3:16,18).

This is especially important. The Bible tells us that God Himself actively pursues a love-relationship with you. He wants us to experience and feel His love, and that He has taken all the necessary steps to see that we do. I want to explore with you several texts of Scripture that affirm this truth.

Our first is perhaps the most important one of all. It is found in Romans 5:5. The N.I.V. translates it, “God has poured out his love into our hearts.” The New Living Bible translates it, “For we know how dearly God loves us, because He has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with His love.” 

Romans 5:5 says that there is an experience of God's love for us that is  something poured out. It is something felt in the heart. Known in the way the heart knows. God takes great initiative in His relationship with us. Paul tells us that God "poured out" His love "Into our hearts." The verb poured out is used elsewhere of the spilling of wine (Luke 5:37), the shedding of Christ's blood (Matthew 26:28), and of the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 10:45). More graphic still is its use in Acts 1:18 of the fate of Judas: "With the reward he got for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out" (emphasis added).

Paul is emphasizing the unstinting lavishness with which God has flooded our hearts with a sense of His love for us. Like an overflowing stream in a thirsty land, so is the rich flood of divine love poured out and shed abroad in the heart.

This is an exuberant communication of God's love. The love of God, writes Charles Hodge, "does not descend upon us as dew drops, but as a stream which spreads itself abroad through the whole soul, filling it with the consciousness of His presence and favor."' The Holy Spirit works to evoke and stimulate in your heart the overwhelming conviction that God loves you. The splendor and immensity of God's devotion is not abstract and generic, but concrete and personal; not for everyone in general but for you in particular. GOD WANTS YOU TO EXPERIENCE MORE OF HIS LOVE!

Now this experience varies from time to time and person to person and can be (and should be) pursued in ever-fuller measures. Why do I say this? Because the tenses of the verbs are different in verse 5 between the outpouring of God's love and the giving of the Holy Spirit. Notice: "The love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us." The difference here is that the first tense "has been poured out"  (perfect indicative) implies in the original Greek that there was a past act for all believers but there is also and ongoing effect or an ongoing act as well right at this moment!. But the tense of "was given to us"(aorist participle) implies a completed and once for all action. In other words, “the love of God that was poured into your hearts by the Holy Spirit in the past is being presently poured into your hearts as well at this very moment.

The thought is that knowledge of the love of God, having flooded our hearts, jilts them now, just as a valley once flooded remains full of water and enjoys its present refreshment. Paul assumes that all his readers, like himself, will be living in the enjoyment of a strong and abiding sense of God's love for them. In other words, God's love doesn't leak! Unlike the waters of Noah that receded after a time, God's love remains perpetually at flood stage in our souls!

Do we always feel it now? No. Yes, we were given the Holy Spirit in the past, but the outpouring seems to have ongoing and varied expressions in the present. So, how are we to seek the fullness of this experience? There are several verses in the New testament that help us..

I.  2 Thessalonians 3:5

"May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ."

Here we have Paul praying that God would do something right now for the Thessalonians and for you and I. What does he want God to do now? He wants God to "direct their hearts." This is a remarkable phrase! The heart has directions. It moves toward one thing or another. It moves toward what it regards as attractive and satisfying and valuable.

"The soul is measured by its heights, some high and others low; but the heart is measured by its delights and its pleasures never lie."

Paul is praying that God would give the heart a sight of the love of God as more attractive and satisfying and valuable than ordinary earthly things. "May the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God." What would this be other than an experience of God's love? And it must be that, even though we are Christians, this movement from where we are into the love of God is needed. Otherwise Paul would not pray it. Therefore, the experience of the love of God is different from time to time and from person to person. Here we are as Christians. We have all tasted of God's love for us and have been drawn into trusting all that God is for us in Christ. But our hearts are not always steadfast. They drift and they waver. As the Puritans used to say, "There is much insensibility to divine things among Christians." This is why we need to be renewed and directed back to what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13:13, to the greatest thing there is: LOVE!  Oh we need love to master us in order to minister through us both to God and others. "We love, because He first loved us" (1 John 4:19).The more of his love in our life, the more we will love. Revival is first the answer to Paul's prayer in 2 Thessalonians 3:5, "May the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God." Oh may the Lord take hold of your heart and direct it into the love of God. May you experience the outpouring of the love of God through the Holy Spirit. 

II. 2 Corinthians 13:14

"The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all"

Paul is closing his epistle to the Corinthians. He ends with a benediction. Here he calls on God, in the presence of the people, to make his love manifestly present and real to them. "The love of God be with you!". Make it manifestly present to you!

What do I mean by "manifestly" present? For Christians, isn't the love of God always present with us? Romans 8:35 and 39 tell us that nothing can separate us from the love of God. So if nothing can separate us from the love of God, why does Paul pray, "The love of God be with you"? The reason is because, even though the love of God is always present with believers, we do not always experience the love of God as present. Many of us at times feel the opposite, that we are not loved by God. Therefore, we want God to make his love more manifestly known. More obviously. More experientially. We sing that song, “More love, more power, more of you in my life.” This is why. Paul is calling for in 2 Corinthians 13:14 the love of God to be poured out more fully and more consciously in our hearts.

III. Jude 21

"keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life."

Jude exhorts, do what you must, to avail yourself of the unparalleled joy of receiving the love of God. That this experience is ultimately a work of God the Father, through the Holy Spirit, is confirmed by Paul's prayer in 2 Thessalonians 3:5

In the final analysis, if we are to "feel" loved of the Father it is the Father Himself who must (and will) act to remove every obstacle and clear away every encumbrance to that inexpressible experience. I can’t do it. Hearing teaching on the Father's love can’t alone do it. Reading these scriptures can't do it. God must do it.

The obstacles to this are very real indeed for us all. that is why Paul prays and we can pray that God would Himself act to obliterate such obstacles to the enjoyment of being loved and manifest, pour out, direct, our hearts into an ongoing full, deep, personal, and intimate experience into His love.

Surely, then, we must begin to pray for ourselves and for one another even as Paul prayed for the Thessalonians. Experiencing the love of God, not just thinking about it, is something we should desire with all our hearts.

IV. Ephesians 3:14-19.

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, 16 that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.

No passage in the Bible can fill you with longings in prayer for an experience of God's love like this one. Consider what Paul is asking for as we read the prayer backward. In verse 19, he is asking that we be filled with all the fullness of God. That is an experience. We don't always have that. We want it. We pursue it. How does it come? In comes through an experiential knowing of the incomprehensible love of Christ - "to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge." And how does that experiential knowing of the love of Christ come? In verse 17, Paul asks that they be "rooted and grounded in love" so that they "may be able to comprehend" this incomprehensible love. Well, how does that rooting and grounding in love happen? Paul prays for it to happen (in verses 16-17) by the strengthening of the Spirit in the inner man so that Christ dwells (manifestly) in the heart by faith.

So here we are at the work of the Holy Spirit again. And is not all this astonishing experience in Ephesians 3:14-19 simply an unfolding of the simple sentence in Romans 5:5 that the love of God be poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us?

Oh dear reader, I pray that you and I would seek a deeper experience of the love of God. First, that you would be reflective and thoughtful on these verses I have shared and with the truth of Christ's love and and the demonstration of his love for us when he came and lived and died and rose. Second, pray for it. Really pray for it! Pray these four verses daily! Third, that you would receive it right now in Jesus Name.

Praying to see, experience, savor, and show the love of God in my life,

Pastor Bill