Sin is usually its own punishment in terms of the natural consequences it brings. If I overeat, the natural consequence of that sin is gaining weight. If the natural consequences of sin don’t get our attention, a loving God will discipline us as well. To heap on top of all this our additional penalty of self-hatred and the miserable life that goes with it is to be masochistic and unbiblical. As one of my colleagues vividly put it, that’s like treating a sprained ankle by pounding on it with a crowbar.
What will it be? Are you going to go Janice’s route of not accepting God’s forgiveness and continuing to pay for sins that have already been paid for? Or are you going to go the route Christ offers where sins are forgiven and where you show your appreciation by dedicating yourself to “go and sin no more”? If you think you are letting yourself off the hook too easily by choosing Christ’s route, let me suggest you give it a try. Christ’s route will cost you everything.
“Because I’m a Christian, God Will Protect Me from Pain and Suffering.”
Jerry was one of those Christians who praised God when things were going well but who felt bitter toward Him when things went wrong. When he lost his business and faced bankruptcy, things were obviously not going well. And Jerry was very bitter. When he came to me for counseling, his overriding question, session after session, was, “How could God let this happen to me?”
“You seem to be assuming that a loving God wouldn’t let bad things happen to you,” I said.
He looked at me with a funny expression on his face. “Well, how can He be loving if He lets bad things happen to us?”
“Let me throw that question back at you. What do you think?”
He didn’t have a quick answer. Finally, Jerry said, “Could be He’s getting me back for some sin in my life.”
I waited. “Then all of us would be toast, wouldn’t we?”
“You’re right. I suppose that’s not it. But what else could it be?” Jerry looked genuinely puzzled.
Being a Christian always means joy, peace, and contentment, we are told. We childishly misinterpret that to mean a Christian will never have problems or pain, at least not the more serious versions. We foolishly believe that God will protect us from losing our jobs, suffering serious illnesses, or having other bad things happen to us. We want to believe it, so we do.
I’ve seen many Christians like Jerry whose “faith” becomes a source of bitterness and resentment the moment life turns sour. We spew all the venom in our souls at God when He doesn’t come riding to our rescue as if He is some heavenly knight in shining armor. We, as the earthly damsel in distress, expect Him to save us from the fire-breathing dragons of life because we think being a Christian is some kind of guarantee that life will never harm us.
The bottom line is that life is difficult for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike. Having faith in God doesn’t mean you won’t have problems. If anything, being a Christian means more troubles for two primary reasons: (1) you are asked to die to your own selfish desires and live for God on His terms; and (2) you will be persecuted for standing up for Christ by a world that rejects Him. Dying to self and suffering for the cause of Christ are two inescapable realities of the Christian life that make it a difficult life to live.
The ultimate comfort of Christianity isn’t that it ensures that our lives here on earth will go well. They surely won’t. The ultimate comfort of Christianity is that however bad life is down here for us, we have God’s help in time of need and eternal life in heaven waiting on us when we die. Both give us real hope.
But don’t we Christians deserve less pain and suffering just because we are Christians? No! A thousand times no! Anyone coming to Christianity for an easier ride through life has missed the point altogether. Christ Himself came out of heaven and suffered greatly here on earth. If anyone deserved to be protected from life being painful, it would have been Him. Christ was not spared life’s slings and arrows, and neither will those called by His name.
Jerry and I talked about this.
“Jerry, I’m truly sorry about what happened to your business and the bankruptcy you are facing. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. I know you are in a lot of pain over it, and you should be. What concerns me is that your spiritual life seems to be suffering as a result.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“It’s one thing to go through tough times. It’s another to be resentful toward God about the situation. I get the feeling that as long as things were going well for you, God was a great guy and you praised Him to the mountaintops. But when your business failed and your fortune went with it, the first person you felt bitter toward was God.”
“You’re telling me I should just put a happy face on all this and ‘count it all joy,’ like the Bible says?” he replied.
“Well, no and yes, actually. Put a happy face on it? No, that isn’t what’s called for, nor does it help. It would be lying to yourself and others to act as if you feel happy about what has happened. No one would feel that way about a painful situation, and no one should. But ‘count it all joy’? Yes, that is what you are supposed to do. Do you know what that really means?” I asked.
“Well, I thought it meant we were supposed to be happy about everything. I take it from what you’ve just said that it doesn’t mean that, right?”
“Right. That verse of the Bible means that whatever happens to you and however bad it may be, put joy together with it. In other words, couple your suffering with joy—joy based in the fact that God is still God, He still loves you, He is more powerful than any circumstance that you come up against in life, and that regardless of what happens to you down here, you are still going to heaven someday where all the misery will end.”
“So, Christians aren’t supposed to whitewash the bad things that happen to them, just not lose sight of the good things that remain true. Is that it?”
“Yes, that is exactly it. Christ didn’t ‘pretty up’ the bad things that happened in His life. He wept over them, got angry about them, felt hurt over them. He always went to God the Father and received comfort and help. He didn’t get bitter and stomp off.”
Jerry looked caught. He heard what I was saying, and it stung him. He realized that he did expect God to protect him from bad things. He realized that he felt bitter when God chose not to. Jerry came to see that he was choosing to resentfully “stomp off” from God over his problems rather than turn to God for help. Seeing all this enabled Jerry to allow God to comfort him in his time of need instead of choosing to give God the royal stiff-arm for allowing bad things to happen to him in the first place. Jerry was on his way to a healthier faith and dealing with his problems constructively rather than destructively.
“In this world you will have trouble,” Christ once said,7 summing up the great truth that counters the “God will protect me from pain and suffering” lie. If we demand that life be pain-free, we will almost automatically be bitter when it isn’t. And we will take it out on God, the very person who wants to help us when we are hurting.
“All My Problems Are Caused by My Sins.”
Ever since the days of Job, people have been hearing and believing that a person’s problems are always caused by his sins. Harold was the victim of that same old lie.
“I know why I’m having such trouble,” he said. “I’m being punished.” Harold was a distinguished older man I’d been working with for only a short time, and he opened one of our sessions with this statement.
“Punished? By whom?” I asked.
“God,” he quickly replied.
“For what?” I asked.
“Well,” he hedged, “I don’t know for sure. But I’m sure it’s something we can figure out. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Harold, do you believe that people have problems only because they have sinned?”
“Yes, it makes sense.”
“Then bad things happen only to bad people? Good people never have any troubles?”
“Well, no, that’s not what
I said. Good people seem to have troubles . . .”
He thought about that for a second, then clicked his fingers, “But maybe they’re not as good as they seem to be!”
“And bad people who get away with awful crimes, they’re not really bad?”
“No, no, no. Look, I don’t know. There’s some explanation for that, I’m sure,” he said, with a wave of his hand.
We humans like to explain things. We like to explain the universe to one another, to have some tiny grasp of it all. Everything must happen for a reason, we believe. If we just know that reason, we can feel more in control somehow. To believe we cause all of our problems is a very easy lie to believe (the opposite lie, that all of our problems are caused by others, is also very easy to believe). If it’s true, then all we have to do to avoid problems is to be good. Yet even when we are “good,” we still have problems.
Of course, as always, this lie has a toehold in reality. When you sin (lie, steal, commit adultery), problems will result from the act. But other people’s sins can cause our problems too. If your business partner decides to funnel off revenue into a Swiss checking account rather than use it to pay bills, you will suffer.
Sometimes we have problems and no one sinned! For example, our friends’ home was struck by lightning. It burned a hole in their roof, fried some of their electrical wiring, and ruined some appliances. They had a lot of problems as a result of that strike, and no one had sinned. Yet even in a situation like that, some Christians would fall into thinking, They must have done something wrong because otherwise God would not let that lightning strike their house. If God used lightning to get back at us for our sins, every house in this country would have been torched long ago!
We can see this truth, once again, in the ministry of Christ. His disciples must have believed that people’s problems are always caused by sin. When the disciples saw a man blind from birth, they asked Christ, “Rabbi, who sinned? This man or his parents? Who caused his blindness?”
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but [this happened so] that the works of God should be revealed in him.”8What an amazing statement—the guy was blind and nobody’s sin was the cause! The man was made blind so that God could demonstrate His power in giving him sight.
Whatever the cause of a personal problem may be, the main truth we can grasp here is that God can bring good out of it. That’s the truth behind the passage “in all things God works for the good of those who love him.”9If I inflict a problem on myself because of sin in my life, God can use it for my good. If someone else’s sin causes me a problem, God can use it for my good. If no one sins but I still have a problem, God can use it for my good.
The challenge we face here is to examine honestly the root of a given problem. If the root is personal sin, then we need to repent of that sin. If a problem is the result of someone else’s sin or no sin at all, then we need to let ourselves off the hook of responsibility and focus on solving the problem with God’s help as best we can. The alternative is to feel guilty over something we didn’t cause, all because of a lie.
Harold started to understand this in our work together.
“Harold, as I understand it, the problem you are dealing with has to do with being laid off recently. For the last two months you have been unable to find work. Your company gave you three months’ worth of salary as severance pay, but you are going to have to make some significant life-style changes if a new job doesn’t come through soon. Is that right?” I asked.
“Yes, that’s right. Seventeen years of hard work and dedication, and they thank me by letting me go. I’ve got one more month of income left, and there is no job in sight.”
“And you’re convinced that some sin in your life caused all this to happen?”
“Right.”
“What sin?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered somewhat defensively.
“You have a guess, don’t you?” I prodded.
“Well, I occasionally drink too much. I wonder if it might be related to that.”
“Anything else?”
“I struggle with watching things on TV that I shouldn’t,” he confessed.
“R-rated movies?”
“Yes.”
“Very often?”
“Every so often.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“I lose my temper sometimes and let some words fly around my wife that are wrong.”
“Anything else?” I kept on.
“Well, sure, there are other things I do that I’m not proud of, but the ones that concern me the most are the drinking, watching R-rated movies, losing my temper, and cussing,” he asserted.
“And you believe that God made you lose your job as a way to punish you for these things?”
“Yes, that’s how I feel,” he replied.
“Do you think everyone else in the company who was laid off was similarly being punished for sins in his life?” I asked.
“Well, everyone sins . . . ,” he stammered.
“Yes, I know, but do you think that all of the people who were laid off got laid off because God was punishing them for their sins?”
“I had never thought of that. No, I don’t guess that would be the case with everyone.”
“So, why did some people get laid off if personal sin wasn’t the issue?”
“Actually, the company made some bad business decisions years ago, and the layoffs are tied to them. The company is laying off people in order to survive.”
“You might say that the sins of those who run the company have led to some people getting laid off?”
“Yes, I guess so,” he admitted.
“Any other reasons that people might be losing their jobs unrelated to sin in their own lives?”
“Well, the computer field itself is a competitive one, and we, like a lot of other companies, are running into the fact that the need for the computers we make isn’t as great because so many companies are making them. So, the layoffs are partly tied to the fact that our profits have been lower and may continue to be.”
“Harold, let me throw a thought or two at you. I’m not saying God isn’t disciplining you for your sins by taking your job away from you. The sins you are struggling with could be the reason you are out of work. I think, though, that it is just as likely that you lost your job through no fault of your own and that this isn’t about sin in your life. God is probably dealing with your sins some other way, more likely than not. Otherwise it would be hard to imagine a Christian who would have a job.”
“So, I might be right. I could have lost my job because God is trying to discipline me?”
“Yes, but make sure you hear the other things I said. It seems unlikely to me that He is doing that and more likely that your company’s bad business decisions and the downturn in the market for computers are the actual candidates. In saying that to you, I am not trying to make you less concerned about the sins you mentioned. I just think you might be falling into a very unbiblical way of thinking that could leave you at odds with God and lacking any hope that He wants to help you find a new job.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, given your line of thinking, if God took you out of a job because of those sins, it would only make sense that He wouldn’t help you find a new job until you repent of them. Do you think He leaves people who want to work without food, shelter, and clothing in an effort to get their attention about sin?”
“Probably not. Otherwise, like you said, there would be a lot of homeless, hungry, naked Christians.”
“I think you are starting to see the light.”
Yes, personal sin causes personal problems. We can lose a job because we act irresponsibly in it. But other people’s sins can cause our problems too. And we can have pretty bad problems at times when nobody sinned. The challenge in all of this is to try to keep in mind that the rain falls “on the just and the unjust”10 and not assume that anytime we have a problem, it must be all about
us. Job’s “friends” accused him of something along those lines, and they were dead wrong.
“It Is My Christian Duty to Meet All the Needs of Others.”
Bob, a pastor friend of mine, is a bright, articulate, kind, and caring man who loves people a great deal. During his thirteen years in ministry, he has helped literally thousands of hurting people. One day, he dropped by my office, and I soon found out that he was the hurting person. His eyes were hollow, his shoulders hunched. He looked depressed. All the signs of burn-out were there.
“Bob,” I said, motioning for him to have a seat, “how’s it going?”
“I didn’t get much sleep last night. For that matter, I haven’t slept much all week. My phone rang almost every night, once in the middle of the night. I ended up running over to some people’s homes to offer some help,” he said, slumping into my couch. “The thing is, I don’t have time during the day to catch up on the rest I need or the things I’ve fallen behind on. We’re still looking for an assistant pastor, and my youth pastor just left. I sometimes think that I should wear running shoes to work,” he said, with a sigh.
Well, his sense of humor isn’t totally gone, I thought.
He went on. “Today, though, I didn’t want to get out of bed. I just couldn’t move. I didn’t get up until noon. So, I dropped in to see you.”
Bob was in trouble. In his efforts to serve God, he was suffering from a pretty severe case of physical, emotional, and spiritual burn-out, all of which made it impossible for him to carry on his ministry. He was, as the saying goes, “so heavenly-minded, he was no earthly good.” Bob worked so hard to please God and everyone else that he had worn himself out.
The Lies We Believe Page 12