Your Suffering Is Not the End of Your Story

Yeah. Now, you don't have to raise your hand this time, but if I asked you if you thought you had probably suffered more than the typical person, I bet a lot of you would say yes to that too. Right? You've buried people. You've lost things that you don't want to talk about. You've survived things that should have killed you. The pain is real. And some of you may have been asking God where He was in the middle of all of it. And maybe you've even worried that that doubt and those questions aren't okay. Guys, that's not disrespectful. That's honest. And tonight, we're going to talk about where God was in the middle of all of it. I want you to understand, I'm saying it's okay to ask God where He was in your suffering. But I'm not saying it's okay to use your suffering as an excuse to sit out your calling, okay? Some of you have already been doing that without even realizing that you were doing that. Suffering has become the reason you isolate, the reason you keep God at a distance, the reason you tell yourself, well, you'll get around to serving Him and reaching people and doing whatever He's called you to do once you're healed enough, whatever that means. Tonight I want to look at three things. First, you are not alone in what you've been through. Second, that you are allowed and actually invited to bring every bit of it to God, even the anger and the questions. And the third, that everything you've going through is temporary. Some of you were in our rejection class that we just finished last week. And last week I went through a list of people in the Bible that have suffered. And I want to share part of that list tonight because I think it's impactful when the Lord revealed it to me.

I know it impacted me. And I'm not sharing it to make you sad in any way, right? I'm walking you through something to prove that you are not the only one who has ever felt abandoned, abused, rejected, but still has a story worth living. So I want to go through a couple of people in Scripture. And as I say their names and tell you what they went through, I want you to think about if any part of their story relates to any part of your story, anything that you've been through in the past, or are currently going through, okay? So the first person is Joseph. Joseph's own brothers hated him enough to sell him for cash. This wasn't strangers, guys, this was his family. And then he got used, falsely accused of rape and thrown in jail for something he didn't do. Then you have Hagar. She didn't get a say. Somebody else decided what her body was going to be used for. They used her to get whatever they wanted. And when she wasn't useful anymore, they dumped her and her son off, leaving them with nothing left to die. We have Leah. Leah spent her whole marriage watching her husband desire another woman. She kept trying to earn his love the only way she knew how, which was with her body. But it never worked. We have David. When the prophet came looking for a new king, David's own father didn't even think to call him in from the field. His own dad didn't think he was worthy of being mentioned. Later the man David served got so jealous he literally threw a spear at his head and tried to kill him. He hunted him like an animal.

We have Tamar, someone she trusted lied to get her alone. And once he had her there, he raped her while she begged him to stop. And the second he was done, he looked at her like she was the disgusting one and threw her out. We have Job. Job buried all ten of his children. He lost everything he owned. He lost his health and then he watched everyone who used to respect him disappear the second his life fell apart while his friend sat around telling him it must all be his fault. We have Jeptha. His own brothers told him that because his mom was a prostitute that he didn't count as family, they ran him out of his own house. We have Hosea, Hosea loved someone who kept sleeping with other people and leaving him for them over and over and over in public for everyone to watch. We have Paul. Before Paul changed, he was a pretty bad guy who hurt a lot of people. So when he showed up and started telling everybody that he was different, they didn't believe him. terrified of him and they never stopped looking at his pet. And then we have Jesus. He knows what it's like to have almost everybody turn on him at once. His hometown tried to kill him. His own family thought he'd lost his mind. A friend sold him out for cash. His closest friends swore they didn't know him. Everyone ran. A crowd screamed for his death. He was beaten, spit on, stripped, mocked, nailed up, and left to die in public while people watched and laughed.

Because that's 10 names out of scripture. There are roughly 3,000 people in scripture. And I think if you went looking, you'd find that most of them walked through some kind of trauma on their own. Suffering doesn't skip people. It never has. That's not just a Bible statistic. The World Health Organization estimates that 6 out of 10 adults on this planet have lived through something that genuinely wounded them. Some kind of abuse, neglect, or household chaos that left a mark. And I'm not saying 6 out of 10 people in this room. I'm saying 6 out of 10 people on Earth. There are 8 billion people on Earth alive right now. So if you apply that number, you get somewhere around 4.8 billion people currently walking around on this planet who knows exactly what it's like to carry a wound similar to yours. You have never been as alone as your suffering wants you to believe you are. Some of you have been waiting. Waiting for the day that all of this makes sense. Waiting for someone to hand you a reason for what you had to go through. You want answers. You want to know why, yet you're thinking maybe God didn't or won't answer you. So you're waiting to feel healed enough, whole enough, far enough removed from the pain before you let yourself get

close to God again or anyone else. But guys, I need you to know something. That day might never come. Not one of those 10 people that I just talked about got a memo explaining to them why they went through the things that they went through. Joseph didn't get a letter from his brothers apologizing before he was thrown in that pit. Job never got a clean answer for why he lost everything. They didn't get free because they understood their suffering. They got free some other way. And that's what I want to talk to you about tonight. So the first step in getting free is probably not what you would expect me to say. Because not everybody in the church will agree with what I'm about to say. But the first thing I want you to do if you're stuck in your suffering is ask God why. I want you to think about the person that you're the closest to on this earth. The one that you don't have to fix your hair for. The one whose phone call you pick up without even hesitating. The one you tell your dreams to. The one that you're not afraid to tell your fears to. If that person did something that you didn't understand, I would think you'd be close enough to ask them why they did that. That is the same kind of intimate relationship that God wants with you.

He doesn't want you to be distant. He doesn't want it to be formal. Like you're some stranger to him and you need to be polite about him. He wants you to be close enough that when something doesn't make sense, you go straight to him and you ask. There's a prophet I want to talk about tonight. His name is Habakkuk. Okay, some of y'all grew up in a different church than me. Maybe you say Habakkuk. But in my church we said Habakkuk, okay. So Habakkuk lived at a time when everything was falling apart. There was extreme corruption everywhere he looked. His land was filled with violence and hatred and evil and spiritual conditions were at all time low. Does that sound familiar? Like this time that we live in today. But Habakkuk wanted to know why. So he did something that maybe you were taught was off limits. He questioned God and Habakkuk one versus two through four. He says, "How long a Lord must I call for help, but you do not listen. Violence is everywhere. I cry, but you do not come to save. Must I forever see these evil deeds? Deeds, why must I watch all of this misery? Everywhere I look, I see destruction and violence

and surrounded by people who love to argue and fight. Every other prophetic book in the Old Testament was written to the people, but this one wasn't. This was a private conversation between Habakkuk and God, but God lets us listen in on purpose. And God didn't rebuke Habakkuk for him asking what he did was answer him. And in Habakkuk one, five, God basically tells him, "I'm working. You just can't see it yet." But that wasn't enough for Habakkuk. So he asked again, "Have you ever asked why bad things happened to good people and good things happened to bad people?" I know I have. Habakkuk did too. You'll notice that. And if you read the book, what else you'll notice is that he never once assumed there wasn't a God. He didn't walk away. He just asked again and again because he didn't understand and because he trusted God enough to bring it straight to him instead of someone else. Guys, he's not the only one. The Bible is full of what's called a lament. A lament is an honest cry to God when life isn't going the way that you thought that it should. Today we hide our emotions and we pretend like everything's fine and we search for false saviors like work and food and drugs and alcohol and men or women's anything

to numb the feelings that we're feeling. But in biblical times, laments were set out loud. David wrote them throughout the book of Psalms. Jeremiah wrote an entire book called Lamentations because he couldn't understand why Jerusalem was being destroyed. Gideon asked God why he abandoned them. Job asked God why he was even born. And Jesus on the cross cried out asking God, why have you forsaken me? So if Jesus was allowed to ask God, why so are you. But there's a right way to bring your why to him. It isn't about pride. It's not about proving you know better than him. It's not about questioning his authority. Psalm 912 says he forgets not the cry of the humble. So when you come to him humble instead of demanding, you can ask why and he will not turn away from you. God is powerful. Guys, he can handle your questions. He can handle your doubts. And in Psalm 56.8 or said, it says, you keep track of all of my sorrows. You have collected my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book. Every tear. Every single one you have ever cried. Even the ones no one else saw. He's not too far away and he's not too busy. And he's not going to minimize your pain. And he's not going to ask you to be fake

by pretending that you are fine. So bring him your anger and bring him your confusion and bring him your blame if that's where you're at tonight. He is a big God and I promise he can handle it. But sometimes his answer is different than we expect. In John chapter 9, the disciples come across this man and he was born blind. And they asked Jesus, whose sin caused this? Was it his own or his parents? They wanted to know why. But Jesus didn't give him a why. He turned the question into a how. How can this glorify God? And then he heals the man and he spends the rest of his life telling everybody what Jesus did for him. So guys, God let you ask why. He's not offended on it. But he wants to walk you from why into how? How can this pain help someone else? How can your despair become a blessing? How can this trauma glorify God? How can you use what happened to you to tell someone else about Jesus? And Habakkuk gets to that place too. And Habakkuk 2-1, he says he's going to climb up to his watchtower and wait to see what the Lord says. He didn't keep demanding an answer. He asked and then he chose to wait because he trusted that God would speak. The other thing I want you to know about Habakkuk

is he took his concerns straight to God. He didn't take it to his friends. He didn't take it to his spouse or his coworkers. He didn't post on social media about it. He didn't sit around complaining to everybody but God. The Israelites did that for 40 years in the wilderness and it cost them 40 years in the wilderness. God knows what our mouths can do when we're hurting, right? He tells us life and death are in the power of the tongue. By Habakkuk 2-4, God tells Habakkuk one of the most important lines in the Bible. He said, look at the proud. They trust in themselves and their lives are crooked but the righteous will live by their faithfulness to God. Another translation says the just shall live by faith, not by explanation but by faith. That verse shows up three more times in the New Testament because God wants us to get it. Your faith is not dependent on your emotions. It's dependent on the truth and God's word is that truth. So there will be times when you feel like God isn't there. You will feel like he's turned his back on you. You will feel like nothing is working out but feelings aren't facts. Sometimes a little doubt is part of the road that gets you to a deeper place of faith and that's okay as long as you don't stay there. By Habakkuk chapter three, verses 17 through 19, listen to what Habakkuk says. He says, even though the fig trees have no blooms,

even though there are no grapes on the vine, even though the olive trees have no blooms, "even though the flocks die in the fields "and the cattle barns are empty, "I will rejoice in the Lord. "I will be joyful in the God of my salvation. "The sovereign Lord is my strength." Has nothing about Habakkuk changed between chapters one and three? Nothing about his situation changed. He still didn't have an answer to his why, but he chose to rejoice anyway, because he chose faith without an explanation. Turning toward God with your questions is not turning away from him, right? Staying silent, refusing to go to God, slowly walking away or putting distance. That's what turning away from God is. But when you turn to him, Jeremiah 33, says if you ask, he will tell you remarkable secrets about the things to come. When you call on him, he will answer. So where is God in your suffering? He's not distant, and he's not silent, and he's not turned away from you. Psalm 56, eight, already told you he's collecting every tear in a bottle. Habakkuk, one, five, already told you he's working. Even when you can't see it, Isaiah 43 promises, "He's not sending you through the fire alone.

"He is walking with you." And that is your answer to where was God in the suffering. He was with you the entire time. But what do you do with that answer? For a believer tonight, right now, this is the worst your life is ever going to get. But for someone who doesn't know Jesus, this is the best it's ever going to get. Think about that for a minute because it should change how you carry your suffering. James 414 says that your life is like the morning fog here a little while, and then it's gone. Psalm 90, 10 puts a number on it. It says 70 years are given to us. Some even live to 80, but even the best years are filled with pain and trouble, and soon they disappear and we fly away. Best case, we get 70, 80, 90, maybe even a hundred years on this earth. But guys, eternity, it has no end. We can't even give it a number. So if you lined up your whole life next to forever, even if it's the longest life anyone has ever lived on this earth, it wouldn't measure up to a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of eternity. I wanna show you something that I saw one time that was so powerful, okay. And Ken, I'm gonna have you come help me with this. I want you, can you see this?

There's like this little black. It's about an inch here of black tape on the end of this yarn. Do you see this? Okay. This inch right here represents your life on earth. All of it, no matter how many years you have, whether it's 70, 80, 90, or 100, this represents your life. Every year you've lived, every year that you have left. And now let's compare that to eternity. The yarn represents eternity. And you can watch how far eternity goes. It's not stopping. It's not even close to the end. Eternity does not run out. All of your pain, all of your suffering, all of your trial, every trauma you have ever faced fits right here in this one inch of black tape. The worst thing that ever happened to you happens inside this tiny inch in a yarn that never ends. Isaiah 43, says, "When you go through deep waters, "I will be with you. "When you go through rivers of difficulty, "you will not drown. "When you walk through the fire of oppression, "you will not be burned up. "The flames will not consume you." Notice it says, "When, when you walk through those things." It doesn't say if.

He already knew you'd walk through it. He never promised that you'd get to skip it. He just promised he'd be here with it. That yarn that you just watched going. For a believer, it isn't just long, it's good. Paul, in his prison cell in Philippians 1-2, he wanted to get out. He wanted relief from jail, but he said, "I long to go be with Christ, "which would be far better for me." And in Revelation 21, 4, it tells us what's waiting for us in eternity. He will wipe away every tear from our eyes. There will be no more death, no more sorrow, no more crying and no more pain. All of those things are gone forever. No more of what you've carried in this inch. It's gone forever. But this is the eternity for someone who knows Jesus. And this is the part where I'm asking you to change same yarn that's running all over the stage here is still there for someone who doesn't know Jesus. It's still endless. Only it doesn't end in no more tears. It doesn't end in no more suffering. It ends exactly in what they're going through right now forever. Their one inch of suffering on this earth isn't the worst it gets for them. It's the best it is for them. It's about where they're going, you guys. Pulling someone out of the ditch they're in isn't it isn't really about making someone's one inch on this earth more comfortable. It's about where are they going to spend eternity, right? Pulling someone, I mean, if you know someone who is stuck in a pit, you're not just offering them relief for this. You're offering them the distance between an eternity of no more tears and an eternity that never stops hurting. Guys, every person in here was pulled out of something. Every person has

been rescued, or maybe you're in the process of being rescued and pulled out right now, but that means you know exactly what it looks like to be in the pit, which means you are exactly the right person to go back in and reach for someone else, not just for their sake here on this earth, but for where they spend forever. So stop letting your one inch of suffering dictate what you're going to do. Someone's eternity might be dependent on you going back for them. Someone in your life needs help getting out of the exact same ditch that you climbed out of. Somebody needs to hear that this life is temporary, that Jesus is the one who gets us through, that where they spend forever is being decided right in that one little inch of black tape. Someone is waiting for you to stop hiding behind your pain, and you're suffering long enough to tell them about Jesus. I know you have suffered. You are not alone. Ten people in Scripture and roughly 4.8 billion people alive today could tell you that you are not alone. You are allowed to bring every part of this to God. He's a big God and he can handle it. You're allowed to bring the anger, the confusion and the why. But remember, all of it is temporary. All of it. And it's over quick, which means your calling doesn't get to wait until your pain makes sense. So first and foremost, if you are unsure where you're going to spend eternity, this is long. If you've never given your heart to Jesus Christ, is your Lord or Savior, and you don't know if you're going to spend eternity wiping, having Jesus wipe your tears away or whether you're going to spend it suffering, then I tell you don't wait another second. I know you hear a lot of altar calls, okay, if you're ever in church, but I'm telling you this is real and this is long. Give your heart to the Lord today, tonight. Find somebody, pray, whatever it is. You can run up here now, someone will pray with you, right? Your eternity is the most important thing. But if you're saved and you know where you're going to spend eternity, then I want you to think about somebody that doesn't know. I believe that the Lord's going to put someone on your heart or your mind today, even if it's one person. One person that you haven't really been thinking about too much or praying for too much because you've been wrapped up in your own wound to reach out to them. And I'm going to tell you to set your wound aside and go find them and go tell them what Jesus is doing for you and tell them where God is in the suffering and that the suffering isn't your whole story, what you do with your suffering is. Lord God, thank you for every person in this room, Lord, thank

you, Lord, for what you're going to do through their suffering. Lord, the suffering is hard. I know it's hard, Lord, but you promise in Romans A28 to work all things together for the good of those who love you and who are called according to your purpose. I know every person in this room is called, called to reach others, called to dig others out of the pit, called to set others on the right track. Lord God, put people on their hearts and in their minds, Lord, of who you want them to reach. Lord God, comfort them in the suffering that they have but remind them that it's temporary and that people are headed to hell, Lord God, and you don't want anyone to perish. Lord, use each person in here to do mighty things in your kingdom, Lord God. I want to come back a year from now and I want every person in here to have taught others about you, to be discipling them, Lord God, to be sharing the good news of you everywhere that they go. Lord, thank you for your grace and your mercy when we get so focused on ourselves, when we get caught up in our own pain, Lord God, again, we know that you comfort us, but we know that you comfort us so that we can comfort others. I pray they don't wait another minute because eternity is so long. Lord, I pray that they find you today is very moment without any hesitation. God, we thank you for your son, Jesus, who suffered more than anything we could ever even possibly imagine. We thank you that through his suffering, he never once looked at himself, but he always looked to us. God, we love you, and we praise you in the name of Jesus. Amen. [Applause] Bye bye. [BLANK_AUDIO]