Why does God allow us to go through pain? What is the reason behind Christian suffering?

<p>Why does God allow us to go through pain? What is the reason behind Christian suffering?</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Freedom Health Ministries

Gabriel Arruda

The Purpose of Pain

So the title of this message is The Purpose of Pain.

How should you biblically relate to pain?

Why does God allow Christians to suffer pain?

All you need to do is listen to just a few minutes of our praise and prayer request time and you'll find that Christians as well as non-Christians have to deal with pain, have to deal with suffering.

And sometimes we might even seem to, it even seems that Christians might even suffer more sometimes.

And you could look through Christian history and see that.

The last 5 years of my life, I'm just gonna be, I'm a very honest speaker, I'm a very straightforward individual.

It's, in some ways, it's been the best period of my life, and in other ways, it's definitely been the worst period of my life, last 5 years.

Many of you know my backstory, some of you don't.

Had to watch her essentially fall apart piece by piece over the process of a year in front of me.

Then also just the grief of dealing with losing the someone who you deeply love, the love of your life, then after that, shortly after that, losing my health.

As many of you know, I'm going to be leaving as Ron announced and that is a health journey.

That is to get my digestive health back And it has been a real up and down journey.

And I have suffered a decent amount because of my digestive issues and challenges in ministry, challenges now in being single, all of these things, just lots and lots of pain.

My life has not gone the way I wanted it to go the last several years.

However, there are things that went way better than I expected as well.

So the last 5 years has just been really weird.

It's been better than I anticipated and far worse than I ever anticipated.

And I've often asked, why has God allowed my heart to be filled with so much pain?

Why has God seen fit to allow this experiences to come on me?

Number 1, I think it's because he knew I could handle it by his grace.

But number 2, I almost feel as though God has given me a special mission to help teach people how to correctly and biblically respond to the pain in your life.

You know in the Bible, we're all familiar with Revelation 12, 17, that the dragon was wroth with the woman and went to make war with the what?

And the idea is that the end time church would be a remnant or a remainder of the original Apostolic Church.

And so we use that to help us to understand that what the church looks like in the end will look just like the original.

And you know there's several features that's given there.

They had to keep the commandments of God, including the fourth.

They have the testimony of Jesus, which we know is the spirit of prophecy.

But there's another, there's several other features that aren't identified there, that you just have to look at the early church and realize that this is the part of church culture.

Number 1, they were praying in the temple daily.

Prayer was a big part of early church life.

They broke bread and house-to-house regularly.

They were fellowshipping together on a regular basis.

We have to have these features if we want to be like the Apostolic Church.

And there's 1 feature that you see that's very clear in the writings of Paul and the writings of Peter that I feel honestly we just really missed the mark in, And that is they rejoiced in suffering.

That is a very clear teaching in the New Testament.

As a matter of fact, I looked up the word happy in the New Testament.

Do you know what's the most common experience associated with the word happy in the New Testament?

4 out of 6 times when the Bible mentions being happy, it's in the context of receiving persecution.

4 out of 6, The majority of the times the Bible in the New Testament mentions being happy, it's in the context of persecution.

So the early church had this teaching that when we suffer, that's it doesn't feel good, but that's not necessarily a bad thing that you could even and should Rejoice in your trials and in your pain.

This is something that I think as a church, we're still grappling with.

As soon as you start experiencing it, you're looking for a way out.

But the teaching of Scripture is that we should even rejoice in our pain.

Now I want to share that when you're talking about why does God allow pain?

Number 1, we're in a great controversy, right?

If you want freedom of choice, the person who lives next to you, the person driving next to you, they get freedom of choice too.

And they might not be surrendered to God.

And so people can choose to say nice things to you or naughty things to you.

The greatest victories in the Bible were preceded by the biggest tragedies or the biggest disappointments.

But I wanna focus on 1 reason, the entire rest of this message, I'm gonna be focusing on 1 main reason why God allows pain.

What is the purpose of pain in the Christian's life?

And my personal opinion about this is this is the majority reason.

And let's go now to the book of Lamentations.

You'll probably, some of you might need to dust the cobwebs off of your Bible in that section there.

That's not a book we go to very often, is it?

And we want Lamentations chapter 3 starting in verse 1.

Lamentations chapter 3 starting in verse 1.

Now Jeremiah is the 1 author of this book and he's speaking as if he is the people of Jerusalem.

He's the voice of Israel in this passage.

He says, I am a man that had seen affliction by the rod of his wrath.

He hath led me and brought me into darkness, but not into light.

He turneth his hand against me, referring to God.

He hath builded against me and surrounded me with gall and travail.

Back to Menu

The Purpose of Pain

Transcript

Description

Sponsor

Recorded

Sound Doctrine