“Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy.”
John 16:20
If you knew for certain that following Christ would mean a life filled with trials and suffering, would you still be determined to follow Him? If showing up at church this morning put your job at risk, would you still want to be sitting here? One of the fallacies many professing Christians believe is that following Christ should lead to less pain and suffering in this world . But that’s not what the Bible promises. Instead, what it proclaims is that the pain we suffer in this world as we follow Him will inevitably be used by Him to bring us greater joy. So yes, there will be times of suffering. They cannot be avoided. But Christ will take these present sufferings and, in the end, transform them into eternal joys.
Milton Vincent reminds us of the value of suffering, in his little book A Gospel Primer.
“More than anything else could ever do, the gospel enables me to embrace my tribulations and thereby position myself to gain full benefit from them. For the gospel is the one great permanent circumstance in which I live and move; and every hardship in my life is allowed by God only because it serves His gospel purpose in me. When I view my circumstances in this light, I realize that the gospel is not just one piece of good news that fits into my life somewhere among all the bad. I realize instead that the gospel makes genuinely good news out of every other aspect of my life, including my severest trials. The good news about my trials is that God is forcing them to bow to His gospel purposes and do good unto me by improving my character and making me more conformed to the image of Christ. Preaching the gospel to myself each day provides a lens through which I can view my trials in this way and see the true cause for rejoicing that exists in them. I can then embrace trials as friends and allow them to do God’s good work in me.”
This Sunday we will be looking at how suffering turns to joy because of the finished work of Christ on the cross, from John 16:16-24
Because He is wroth it!
Pastor Scott