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In this episode, Pastor J.D. continues through our series on Psalm 23. This week, he answers, “What if God is using your pain to bring you closer to him?”
Show Notes:
God uses your pain to bring you to him
What if God was doing something similar in your pain? Again I’m not saying for sure that is what is happening, but…
So, again, I ask: Has God revealed a spot in your life that tells you that you’re not as together as you have thought?
These spots can all wake you up to a bigger problem–that is, where you stand with the God who created all of us. You see, leprosy, throughout the Bible, you see, symbolizes sin. Like leprosy, sin deadens. It grows in you and corrupts you over time. Because of it, you slowly lose feeling in your life—parts of you die. Your innocence; your joy; your optimism; your compassion for others. You become grotesque.
Scripture says, “the wages of sin is death.” Our souls have a spot of sin on them that is corroding us from the inside out. And sometimes these lesser spots–the problems in our lives–can wake us up to the ultimate spot we should be worried about.
Not that every leper who heads out to the Jordan River will find healing for his skin disease; the point is to show us that God sometimes uses suffering to open up your eyes to your need of him. Again, I’m not saying that is the case with you–as we saw with Job and Joseph, a lot of our suffering doesn’t have a root cause in our lives. But, sometimes God is trying to get our attention. As the writer of Psalm 119 says, “Before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now I obey your word” (Ps 119:67) (God used affliction to bring me back to himself.)
So, our first point is that God often uses our pain to bring us back to him. And Naaman shows us that all we need to respond to God, if he’s doing that in our lives, is humility and faith.
Humility: That’s the one thing God keeps going after with Naaman. Naaman in this story keeps trying to go to the top: “Let me see the prophet. Here’s an enormous amount of money. Ask me to do something hard.” Yet God keeps sending Naaman to the bottom. Talk to an intern. Do something humiliating.
The path to God is the path of humility. You can’t get there any other way. If you are going to be saved, the one thing you absolutely need is a sense of absolute need.
So, I ask again: Do you have the humility to come to Jesus? Think about how much humility it took for Naaman to cross that border into Israel, a place he regarded as inferior to Syria, to seek salvation; to admit that the healing he sought could not be found among his own mighty Syrians but among the despised Jews. I say this because maybe this is where you are: you never thought you’d be in a place like this, with people like these. A church of born-again Christians? For some of you, we are in the same category as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals for you. Do you have the humility and courage to question your convictions, to consider these things with an open mind?
God can save anybody, it just takes humility and faith. Faith means just believing what God says and taking a chance on it. Like Naaman did.
Want to ask J.D. a question? Head to our Ask Me Anything hub to submit your question.
As always, don’t forget to rate and review this podcast!
Find Pastor J.D. on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
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In this episode, Pastor J.D. continues through our series on Psalm 23. This week, he answers, “What if God is using your pain to bring you closer to him?”
Show Notes:
God uses your pain to bring you to him
What if God was doing something similar in your pain? Again I’m not saying for sure that is what is happening, but…
So, again, I ask: Has God revealed a spot in your life that tells you that you’re not as together as you have thought?
These spots can all wake you up to a bigger problem–that is, where you stand with the God who created all of us. You see, leprosy, throughout the Bible, you see, symbolizes sin. Like leprosy, sin deadens. It grows in you and corrupts you over time. Because of it, you slowly lose feeling in your life—parts of you die. Your innocence; your joy; your optimism; your compassion for others. You become grotesque.
Scripture says, “the wages of sin is death.” Our souls have a spot of sin on them that is corroding us from the inside out. And sometimes these lesser spots–the problems in our lives–can wake us up to the ultimate spot we should be worried about.
Not that every leper who heads out to the Jordan River will find healing for his skin disease; the point is to show us that God sometimes uses suffering to open up your eyes to your need of him. Again, I’m not saying that is the case with you–as we saw with Job and Joseph, a lot of our suffering doesn’t have a root cause in our lives. But, sometimes God is trying to get our attention. As the writer of Psalm 119 says, “Before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now I obey your word” (Ps 119:67) (God used affliction to bring me back to himself.)
So, our first point is that God often uses our pain to bring us back to him. And Naaman shows us that all we need to respond to God, if he’s doing that in our lives, is humility and faith.
Humility: That’s the one thing God keeps going after with Naaman. Naaman in this story keeps trying to go to the top: “Let me see the prophet. Here’s an enormous amount of money. Ask me to do something hard.” Yet God keeps sending Naaman to the bottom. Talk to an intern. Do something humiliating.
The path to God is the path of humility. You can’t get there any other way. If you are going to be saved, the one thing you absolutely need is a sense of absolute need.
So, I ask again: Do you have the humility to come to Jesus? Think about how much humility it took for Naaman to cross that border into Israel, a place he regarded as inferior to Syria, to seek salvation; to admit that the healing he sought could not be found among his own mighty Syrians but among the despised Jews. I say this because maybe this is where you are: you never thought you’d be in a place like this, with people like these. A church of born-again Christians? For some of you, we are in the same category as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals for you. Do you have the humility and courage to question your convictions, to consider these things with an open mind?
God can save anybody, it just takes humility and faith. Faith means just believing what God says and taking a chance on it. Like Naaman did.
Want to ask J.D. a question? Head to our Ask Me Anything hub to submit your question.
As always, don’t forget to rate and review this podcast!
Find Pastor J.D. on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
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