Suffering and Advent

How do you respond to affliction and pain?

In Psalm 69 – our sermon text this week – David calls out to God, “I am afflicted and in pain!” He then, as we would expect, calls out for God to deliver him: “Let your salvation, O God, set me on high!” (Psalm 69:29)

But the next verse is surprising: “I will praise the name of God with a song; I will magnify him with thanksgiving.”

In other words: “I am really hurting. And I will sing praises to God. I will show how great He is by thanking Him.”

Is that how you respond to affliction and pain?

Note that David has not yet been delivered when he offers praise. He praises God prior to any deliverance, because God made promises to him and to his people – and He always keeps His promises.

This is what the Advent season is all about: God has made promises. We eagerly await the fulfillment of those promises. We don’t know when they will be fulfilled. But we know He is faithful.

This is the position of God’s people again and again over the centuries. We hurt. We are in pain. And we praise God, looking forward to His fulfillment of His promises.

Consider these examples:

  • God tells Abraham that all the families of the earth will be blessed through his descendant (Genesis 12:1-3) – and he then remains childless for decades, awaiting the birth of a son.
  • God tells Abraham that his descendants will be afflicted in another land for 400 years, but then He will bring judgment on that nation, and they will come out (Genesis 15:13-14). And so the Israelites suffer much oppression in Egypt, crying out to God, before He sends Moses and brings about their exodus.
  • In 586BC God destroys His temple, His picture of His presence with His people, sending the Jews into exile. And yet decades earlier the prophet Isaiah, looking forward to this time of exile, had written, “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.  Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned” (Isaiah 40:1-2).
  • The faithful Jews held on to God’s promise of a coming Redeemer, a coming Messiah, across the centuries of foreign dominance and oppression. So in Luke 2 we find faithful Simeon and Anna in the temple, having waited for decades, and now at last seeing their Messiah as a little baby.

We find ourselves in a similar position today. Our Lord promises us, “In the world you will have tribulation” (John 16:33). We will experience pain and affliction. Jesus guarantees it. And we don’t have to look far to find it. In our own neighborhoods – indeed, in our own families – we find broken relationships, poverty of spirit, and oppression of the soul, as well as physical needs and maladies.

But Jesus also tells us in that same verse, “In me you may have peace. . . . Take heart! I have overcome the world.” And the Scriptures conclude with His promise, “Surely I am coming soon! (Revelation 22:20).

So in this interval between the First and Second Advents of our Lord, we will experience troubles similar to those endured by our brothers and sisters in the faith across the centuries. Like them, we will be afflicted and in pain. Like them, we will witness suffering and suffer ourselves.

But also like them, we can follow David’s example in Psalm 69, and, in the midst of trials and hardships, cry out, “I will praise the name of God with a song; I will magnify him with thanksgiving.” For the Lord is a faithful God. He always keeps His promises. And all who love His appearing, all who trust in Him, will see Him face to face – and will know the reality, then, that they have believed all along: That “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18).

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

How To Make Your Heart Content

[From The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment by Jeremiah Burroughs (1600-1646). Justin Perry of Covenant Life Church in Tampa quoted the third consideration in his talk this week at the Treasuring Christ Together Network’s pastors and wives retreat.]

CONSIDERATIONS TO CONTENT THE HEART IN ANY AFFLICTED CONDITION.

1) We should consider, in all our wants and inclinations to discontent, the greatness of the mercies that we have, and the meanness of the things we lack. The things we lack, if we are godly, are things of very small moment in comparison to the things we have, and the things we have are things of very great moment. … I will give you the example of a couple of godly men, meeting together, Anthony and Didymus: Didymus was blind, and yet a man of very excellent gifts and graces: Anthony asked him if he was not troubled at his want of sight. He confessed he was, ‘But’, he said, ‘should you be troubled at the want of what flies and dogs have, and not rather rejoice and be thankful that you have what angels have?’ God has given you those good things that make angels glorious; is not that enough for you, though you lack what a fly has? And so a Christian should reason the case with himself: what am I discontented for? I am discontented for want of what a dog may have, what a devil may have, what a reprobate may have; shall I be discontented for not having that, when God has given me what makes angels glorious? ‘Blessed be God,’ says the Apostle in Ephesians 1:3, ‘who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places.’ It may be you have not such great blessings in earthly places as some others have, but if the Lord has blessed you in heavenly places, that should content you. There are blessings in heaven, and he has set you here for the present, as it were in heaven, in a heavenly place. The consideration of the greatness of the mercies that we have, and the littleness of the things that God has denied us, is a very powerful consideration to work this grace of contentment. …

3) The consideration of the abundance of mercies that God bestows and we enjoy. It is a saying of Luther: ‘The sea of God’s mercies should swallow up all our particular afflictions.’ Name any affliction that is upon you: there is a sea of mercy to swallow it up. If you pour a pailful of water on the floor of your house, it makes a great show, but if you throw it into the sea, there is no sign of it. So, afflictions considered in themselves, we think are very great, but let them be considered with the sea of God’s mercies we enjoy, and then they are not so much, they are nothing in comparison. …

8) Before your conversion, before God wrought upon your souls, you were contented with the world without grace, though you had no interest in God nor Christ; why cannot you now be contented with grace and spiritual things without the world? If you yourselves were content with the world without grace, there is reason you should be content with grace without the world. Certainly there is infinitely more reason. You see that many men of the world have a kind of contentment; they do not murmur or repine with the world, though they have no interest in God and Christ. Then cannot you have as much contentment with God and Christ, without the world, as they can, with the world, without God and Christ? It is an infinite shame that this should be so.

9) Yea, consider, when God has given you such contentments you have not given him the glory. When God has let you have your heart’s desire, what have you done with your heart’s desire? You have not been any the better for it; it may be you have been worse many times. Therefore let that satisfy you-I meet with crosses, but when I had contentment and all things coming in, God got but little or no glory from me, and therefore let that be a means now to quiet me in my discontented thoughts.

10) Finally, consider all the experience that you have had of God’s doing good to you in the want of many comforts. When God crosses you, have you never had experience of abundance of good in afflictions? It is true, when ministers only tell men that God will work good out of their afflictions, they hear them speak, and think they speak like good men, but they feel little or no good; they feel nothing but pain. But when we cannot only say to you that God has said he will work good out of your afflictions, but we can say to you, that you yourselves have found it so by experience, that God has made former afflictions to be great benefits to you, and that you would not have been without them, or without the good that came by them for a world, such experiences will exceedingly quiet the heart and bring it to contentment. Therefore think thus with yourself: Lord, why may not this affliction work as great a good upon me as afflictions have done before?