Reformed, Book Reading, Apple Loving, Beverage Snob, 23 Year-Old Husband, In Need of Grace.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
A Big View of God Pt. 5: God and Suffering
Many times in our lives we encounter pain, suffering, trials and the like. Often we think of these instances as God punishing us for our sins, which is sadly a lie that our society has bought into. Our suffering is not to be thought of in terms of karma; that only leads to a small, punitive view of who God is. Now I don’t want to deny that sometimes our actions have consequences, because they do, but that is because our own sinfulness has brought these things upon us not because of some cosmic force that is seeking to even out the balances.
What does suffering have to do with having a big view of who God is?
If we don’t have a big view of God, it is impossible for us to suffer well. Our pain, our trials, our cancer… all of it will be wasted if we fail to have a big view of God and apply that to how we view our circumstances in light of who He is. For almost everyone who read that last sentence (including myself), your world just got rocked.
Wasted?
Wasted!?!
Isn’t the goal of life to appease suffering and enjoy pleasure? To overcome it? To eliminate it?
If we are to be faithful to Christ, we must be able to suffer well. We cannot waste that opportunity to grow and to make much of Him. The Bible never says that following Christ includes a life of luxury and ease. We will face storms; we will suffer. And how we suffer will be determined by our view of God.
In order to suffer well we need to have a couple of basic beliefs (stolen from John Piper ):
-God is not surprised by our suffering and pain (aka, He is sovereign)
-God is good
-Our suffering is not a curse
-Our comfort is not in odds of survival, but in God
-Overcoming suffering is not survival, its cherishing Christ
-Suffering points us to Christ
-Suffering allows us to make much of Christ to those around us
Personally, I am not sure if I am ready to suffer well. I haven’t been thrown into that place yet, but I pray as I am being sanctified that I will be able to suffer well.
A couple of men that have suffered well over the past few years because of their large views of God are John Piper and Matt Chandler. John Piper is now cancer free and healthy, and Matt Chandler just finished up a round of chemo today (he will be our focus). Essentially, last Thanksgiving he had a seizure, woke up in the hospital and was told that he has a brain tumor that will most likely kill him in the next 3 years. Since then he has had a large part of the cancer removed and gone through radiation and a couple stages of chemo. He and his wife have chosen to keep his battle public so that Christ will be magnified in his suffering.
It’s easy to make much of God when life goes according to our plans, but if we lose faith when our world is seemingly torn apart, we deny God’s goodness, sovereignty and grace. After all, for believers, this world is our hell. It can only get better from here.
I would like to write more about Matt’s story, but I’ll fail to do it justice. Here is the first video he posted right before his surgery. He says it all better than I ever could.
How have you failed to bring God glory in your suffering? Post your thoughts!
Scripture to Meditate on:
Link to the AP article about Matt Chandler
Book for further study: Suffering and the Sovereignty of God
A Big View of God pt. 4: God and The Not So Ordinary
When was the last time you were truly amazed by something?
When you saw Inception? The last time you went to the beach? The first time you picked up an iPhone? (I’m slightly nerdy…)
Either way, these things grasp our attention because they are unique, mind-bending, fun and inescapably beautiful. We are drawn to wonder in the things that perplex us and bring us joy.
Now lets look at this a different way…. When was the last time you were amazed by the ordinary things in life? Eating, grass, breathing, going to work, hanging out with your best friend, etc…
Why have these things become so dull?
I believe that by having a big view of who God is we can actually view the mundane things in life as extraordinary and unique. In short, a big view of God impacts how you view the world around you and your day to day life.
Maybe if we had a big picture of God’s power to sustain everything, every morning when we awoke we would be amazed and thankful that we are still breathing and our hearts are still beating.
What if we viewed our jobs as a means of living out our abilities that God has given us, despite our actual enjoyment of the task at hand…. and just maybe what if our joy in our work came from knowing that we were actually gifted with that ability from a massively gracious God, despite if we actually enjoyed it?
What would our lives look like if we were constantly looking at the mundane things in life and viewing them as extraordinary in light of who God is and what He has done for us and around us?
What if the source of joy in our lives was not found in our own personal desires?
Scripture to meditate on…
A Big View of God Pt. 3: God and Our Identity
As humans, we constantly look for approval and hope in other people. It’s part of our humanity. As our hearts desire community and relationships we look for specific things from those whom we are in community with. But what happens when we have a big view of people and a small view of God? First, we can lose our true identity as God see us. Second, we put our hope in fallible people that will eventually let us down. Third, humans are finite, which ultimately sets us up for failure.
Here’s a quick example… Who was your childhood hero? Are they still your Hero? If not, why?
Presidents have affairs, movie stars have drug addictions, musicians commit suicide, and sadly Justin Timberlake is singing to 400 million other people, not just me. Our heros and idols (even our friends and family) let us down. We can’t allow them to determine our identity because if we do, our identity will ultimately be falsified. So we must invert our big view of people and transfer it into a big view of God. This is how we truly discover who we are and our place in this world. We need to see ourselves as God sees us and this can only be done by having a big view of who God is.
The first is to recognize that you are not a good person (p.s. neither am I).
“If we think we are usually good, then God becomes irrelevant.”
-Edward Welch, When People are Big and God is Small
Jonathan Edwards also had similar thoughts. In his resolutions he writes, “Resolved, to act…as if nobody had been so vile as I, and as if I had committed the same sins…as others; and to let the knowledge of their failings promote nothing but shame in myself, and prove only an occasion of my confessing my own sins to God.”
While Edwards might speak in lofty terms, he is speaking a great truth that really urges himself (and us) to 1) not think of ourselves as better than those around us and 2) to allow other peoples shortcomings to cause us to reflect on our own. Because if we view ourselves as good, we leave no room for God (quote above). We must constantly be finding our own faults for our own growth as well as a growth in a reliance that exists outside of ourselves.
Once we recognize that we aren’t good people, we can then look to God for our identity and our hope. In light of who he is, we can see that ultimately he is in control, not us; he sustains our lives, not us; he is the one who saves us, not us. By expanding our view of God and lessening our view of people, we can find our identity in a source that is infinite and true rather than a source that is fallible and finite.
How do you view yourself in light of what your view of God is? Post your thoughts!
Scripture to Meditate on:
A Big View of God Pt. 2: Why is it important?
Q: “What is the chief and highest end of man?”
A: “Man’s chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him for ever.”
You may be wondering to yourself what that actually means or why having a big view of God is even important. By the very definition of His nature, if God is to be God then he must be at the center of all things. He must be worshipped. Whether we like it or not, we are all worshippers. We may worship shoes, sex, money, cars, spouses, iPhones or even ourselves, but in the end we all worship something.
Now we must ask ourselves a couple of questions.
What do I worship and why do I worship it?
*Hint* think about where and what you spend your money on and what you spend the most time thinking about*
What is truly worthy of worship?
And while these are all good things that God has given us, can they truly be ULTIMATE things? Money gets spent, sex loses it’s excitement, shoes break, iPhones become outdated, and significant others are just as fallible as ourselves. In short, idols fail.
Despite our idolatry (giving other things the status that only belongs to God) and tendencies to forget who God is, He remains the only thing that is actually deserving of worship. How can worshipping and enjoying God be the chief purpose of our lives if our God is impotent and lackluster? We must have a HUGE view of God if He is truly worthy of worship. If we fail to have a big view of who God is, we can’t truly worship Him.
What about God makes Him worthy of worship in your mind? *post your thoughts*
Scriptures to meditate on:
The first post in this series can be found HERE.
A Big View of God
When you hear the word “God,” what do you think of?
An old man?
A King?
Jesus?
A spirit being?
A warrior?
A father?
A cosmic sky fairy?
A creator?
Lately I’ve been thinking that far too often, our views of God are far too narrow or even non-existant. We thank Him for the gifts in life and damn Him for the trials. We thank him when we win Grammys and forget about him when we lose. More often than not, we only recognize Him when we accomplish something or need His help.
What would our lives look like if we had a big (maybe even massive) view of God? How would we view our blessings and our curses? Would we thank Him in both? Would we even be thankful for both? How would we view sin if our views of God were vastly expanded?
These are questions that we should be taking seriously. And if you are a skeptic that finds these thoughts to be silly, I’d like to challenge you to think about the possibility of God and what implications come along with the idea of a massively huge God.
Over the foreseeable future, this will be a topic I will heavily be exploring and writing about: having a BIG view of God. I’ll be writing about what a big view of God looks like, what it implies, give examples of people who had massive views of God, and practical ways to expand your view of God. This should be a challenging, yet exciting topic to explore and I believe it will big growth in the lives of those who join me on this journey.
For now, think about your view of who God is and post your thoughts… If you don’t know where to start, read Psalm 9.
