5 hopes for ‘When I’m hurting…’

Hope #1: People will invite their friends.

When I talk to my friends who are still figuring out where they are at with Jesus, one of the biggest issues they have is “Why is there so much pain and suffering in this world?” We have a great opportunity as a church to really help people come to terms with this issue.

At Resolved, we love to invite our friends to church, not only to experience the great community we have but also to hear about Jesus. During this series we will be pointing our friends to Jesus every week. We will also be showing them that the Bible has the answers for the most challenging questions of their life.

The question is, then, who are you praying for and inviting to come to Resolved this weekend?

Hope #2: We will give each other space to deal with whatever issues may be brought up during this series.

This series is a really risky series. For some people it will bring up issues that are buried, issues that are painful, issues that go deep, issues that don’t have easy answers.

For this reason we are changing what we do in community groups during this series so that our group discussions are based on the text of the talk from the Sunday before. So when we look at Job 1-2 at church, that same week we will be looking at Job 1-2 in our community groups.

Each week we will be asking questions in our community groups that may bring up some pain in our lives. People will express this pain in many different ways.

In the book of Job, Job loses everything (Job 1:1-2:10), he has three friends come and sit with him (2:11) and in the following chapters, Job enters into a conversation with these three friends (4:1-31:40). They are friends who try to love and care for him but they are friends who make two mistakes.

Firstly they had mostly bad theology. One of the potential problems with theology is that if you have the wrong theology it destroys lives.

The second problem with Job’s friends was that they didn’t have emotional intelligence or enough compassion for Job. Their theologically-informed answers were delivered with a harshness and a critical spirit that was unloving. And the problem is that if we put across good theology with an unloving or arrogant spirit we miscommunicate the intent of the theology and therefore we miscommunicate what God is actually saying.

My hope is that when people are sharing about their lives, we would be compassionate and listen twice as much as we speak. And that when we do speak, we would speak in a theologically-informed way which shows great love and compassion to the person we are speaking to.

The question is, then, will you speak with love and compassion when you talk to other people about their suffering?

Hope #3: People will be able to think biblically about their pain and suffering

Here is one thing I know about Resolved. The people who come to Resolved will suffer.

Some will suffer painfully and die.

Some will have loved ones die.

Some will have spouses walk out on them.

Some will develop mental illnesses.

It is for this reason that I see this series as not necessarily impacting a lot of people at Resolved immediately. But it will come good in years to come when we do experience pain and suffering.

When some of us suffer painfully and die.

When some of us have loved ones die.

When some of us have spouses walk out on us.

When some of us develop mental illnesses.

My prayer is that the teaching we hear from the Bible in this series will help us to think about suffering in a biblical way and that when suffering comes in our lives, we will acknowledge two things: (1) that God is doing something more than we can see in our suffering, and (2) that he can be trusted because he himself has suffered just like us, and so we can turn to him in our times of suffering.

The question is, then, will you let your thinking be changed by the Word of God?

Hope #4: People will change their way of thinking about pain and suffering

The issue of evil and suffering impacts deeply on how you think of God and what you think about him.

People think many different and wrong things about evil and suffering and God.

1. People think that God is capricious and that he visits suffering on people randomly for his pleasure. This God is a cosmic maniac, akin to a cosmic Jigsaw character from the Saw movie series.
2. People think that God doesn’t know the future. This is called Open Theism. It says that God is just as surprised and taken aback as we are when evil and suffering happens. People like this because it gets God ‘off the hook’ on the issue of evil and suffering.
3. People think that God is distant when we suffer and he cannot relate to us when we suffer. Some of us believe that God is way out there and so removed from us and our experiences that he looks down and in effect says “Sorry I cannot relate.”

But what we will see throughout this series is that God is not capricious but careful and loving when he relates to us. We will see that he has a plan that includes suffering and he has had this plan since before the creation of the world and therefore our suffering has meaning. And ultimately we will see that in Jesus, God has experienced the worst of our suffering and therefore he can and does relate to us on our level when we suffer.

The question is, then, will you let the Bible shape your view of God, especially when we think about evil and suffering?

Hope #5: People will become Christians

The reason why we started Resolved – the reason why Resolved continues – is that we want to see people who don’t know Jesus come to know, love and serve Jesus.

My hope for this series is that God would use this series to bring people to know Him. That is why we have done the two videos and the postcards.

I hope to see a church on fire, pleading with God that He would call many people to Himself through this series.

I hope to see people using the media to get their friends excited about this series.

I hope to see those friends being invited to church.

I hope to see everyone at Resolved having these same hopes.

The question is, then, will you be praying for these things to happen? And will you not only pray, but also invite people to come to Resolved to experience God as He speaks at Resolved?