Don't Lose Hope

How do we get through life's difficulties undaunted? That's the theme of our message series this fall. Hey everybody, thanks for joining us. My name is René, another one of the pastors here. You know, this past week was the 50th anniversary of one of my favorite TV shows, Monday Night Football. And in an article I read about the anniversary, they talked about some of the great moments in Monday Night Football history. And one of my favorites was this: the Niners are playing the Chiefs, the Kansas City Chiefs at Candlestick Park one night. And Chiefs tight end Tony Gonzalez runs out of bounds and collides at full speed with a press photographer who is knocked out cold.

This is a photo of that exact moment. They take the photographer to the hospital, and this is where the story gets really interesting. In the hospital, they do a brain scan and they find a life-threatening brain tumor, which never would have been found had this photographer not gotten clocked by a football player. The photographer underwent surgery to remove the tumor. His life was saved because he got knocked out. I don't know about you, but I hear that story and I say, wow, how amazing. God used something bad for something really good.

Well, here's the theme of this morning's message. The thing is the Bible says God always works like that. I want to invite you to grab or download your notes at TLC.org/notes. Undaunted is the name of our series in 2 Corinthians. Remember when he wrote this, the apostle Paul was really going through some tough stuff: unjust imprisonment and torture, attacks by rioters, disease, slander, intense physical pain. And yet he says in verse 1 of chapter 1, we do not lose heart. Verse 8, we do not give up and quit. Verse 16, therefore we do not lose heart.

So I see his attitude and I want to know how do I not lose heart, right? How do you not lose heart? I'm sure that God has some of you joining us today because you need to hear, don't lose hope. You were ready to quit this week. Quit your job, quit your marriage, quit your faith, maybe even quit your life. I want to infuse some hope towards you. We're going to go through 2 Corinthians chapter 4 verses 8 through 18 verse by verse.

Now, last weekend we were in chapter 1 of this book of the Bible. I'm going to leapfrog chapters 2 and 3. But don't worry, in my daily devos this week, we're going to take a look at some of that content. There's a great book by a guy named Tim Keller called Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering. He has this really interesting observation. He says, "Our Western culture is perhaps the worst in history at helping its members face suffering." And here's why. In secular culture, the meaning of life is to be free to choose what makes you happy in this life. And so in the secular view, suffering can have no meaning at all.

It can't be a chapter in your life story. It's really just the interruption or even the end of your story because Western society is all about finding happiness, not growing through suffering. Now, in contrast to that, Keller talks about the Christian hope in suffering. This is how Christians process their pain if they are seeing their pain through the lens of the Bible. Here's the problem. Let me speak very candidly with you. As a pastor, of course, I observe many, many people processing very severe bouts of pain, episodes of suffering in their lives.

And in my observation, the people who get through their pain, death, loss, disease, other tragedies with their sanity and their faith intact are not the people who've been going to church the longest. They're not the people who read the Bible the most. They're not necessarily the people who know all the fancy Christian theology words. It's the people who see their tough times through this lens, this perspective, this worldview that we're about to see in this passage.

And one of my greatest frustrations as a pastor is that I see many, many Christians who really love Jesus, who have somehow never learned what I'm about to tell you. And so when they go through tough times, they are just destroyed by them. And that means that this is one of the most important life lessons that you and I could ever learn. If you want to thrive through tough times, you need to know this. In his book, Keller points out the three parts of the Christian view about suffering. It starts with the inevitability of suffering and then the pattern of suffering. And finally, the future of suffering: the inevitability of suffering, the pattern of suffering, and the future of suffering.

And that is basically my three-point outline for this message here today because you see the apostle Paul talking about all three of these things in order in the passage we're going to look at today. And I'll spend the least time on this first one because the apostle Paul spends the least time on it. And it's probably the one you need to be least convinced about: the inevitability of suffering. We are going to suffer in life. All through this passage, Paul says things like outwardly, we are wasting away. And what is seen is temporary. Everything in this universe is wasting away. Everything in this universe is temporary. Everything that you can see. All our stuff. All of our possessions. Our health. Our attractiveness. The people that we love. Your skills. Your memory.

And if you are a living example of this, I want you to just type amen in the comments section, right? You know, I was so introspective for days after I visited Camp Hammer and saw how the fire just ravaged that camp campus because it brought this truth home to me in a real kind of a gut punch way. Everything that we see is, as Paul says, absolutely temporary. And that means that loss and grief are going to be familiar companions in life. You are going to get hit by the metaphorical football player.

Paul describes his own experiences in verse eight. We are hard pressed on every side like it's a full blitz. Pressure's coming from everywhere to use football analogies, but not crushed. Perplexed. I'm so confused about what God is doing, but not in despair. Persecuted, but not abandoned. Struck down, but not destroyed. Okay. But here's the thing. I know many Christians who are crushed. Many who, in fact, are in despair. Many who feel abandoned. Many who are essentially destroyed by suffering. I've honestly, I've been there myself. So how could Paul experience all four of these things without being destroyed?

Well, Paul's answer is in the next point. And listen carefully because I sincerely believe this is possibly the least studied and least understood part of the New Testament, part of Christian thinking. And yet this is so big it formed the core of what really made the apostle Paul tick. It is the pattern of suffering that he sees everywhere. Paul sees a pattern in the way God always works. It's always this: crucifixion to resurrection. Death to life, bad to good, all different ways of saying the same thing. This is the arc. This is the shape. This is the pattern of how God always works.

Yes, we get hit by the metaphorical football player, but that means the tumor is discovered. Bad things happen, but God always works something good, even out of the bad. Look at the apostle Paul says this over and over in the next few verses. He says in verse 10, "We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body." Let's just think about the death of Jesus for just a second. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ. On the cross, Jesus suffered unjustly, painfully, horribly. The cross in those days was nothing but a symbol of Roman cruelty, power, and oppression. Yet, within a generation of this, the cross became a symbol of hope to people everywhere.

The cross suddenly had deep meaning. Why? When believers looked at the cross, they began to see it as a sign of hope and love. What changed? Well, we know that Jesus Christ suffered there for us, paid the penalty for our sins on the cross. So it has profound meaning. We also know that he was then raised from the dead. We look at this and we know it's not the end of the story. The cross gives us amazing hope. Paul is saying when you place your faith in Jesus Christ, somehow that same pattern, crucifixion to resurrection, his story becomes woven into your story too, and God uses that same pattern over and over again in your life.

There will come a time when all seems hopeless. It's crucifixion time. But God promises that there will be a resurrection, both literally and metaphorically. And Paul says in the next verse, "For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Christ's sake." There again, you see the death, life to death, death to life, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. Next verse, verse 12. So then death is at work in us, but life is at work in you. And it's not just metaphorically while we go through tough times in life and God works something good out of it. It also means literally resurrection follows our death.

Paul says in the next verse, "It is written, 'I believed, therefore I have spoken.'" Since we have that same spirit of faith, we also believe and therefore speak because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you to himself. Again, death to life, four times in four subsequent verses, four consecutive verses, Paul basically says the same thing. There is a pattern to how God works. Crucifixion turns into resurrection. Death into life. The truly bad things, God works into truly good things.

Now you might say, "Okay, that's nice and poetic." But how does that actually happen in life when something truly is horribly bad? Well, let me tell you a story about a man I consider a modern apostle Paul, John Perkins. He's 90 years old now and still going strong and an amazing gentleman. But let me tell you some of his story. He was born to poor sharecropper parents in the South. His mother died of starvation when he was only an infant. His father then left the family. He was raised by his older brother Clyde, who was a decorated World War II veteran, until Clyde was shot by police and died in John's arms. And John became filled with rage against white people.

Then after a move to Los Angeles, John became a Christian through a good news club that his young son was attending. Eventually he went into the ministry and then, get this, John felt like God was calling him to go back to racially charged rural Mississippi to work for civil rights. And then came the day that would change his life. Picture this. It's 1970. 41-year-old John Perkins and two of his associate pastors go to a local jail there in rural Mississippi one day to post bail for a group of black college students who had been arrested after a protest. Suddenly at the courthouse, he is surrounded by white police officers, jumped, arrested, jailed, beaten, and tortured so severely that he gets knocked out cold and is feared dead.

Then when he comes to with an open head wound, they make him mop up his own blood before they take him to a doctor. It took him months to recover. He went through depression. He went through severe physical challenges. And as Perkins laid on his sick bed, here's what he said happened. Quote, "An image of Christ on the cross filled my mind. This Jesus knew what I had suffered because he had experienced it all himself. But when he looked at that mob that had lynched him, he didn't hate them. He loved them. He forgave them." It's a profound, mysterious truth. Jesus's concept of love overpowering hate. But I know it's true because it happened to me on that bed full of bruises and stitches. God made it true in me. He washed my hatred away and replaced it with a love for the white man in rural Mississippi. And then his ministry really began.

He starts preaching. And the beauty of the gospel, spoken through this man who had gone through that, and he stands up in white churches and tells his story and talks about the forgiveness of Jesus Christ, this just starts tearing through defenses. And I want you to see, this is what Paul says earlier in 2 Corinthians 4-7, where he says, "But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us." That's what's happening in John Perkins' life. And his ministry has been incredible for seven decades. He's respected by the most radical people and the most conservative people. Why? He has total credibility. The resurrection power of God is seen through his suffering.

By the way, his latest book, "One Blood," I highly recommend; I've been reading it. John Perkins, what a story. But this is what Paul's saying here in these verses. We are given over to death for Jesus' sake so that his life may be revealed in us. When I really start to see the world through this perspective, this means I have, well, it means I have many things. I have hope. I have a perspective for processing pain. But even more, I have something else, something else that everyone needs to get through the really tough times. I have purpose. Watch this very next verse.

Paul says, "All of this, all this suffering is for your benefit so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God." How does this happen? The movie came out in 2016 called "Hacksaw Ridge." It's the true story about a man named Desmond Doss. Now, Desmond has an incredible story because Desmond is actually a conscientious objector in World War II. He's a very strong Christian, but he believed that God called him to never carry a weapon ever. So he's in the army in World War II, and yet he believes that God doesn't ever want him to carry a weapon. You think he was treated to a little bit of ridicule in the troops? It was nonstop.

But that changed in April 1945, after a bloody battle, his company has ordered to retreat. It's during the Battle of Okinawa. And Desmond looks out and he sees the battlefield is strewn with the bodies of men from his company. And he can tell from their cries that many are still alive. And so Desmond actually disobeys orders, and he stays behind in the battlefield, and he dodges machine gun fire and other bullets. And he gets wounded by bullets, and he breaks one of his arms. But he goes in one person after the next and rescues his own fellow soldiers who are still alive on the battlefield, drags them off the field. He lowers them down a cliff with a makeshift rope that he had put together from different things he found on the battlefield. And he keeps going back over and over and over again. He does this for, get this, 12 hours until by the end of it he has rescued all 75 soldiers that he found alive. Amazing story.

Well, days later he's recovering in the field hospital from his own wounds, and his commanding officer brings him his Bible. Soggy, charred, muddy, which dropped out of his pocket while he was rescuing everybody. Turns out when the battle was finally over, every single able-bodied man in his group, the very same ones who had ridiculed him for his faith insisted on searching for Desmond's Bible until it was found. Not only are they now willing to listen to him, they are riveted as he tells them about Jesus and he says, "You know, Jesus did the same thing that I did for you. He did the same thing for you, only on a much greater scale." Jesus came to us when we were as good as dead. Jesus was wounded for our sake in order to find us and rescue us and bring us to life. And he has, again, instant credibility and a little revival breaks out in his company.

Now years later a reporter asked him, "How did you find the strength to keep going?" And he said, "Every time I lowered another man down the cliff I prayed, 'Lord, just one more.'" But do you see? He could endure the bullet wounds. He could endure the broken bones. He could endure the suffering because he knew it was for their benefit. It had a purpose. It wasn't absurd. And Paul's saying in this verse, "In some ways that maybe we can never see in this life." Our greatest trials can lead to our greatest ministry. I mean, at the very least our greatest trials can lead to our greatest growth, right? Character, formation in us.

Now I am not saying that God necessarily brings suffering into your life to accomplish this. Remember the inevitability of suffering. Suffering happens. But what God does is he brings a redemptive pattern to suffering, a new narrative. And then the Bible talks about the future of suffering. It will be destroyed. This is the Christian perspective on suffering. Now I'm going to go into a little bit more detail on this point. But before I do, each week in this series I'm interviewing another undaunted person. And this week I spoke with somebody whose life is a great demonstration of what we're talking about today. Sarah Bentley, our Associate Pastor of Care and Adult Ministries here at TLC. Watch my five-minute interview with Sarah.

Well, Sarah, thanks for joining me today. I would love for people to hear about some of the things you have gone through. Well, many things, but probably what kicked it all off was 2005 when I actually had a hemorrhagic stroke. I was only 26 years old, great health, but out of nowhere had this bleed in my brain. And it was just crazy. At the time, the doctor said there's just a couple of, just two or three percent that survived the kind of stroke that I had in the area of my brain that I had it. That led to having brain surgery and almost a year-long recovery after that.

Now, did you have any lingering effects? I don't anymore, but for that first year, I sure did. Just where they had to go in to remove the blood vessels that had burst meant they had to cut through a number of pathways where short-term memories were stored. So the biggest deficit was that I had no ability to hold any memory in the short term for about that first year. How did you deal with that? That's a great question. Some days I dealt better than others. I had a great support system around me, but a huge part of it really was just remembering that the same God that I had walked with for all of these years, who had always been faithful and had always provided, choosing to believe that he would still be faithful.

I honestly had to come to grips to realizing that that might not mean that I would ever be fully healed. It might mean that life would look really different, but just choosing to trust that somehow he would make a way even on those days where there didn't seem to be that there would be any way. Then you got better, but that wasn't the end of your trouble, was it? Yeah. Several years later, in 2013, my husband and I would experience three miscarriages in rapid succession just out of the blue. We had already had one healthy pregnancy, healthy child, and then the doctors couldn't explain why my body just wasn't hanging on to that next set of pregnancies. We have a second son, but two weeks before that second son was born, my dad passed away of cancer. That was yet another moment of not only grieving the loss of my dad, who I adored, but really saying to the Lord, "Why this timing? Why right before the birth of Luke?" It was really hard.

Even that was not the end of your struggle. Yeah, after that, and most recently, as recently as last year, we found out that I have a seizure disorder. It's manageable with medication, but that again has been just another moment of saying, "Okay, Lord, this is not my plan. I don't like this, but how are you going to redeem it? What do you have for me in this? Not only personally, but how can I even use this tragedy to be a blessing?" Well, dovetailing into that, how have you seen your faith help you through this? How does it intersect maybe with some of the things we've been seeing in 2 Corinthians? You know, I think a huge thing for me is just this necessity as believers in Christ to keep the big picture in mind. You know, what we see right now is so temporary. Our life on this earth is like a blip in terms of all of eternity, and the best is yet to come.

And so while now we're living in this brokenness where things in our bodies go wrong or things in life fall apart, this isn't the way it's always going to be. And it's a faith exercise to believe there is something waiting for us in eternity that far outweighs anything we have here, and that even now God is using, again, this tragedy to build something beautiful in us. Okay, how have you seen God use your own suffering in your own ministry? You know, you have training as a hospital chaplain. I don't think I ever would have even thought about going into that field had I not walked through some of the hard things I had walked through because previous to that hard and difficult stuff, life had been pretty smooth for the most part. And so I didn't really understand how to relate to people who were suffering.

But once you've walked through any kind of difficult thing, you have some collateral then to sit with some other people who are suffering and meet them in that. What words of comfort do you have for people suffering right now? My biggest thing is number one, Jesus's presence is always with you. You are never alone. And then I think to remember that we serve a God who loves redemption. He is all about redemption on every level. And one of the things he loves to redeem is suffering. God says, you know what, I can use even that not only to build you up, but to be a blessing to other people. I mean, again, that's why I am doing what I'm doing now. It's all part of God's redemption story in my own life of using my own pain so that I can love on others who are in pain and hopefully bring some hope.

What a great example of what we've been talking about this weekend, right? God is all about redemption, as Sarah said, on every level. That can bring you hope because God will redeem your pain. And ultimately, he's going to restore this earth to its Eden-like glory and eliminate all suffering. This is what Paul gets to in the next couple of verses. He says, "For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all." Now, what does he mean, "are achieving for us"? He doesn't mean we somehow earn our way to heaven through our suffering or through our good works. If you're going to heaven, it's all by God's grace, right? But what this is implying is that God will make good on our suffering. Somehow, God will make it right, particularly if you suffered for Christ's sake.

Now, here's a little sneak preview. We're going to see this in more detail next weekend when we go into chapter 5. But the biblical view of the afterlife is so far different than what many American Christians believe, which is just sort of vaguely believing that we go to heaven and we float around in clouds wearing white robes and playing harps, right? Sounds so boring, like this cartoon. I miss stress, right? That sounds so terrible. Now, the Bible teaches resurrection and restoration, that one day God restores the world to its original glory. We will be there forever in our resurrected bodies, and suffering will be eliminated as the Bible says death will be swallowed up by victory.

So, we've been looking at this Christian approach, Christian perspective on suffering. In his book on this that I referenced earlier, Tim Keller says in the first-century world that Paul wrote in, there were really three basic approaches to suffering. And you see these same basic approaches today by different names. The Stoics said, you got to just accept suffering because it happens, just accept it. The Epicureans said, oh, you got to avoid suffering because life is all about happiness. The ascetics said, no, you got to pursue suffering because it's good for you. The gospel doesn't say any one of those three things. The gospel engulfs suffering. I love Keller's wording there. The gospel, the Christian gospel engulfs suffering with meaning and with hope.

And this is why Paul says, so we fix our eyes, as Sarah said, it is an act of faith, not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. Since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. Fix our eyes as in I lock in. I focus in on this perspective. So here's how I want you to apply this. My choice, and this is a choice you and I make every day. Ask yourself, where will I fix my eyes? Will you fix them on your worries? Will you fix them on your social media feed? Will you fix them, focus them on all the scary headlines all the time? Or will you as an act of faith fix them on the Christian hope in suffering, the Christian, the biblical perspective on suffering?

Again, Sarah talked about this necessity as believers, she said, to keep the big picture in mind. In fact, here's what I want you to do. Ask yourself specifically, how will I fix my eyes on Jesus and his promises this week? We talk about, of course, I'm going to fix my eyes on God. Okay, how are you going to do that? I mean, maybe you need to go on a social media fast. Maybe that's a practical step you can take. I was talking to one of our pastors, Mark Olenga, our life development pastor, and he told me he goes on a social media fast heading into every single weekend for the whole weekend so he can focus on the Lord better.

Here's another thing you can do. You could maybe subscribe to our daily video devos and watch them. The first thing when you get up every morning, you'll have these texted to you for free every morning at 7 a.m. They're little three-minute video devos that I and the other pastors film. Just go to TLC.org/videodevos to get them for free. And if you haven't yet, consider getting into a small group. Do it now. Do it today. It is not too late to join in. We've only had one introductory meeting. You can go to TLC.org/smallgroups to sign up. We've got groups meeting in a socially distanced COVID-compliant in-person way and tons of groups meeting via Zoom.

And here's the way we do this. You might have noticed this, but when you download the notes on the back of each weekend's notes, there are discussion questions that you can look over and be ready to use in your small group or maybe even just with your family. And these help you apply and do a deeper dive into whatever topics we covered in that weekend's message. Do whatever it takes for you to really fix your eyes, to really lock in on this hope, this worldview, that this is how God always works. Always crucifixion to resurrection, death to life, bad to good. That's how you find hope.

Now you might say, but René, you know, this is hard because everything just looks so bad right now. How can we have hope? I started the message talking about Monday Night Football and how they celebrated their 50th anniversary this past week. Well, another memorable story that they told was a game against the Denver Broncos that Oakland Raiders fans still love to recount because the halftime score was Broncos 24, Raiders zero. And that doesn't even show how badly the Raiders had been outplayed. They'd been outgained in terms of total yardage by halftime by a factor of 10. I mean, they were just absolutely being creamed. They just didn't even show up to play. Looked hopeless. Final score: Broncos 27, Raiders 30.

What's that tell you? One of the most meaningless statistics in sports is the halftime score. Right. And you see, that's what the Christian worldview is of life. It often seems hopeless at halftime. But the game's not over yet. So don't lose hope. There is victory. There is resurrection ahead so you can stay undaunted. Let's pray together.

Thank you, Father, that though evil has marred this world, your power is such that you will restore it to glory one day. And until that day, you will redeem all our suffering and reward our suffering and restore our joy. We ask now simply that you would help us to fix our eyes on that truth, on that pattern, on that Christian perspective, so that even the worst things that happen to us will make us a little more like your Son, Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, Amen.