Turning Pain Into... Peace

I’ve always had a pretty high tolerance for pain, or so I thought. A couple of days before Christmas I had a sharp piercing pain in my lower abdomen that, based on what I had heard before about kidney stones, was pretty sure that was what was going on. The pain was so severe that I couldn’t move. Now understand that I have been hit full speed by 6’ 4” 250 lb. defensive tackles and have been cut with a chain saw that required over 120 stitches but I had never experienced pain like this before. It caused me to break out in a cold sweat and almost pass out before it began to ease off. Turns out it wasn’t a kidney stone after all, which is good news I guess, but, believe me, I won’t be heartbroken if I never experience that kind of pain again.

We’ve all experienced physical and emotional pain of some kind, whether mild, severe, or somewhere in between and our natural default reaction to pain is to run from it or to rid ourselves of it as quickly as we possibly can. But what if our pain was designed to be a means to an end? What if peace, for example, was waiting on us at the end of our pain and the only way to get to the peace was to go through the pain. I guess then, we would find ourselves at the crossroads in asking ourselves how badly do we want to experience peace? Can I share some good news with you? According to the scripture, pain is not intended to be permanent, but it does have a purpose to it and, as we will see this month, the reward at the end of the pain is always for our good and always worth the pain.

The Voice of God - Spoke and Will Speak

Ask someone under 40 who or what E.F. Hutton was and you will likely get quite a few blank stares. Hutton started a financial investment and brokerage firm in 1904 and grew the business into one of the top 5 investment companies in the world by the mid 1980s. A little over a decade ago, E.F. Hutton, the company was purchased by Kingswood Capital Markets and for all intents and purposes ceased to exist, except on paper. However, due to their tremendous television exposure from the mid 80s through the 90s, today if you were to ask someone over 40 what the E.F. Hutton company’s slogan was they would tell you it was, “When E.F. Hutton talks... people listen.”

I wonder, do you think people listen when you have something to say? If so, how do you know or how can you tell? As we’ve been examining The Voice of God over the last few weeks and looking at the varied ways He audibly spoke in the Old Testament, they are certainly different from each other and unique to each person and situation. I had someone ask me a couple of weeks ago if I thought God had stopped speaking audibly and my reply was that because we have His Word and His Spirit, I believe He has pushed the long pause button on hearing His audible voice. Can He do that? Absolutely! Will He do that? Well the short answer is that, according to the Scripture, we are going to hear His voice again. So when, you ask, will that be and what are the circumstances going to be like to bring that about? Will He be speaking just to one individual, or to the church, or will the entire world hear His voice? And more importantly, what will He have to say?

The Voice of God - Compels Us

It was in my early twenties when I had my first exposure to the Criminal Justice System. I received a summons to serve jury duty in Knox County Circuit Court. The judge was Edward Cole and we were hearing a civil suit between a man and a local bank that he claimed had done him harm. I remember after both sides had presented their case and closing arguments had been given on both sides, Judge Cole stopped to give the jurors some instructions before we left to deliberate. His instructions were obviously something he had given to jurors hundreds of times before and were measured, clear, and concise. Part of what he said was, “Ladies and gentlemen, in arriving at a decision in this case, you are to look for compelling evidence that convinces you to side with either the plaintiff or the defendant. Compelling evidence should be something that is clear, undeniable, and irrefutable, and if you have neither seen nor heard it, you certainly can’t make it up.” I must admit, at the time I found Judge Cole’s instructions to us probably the most compelling thing I had heard during the whole trial.

When is the last time you’ve heard something that compelled you to think or act a certain way? Perhaps it was a song, or a speech, or something you read, but it had you so convinced that another option wasn’t even worth considering. This coming Sunday I’m going to ask you to put yourself in Abram’s (later renamed Abraham) shoes. He heard the voice of God speaking to him and was compelled to respond, to act, to move. The voice of God is trying to speak to us too, to compel us to, among other things, seek to live compelling lives ourselves.

The Voice of God - Reminds Us

I was a young 13 or 14 year old teenager when one of our youth leaders at church led our youth group through an evangelism training course by pastor and author Dr. James Kennedy titled Evangelism Explosion. The course centered around biblical preparedness and a series of probing questions, the opening question being, “If you were to die tonight and were to stand before God and He asked, ‘Why should I let you into my heaven?’ What would your answer be?” When we completed the course, we went out into the neighborhood surrounding the church to put the teaching into action. The first house we came to had a screen door with the front door open behind it. We walked up and knocked on the screen door and a boy around 10-11 years of age came to the door. Totally forgetting my opening question, I asked him, “Are you saved? His eyes get as big as half dollars and he turns to run down the hallway toward the back of the house calling for his mom. “Who is it?” she asks him. “It’s God!” he says. Immediately, my friend and I start backing off the porch and, when we get back to the sidewalk, begin running back to the church. Having that boy’s mom come to the door expecting to see God was way too much pressure for the both of us so we high-tailed it out of there.

The more I have thought about that encounter over the years the more stupid I have felt because, in one sense, that boy was right, we should indeed be the hands and feet, and yes even the voice of God, to a broken culture. In a practical sense though, I sure wasn’t ready to be that in that moment.

The audible voice of God is recorded in scripture with such scarcity that we should pay close attention to what He says and why He said it.

Hope - Blessed

As we chronicle life, most things fall into three categories; what has been, what is, and what is coming. Now we can’t change a thing about what has been, regardless of how often we visit there in our minds. Or perhaps many of us choose to visit there so often because we perceive that our best days really are behind us. But if we’ll be honest, those days probably aren’t so “best” if we’ll remember all of them instead of just the good stuff. Then there’s what is, the times we are trying to make the most of, or sometimes simply make it through, right now. Our perception of them is also shaped by whether we have allowed what has been to be the lens through which we see what is, or whether we’ve allowed our past to shape our present. Sadly, many of us miss significant chunks of life because we have so much trouble living in the moment. We choose instead to camp out in our “best” past or our “better” future than learning to relish what is.

I wonder whether Mary & Joseph experienced that. Whether they were “in the moment” during and following the birth of Jesus, or whether they we looking to an unknown future that had to undoubtedly be exciting and terrifying at the same time. A future of watching the Son of God grow up in their house. You parents try and get your minds around that for a minute. If anyone was ever hopeful and petrified at the same time, it was those two. But what they had experienced and what they were living surely pushed them into a future filled with great hope and even greater fear. Fear that they might mess it up, regularly and royally. But also with great hope that even if they did, they were experiencing the greatest blessing any two humans could ever know... that these two nobodies from Nazareth would actually have the opportunity to have an influence in the life of the Son of God. Now try and get your mind around THAT!

Hope - Hope Comes

When a young boy gets his first baseball glove, hope comes. When that high school senior gets the admissions approval letter from her college of choice, hope comes. When that young adult walks out the door for the first day of that new job, hope comes. When young would-be parents get the news that their first baby is on the way, hope comes. When those same parents watch their now college grad walk across the stage to receive their degree, hope comes. And when the tired, sick body of that godly mom, dad, grandparent, or friend is laid to rest, never to be sick again, hope comes. Life is filled with situations where hope shows up to fill in the gaps of uncertainty... with possibility. And we see the possibilities instead of the uncertainties, all because of hope. What could be, turns into what might be, and again into what will be, when Hope Comes.

So how can we turn the occasional visit there into hope as a lifestyle? There’s a simple but not so easy answer and here it is... Get to know and make the daily choice to follow the Savior of Hope. Feed on the promises from the Book of Hope. And hear and heed the voice of the Spirit of Hope. Over and over again, the God of the Bible is waiting to pour hope out all over our fear, failure and frustration, but only when we make the choice to focus our eyes on Him instead of those 3 things. Easy? Nope, but essential if we ever want to consistently turn uncertainty into possibility.

Hope - Hope Does

There’s lottery ticket hope, there’s cancer surgery hope, and there’s marriage proposal hope and all three are different from each other. So, let’s break them down a little. Lottery ticket hope depends on a lot of chance and luck, the chance that the random numbers on the ticket you bought are the right ones, and the luck that had you buy that particular ticket, from that location, on that particular day, at that specific time. Cancer surgery hope is a dependent hope. It depends on the accuracy of a scan and the skill of a surgeon’s vision, hand coordination and experience. Or, if you are a believer, it depends on the Lord to intervene to either supplement the skill of the surgeon or to do something miraculous instead of that. Now let’s look at marriage proposal hope. It is an active hope that actually has to take some initiative. It’s first involves enough forethought to envision a life together of hopes and dreams, of both milestones and memories. Then it makes an investment in a ring to hopefully seal the deal. Then it selects just the right moment, on just the right night, at just the right place. So you see, there is some action involved in the hope that goes into a marriage proposal and that action is worth it when she gasps, nods her head and says yes.

Hope in the life of the Christ-follower is supposed to be like that too. It should visualize something before it happens, bathe whatever it is in continual prayer, and believe that God’s timing and His answer is always the absolute best outcome for us. That’s a simple yet profound process that many of us seldom, if ever, experience. Why? Because our enemy the devil has used the influence of this self-consumed culture to suck the life and the hope out of us and make us believe that that’s normal somehow.

Hope - Highway of Hope

During my junior and senior years of high school I played the guitar and helped lead the music for our weekly Young Life meetings and one of the songs we used to sing was “Hold On.” Several years later I learned that the version we had been doing was a re-make of sorts of a song that had been sung for years in predominately black churches called “Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand,” a simple song with a life-altering message. Anyway, one of the lines in that song has resonated with me a number of times over the years that said, “Build your hopes on things eternal.” Friend, you will never be disappointed doing that. I’m not sure where people who don’t know Christ place their hope but the cultural evidence says that it’s certainly not in Him.

As I write this today, the United States Supreme Court is hearing arguments in the U.S. vs. the State of Mississippi that deals with the legality of abortion, a case that could have a profound impact on the authority of individual states as it relates to abortion. I tell you this because sitting here today I am hopeful for an outcome that could finally overturn Roe v. Wade on a state by state basis. It wasn’t but a few years ago that I had no hope whatsoever of that happening. That’s why Presidential elections matter, because Supreme Court judicial appointments matter a great deal when the lives of the unborn hang in the balance. That said, my hope is not in a group of judges but rather in the One who is Himself, the real giver and taker of life.

The Lord Is... - Compassionate

Psalm 103

My dad had a soft spot for single moms, especially if they were struggling to get by. He owned his own grocery store back when there were smaller neighborhood grocery stores and behind his last store on 17th street in the Ft. Sanders area lived a single lady with 4 children in a shotgun house, well below the poverty line, with siding that was rotten and falling off the house. I noticed that when she or one of her older children would come to get groceries they would always ask, “Can you put it on our bill?” and dad would take out a small ledger book from under the counter and write down the total for their items. The mom would come in once every 6 to 8 weeks to pay on her bill, always in cash, one time bringing a glass gallon jar full of coins. She was always apologetic and somewhat embarrassed for not always being able to pay for her groceries when they were purchased and always grateful for dad letting her charge them to her account. She would ask, “How much do I owe you?” Dad would look at what was in her change purse and come up with a figure that would always leave her a little left over. She would say, “That can’t be enough,” and he would always respond by saying, “You pay what you can and the Lord will take care of the rest.” One time I got curious about dad’s ledger book and got it out to check her account while he was gone. I discovered that she was paying for about a fourth of what her actual bill was and later asked him about it after one of her barefoot kids had just left the store. He said. “Son, that’s my decision to make. She’s doing the best she can with what she’s got and they’ve got to have food to eat.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing coming from the mouth of my “Always pay your own way and don’t depend on somebody else to do that,” dad.

As I reflected on that years later, I remembered that there were times in his life that my dad had to pray for the compassion of others to get by. This was his opportunity to be the answer to someone else’s prayer.

The Lord Is... Psalm 103 - Righteous

The lines between right and wrong aren’t just blurry anymore, they have moved altogether, and that movement is still underway. So is it possible to hit the reset button and return to some sense of a universal agreement when it comes to what’s right and what’s wrong? Well, it appears that the only way the answer to that question is yes is when a person, regardless of which side of an issue they are on, says, “When everybody moves over to my side, we can hit the reset button.” I’m sure those in the middle are asking, “Why can’t we all come together, join hands, sing Kum-ba-ya and just get along with each other?” Let me answer that question by asking, why, in a culture where social media dominates the cultural landscape, are we less “social” than ever before? I think we know deep down that actually being connected to one another makes us more accountable than we are comfortable with, and when we disagree, who or what becomes the arbiter, the decider? There then has to be a standard, a source of what’s right and what’s wrong.... right?

The Bible told us that the day would come when right becomes wrong and wrong becomes right. It also asks, “What fellowship can light have with darkness?” Our common journey comes to an end with each of us standing before a righteous God, a God who is totally right about everything, every time. The thing is, He wants us to seek out and walk out that same righteousness in the here and now. But what does that actually look like? In short, righteousness looks like right-ness. More specifically, it looks like doing the right things, the right way, for the right reasons, and with the right motives. Does that look like you?