Walk Through the Bible: Job
Text for Sermon: Job 1:1; 2:3-6, 9-10; 13:15
January has been a rough month for me. Unlike any other month of my life.
Three doctors’ office visits, one urgent care visit, ER and hospital overnight, a long sickness and then to top it all off, a kidney stone. In the midst of my pleading prayers for mercy and relief I wondered if this was the hand of God the week before preaching on the book of Job.
But I want to be very careful not to suggest I have great wisdom on suffering. Yes, kidney stones are unimaginable pain, but it is short lived relatively speaking. I don’t know the pain of a chronic or debilitating illness. I don’t know the lifelong pain of the death of a child or spouse. I see the suffering of the poor in refugee camps, the innocent victims living in Gaza or Ukraine. So I speak carefully, humbly, knowing there is much I haven’t suffered and much I don’t know.
Someone once said, “Don’t trust a man who doesn’t walk with a limp.” Maybe another way of saying it is don’t trust someone who hasn’t been humbled by a few hard knock in life, someone who hasn’t suffered.
Suffering makes you humble. Suffering also makes you wiser, it gives you a bit of perspective.
You don’t want to read books on suffering written by people for whom the subject is only intellectual, and not experiential. But even then you have to be careful. What lens are they looking through to understand their suffering? Is it fatalistic or is it Biblical?