How to Love Life in Hard Times | 1 Peter 3:8-4:19 | Justin Leitch

Well, good evening, my name is Justin. I'm one of the pastors here at King's Church. And before we get started with the message for today, I want to just remind you of one of our core values, which is we make sacrifices to reach our neighbors. We do this because Jesus made sacrifices to reach us. Leaving heaven, going to the cross, rising again, giving us life.

Now we're called to be filled with the spirit and intentionally take the good news of the gospel to the people around us. And that is why next Saturday we are doing our first ever trunk or treat right out here in the parking lot. All right? It's not just the awesome fun, bounce houses and food and the incredible cuteness that will be kids running around in their costumes, but it's actually an opportunity for us to engage this Sunset park neighborhood in broader Wilmington and families with relationship. And we hope and pray that it will lead to people hearing the message of the gospel and believing.

All right, so church, I have two jobs for you as it relates to our upcoming trunk or tree. Alright. First one is I want you all to pray this week, just daily in your time with God, jot it down to pray that God would use this trunk or treat to lead to individuals and families having their eternities changed in the gospel. Like, we pray that people will come onto the parking lot to have fun with us and they will eventually make their way into church to worship with us. That's the goal of what we are doing.

So pray with us this week that that would happen. And then the second thing that I want to invite you to do is to invite all of your friends to come and join us. Invite your friends to come. Just have a good time with us. There's a Facebook event, send that out, text it to people.

But Saturday from 5 to 7, we'll be here. Costume parties, all of the fun stuff. So bring your friends. It's going to be a great evening and a great way for us to live out of our value, live out our value of making sacrifices to reach our neighbors. So before we jump in to first Peter, let's pray for trunk or treat.

Sounds funny to say pray for trunk or treat, but there's a significant purpose behind why we're doing it. So let's pray. Father, we thank you for the privilege and the calling you've given us to participate with you in what you're doing in the world. We know by faith that you are working in the hearts of many people around us. We often can't see it from the outside, but I pray that you would fill us with intentionality and boldness to invite to a fun event with the purpose and the hope that people would eventually get to hear the message of the gospel and believe.

So, God, use us, use our invitations, use our fun events out in the parking lot ultimately to build your kingdom, to restore lives and to save. In the gospel, in Jesus name we pray. Amen. Amen. I've got a good friend who tells a story about when he was in elementary school.

He was at his cousin's house one day playing with his cousins. They were watching some football and just hanging out in the living room when all of a sudden his uncle came barreling in, tackled him to the ground and started beating him with a pillow. I just beat him with a pillow. Before he knew it, his uncle picked him up, rushed him out to the car, and sped off to the hospital. You see, what happened was while they were playing, he sat too close to a candle and his shirt caught on fire.

So his back ended up being covered in third degree burns. He was okay. He's great today. But what happened from that event was he had to every night go with his dad to have the scabs that would form each day peeled off of his back. All right?

His father had to use his strength to hurt his son for his good, right? He wanted him to develop and form correctly, so he brought him through painful circumstances and moments so that he could develop in the way that he was supposed to. This story gets us to start to understand a piece of how God relates to suffering in our lives. All right? Today we're gonna be in First Peter, chapter three and four, a big chunk of verses.

But what we are gonna see is we're gonna see God's vision, the Bible's vision for suffering. All right? The Bible is a grimy, realistic and honest book. The Bible knows of real human suffering, all right? It knows of violence.

It knows of betrayal. It knows of sexual violence. It knows of significant suffering in the lives of many people. And God does have a vision for suffering in the lives of his people. The world also has a vision for suffering.

I'd summarize the world's vision for suffering in two words. It would be, first, avoid. And second, escape. The world would say, avoid suffering. Founding father Thomas Jefferson is famous for saying, the art of life is avoiding suffering, right?

With our secular worldview, suffering is seen as, at best, an interruption to the purpose of our lives. So the logic goes that we should set up our lives to avoid suffering. There's a couple of problems with this, though. The first is that we cannot do it, all right? We are not wise enough.

We are not strong enough to create our lives with enough money, the right job, and the right relationships to avoid suffering from inevitably hitting us. The second problem with avoiding suffering is it actually creates just brokenness in us. If we are working through our lives to avoid suffering, it creates one of two things and us probably both bouncing back and forth. It makes us anxious because we're trying to look around every corner and figure out every bend and ensure that we have everything calculated in the right way so that we don't suffer. So we're anxious looking around the world and what could go wrong.

Or it makes us angry, right? Because we become a controlling person who says, no one is gonna get near me or the people that I love with suffering in any way. So I become controlling and angry over time. All right? The world's vision of avoiding suffering does not work.

But it's got a second part too. The world would say if you do, and when you do get the inevitable suffering that's coming along cause you failed at avoiding it says escape. Do whatever it takes to get out as fast as you can. Right again. Cause it's an interruption to the purpose of life to feel all the good feelings and have all the fun.

The problem with this though, is that when we try to escape suffering according to the world's definitions, we end up doubling down on the pain. We may find a way to cope in the moment that heals the suffering we're going through. But oftentimes it's in an unhealthy way. We turn to escapism through things like just busyness and doom scrolling. Or we turn to substance abuse and sex and busyness and all these different things just to hide from the suffering that we're walking through.

And rather than healing the difficulty that we're feeling, it ends up just paying off more and more and more difficulty and more suffering later. All right, the world's vision for suffering makes sense. If this is all there is, right? If all there is is a life where we wanna squeeze out as many good feelings as we possibly can at any given moment, then it makes sense that we would do whatever we can to set up our lives and avoid suffering. But the question is, what if there's more than just this life, right?

What if the apostle Peter is right? What if we are elect exiles? What if there really is an inheritance waiting for us? Imperishable, undefiled and unfading, kept in heaven for us? What if there's more as we go through one Peter three.

Four, we're gonna see just that. We're gonna see that God has a better vision for your suffering and the suffering of the world than the world's vision has. We're gonna see that God does not make us just kind of chipper, happy, clappy with the difficulties that we face, but he gives us the resources, the message Gospel gives us the resources to have a fullness of life in the midst of the difficulty that we face. So what I want to do is I want to show you this in first Peter 3, 8, the first verses that we've got in our passage today. It says this.

It says, finally, all of you have unity of mind, sympathy, brother, love, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling. But on the contrary, bless. Get this. For to this you were called.

What were you called to receiving, reviling and receiving evil. You were called by God for difficulty and suffering in a number of different ways. For to this you were called that you may obtain a blessing for. And this verse just popped off the page for me this week as I was praying and preparing for whoever desires to love life and see good days. Anyone in here?

Do you desire to love life and do you desire to see good days? What this passage is saying is that God is offering us a path to love life and to see good days even in the midst of the inevitability of suffering. All right, what the Bible has for us, God's vision for suffering is so much richer and so much deeper than the world's offer. All right? The world says to love life and to see good days.

It's purely circumstantial. You need to set up your days to have good circumstances, and then you get to love life. What the Bible says that there's a path to loving life even in the midst of hardship. There's a path to having good days even in the midst of bad ones. All right, so what we're gonna do, we're covering a lot of verses today.

So actually, we're not covering a lot of verses today because we're going 3, 8 to 4, 19. What I'm gonna do is actually focus on. On first Peter 4, 19. All right, it's one verse. It's the end of the section of verses that we're looking at.

And it's actually a summary statement of Peter's vision. God's vision, the Bible's vision for how elect exiles should engage with suffering in their lives. It unlocks and explains how we can love life in hard times. All right, so this is 1st Peter 4:19. I'll read it and we'll pull this apart piece by piece.

1 Peter 4:19. Therefore, let those who suffer according to God's will entrust their souls to a faithful creator while doing good. The first thing we see. If we're going to love life in hard times, we have to expect suffering, right? Let those who suffer according to God's will.

Peter assumes difficulty in suffering. The Bible assumes difficulty in suffering. It assumes that we're going to face these things. And the reality is, all throughout these couple of chapters, 1st Peter 4:12 says it extremely explicitly. Do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you as though something strange were happening to you.

But I think in our culture and in our moment, it's hard for us to not be surprised when suffering hits, right? Peter is very clearly telling us that suffering is the norm. Difficulty should be your expectation. But we still get a little frustrated or surprised when difficulty comes along, right? There's a couple reasons for this, I think.

One, we live in a moment in the world and in a place where we have a huge amount of God's common grace, right? We have a stable, relatively stable government. We have access to health care that the world has never known. And we have privileges and comforts that kings of ancient worlds couldn't even imagine. I mean, just air conditioning and indoor plumbing.

So we get kind of lost in the reality that suffering is the normal expectation of the human life because we have all this blessing around us and praise God for that. There's another reason, I think, another reason that we get surprised by suffering when we shouldn't. It should be the expectation is that our theology is weak. And the Bible is clear on a couple of hard truths, not to beat us up, but to prepare us to receive suffering and life in the way that we're meant to. The Bible teaches that the world is broken.

I mean, Romans chapter 8 says that the world, the earth itself, is groaning in the pains of childbirth to be renewed. The world's a broken place because of sin, all right? That means that natural disasters will strike. That means that you and your loved ones will get sick in a surprising way. That means that your body will grow old and not work in the same way that it once did.

All right? The world is a broken place. You need to expect suffering. There's another truth that the Bible gives us. We gotta know if we're gonna expect suffering.

It's that people are sinful. The Strong will take advantage of the weak. People will use and abuse and manipulate others. Right? People are going to talk trash about you.

They're going to betray you. You're going to be hurt by the people around you in your lives. Because the Bible is crystal clear that people are sinful. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you cannot avoid it. You need to know that suffering is the norm because people are sinful.

And it's not just out there. You are sinful, too. You will cause suffering in the lives of other people. Did you know that? You are core to the cause of the greatest suffering and injustice that's ever taken place?

Right. Your sin, my sin, put Jesus on the cross. Right? We need to expect suffering because the world is broken and people are sinful. And expecting suffering is so important because our expectations really impact our experiences.

Right. I was thinking about it this week, and there's a couple of different ways to go to the beach or invite a friend to the beach. The first one would be my preference. It's, hey, we're gonna go to the beach. And that means we're gonna go down to Wrightsville Beach.

We're gonna go to Sundays and get an iced latte. We're gonna frolic in the waves. We're gonna throw the Frisbee around, and we may get a light sunburn while we're climbing in a chair and falling asleep for a nap. Right? That's a great way to go to the beach.

There's another way to be invited to the beach, and that would be an invite to go to The Navy SEALs Buds Training, also known as Hell Week. They go to the beach as well, but they roll around in the freezing water of the Pacific Ocean. They're picking up telephone poles and moving boats around. They're sleep deprived, food deprived, they're bleeding everywhere, throwing up. They've got the educators that are just making life difficult for them.

All right, so what's the point? If I am invited to go to the beach and I am expecting the iced latte, a light sunburn, and falling asleep reading a novel about World War II, but I show up and get punched right in the throat by a Navy SEAL instructor, I am not prepared to handle that moment well, right? If I had a heads up about what I was getting into, I, or probably not me, somebody tougher than me could make it to some length. Within this Navy SEAL training, our expectations matter. And my fear for you, especially those of you who are younger, is that you might have a distorted expectation about reality because what the Bible tells us is that oftentimes life is more like a Navy SEAL hell week than it is like a Sunday's latte at Wrightsville Beach.

You have to have the right expectations. If this, like, militaristic, intense language is too much, look at 1 Peter, chapter 4, verse 1. It's the language that Peter uses. He says, since Christ therefore suffered in the flesh, arm military, language weapon, language. Arm yourselves with the same way of thinking.

You need to be aware and thinking about if you're gonna enter into the war, the spiritual war that's going on in the world. You have to think about suffering in the right, right way. But the world is broken. People are sinful. There is a third reason why you need to expect suffering.

The world is broken. People are sinful. You need to expect suffering because God loves you. All right? You need to expect suffering because God loves you.

Just like my friend's dad peeled the scabs off of his back out of love. Oftentimes God is bringing difficulty and suffering into our lives because he's doing something much richer and deeper in us and through us. Thankfully, the Bible doesn't just leave us completely in the dark when it comes to how God might be using suffering in our lives. I want to show you five different ways that God uses difficulty and suffering for our good as a loving father toward us. The first one is that God will use suffering and testing to reveal what's in you.

All right? That's what First Peter 4:12 says. It says, don't be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you. All right? Why would God test us?

Right? God knows everything. He knows what's in our heart. He knows what's in us. So why is God giving us a test?

To see what we score? No, he's not doing it for him. He's doing it for us. Because nothing humbles you like a test. Can I get an amen?

UNCW students? I remember my first statics test of my sophomore year at NC State. And I was so proud to be in engineering. I was moving forward in the right direction. I thought I had prepared well.

I had a great study group and I took the test. Thought I knocked it out of the park and got it back with a big old red 40 on it, right? Nothing humbles you like a test. Nothing humbles you like a test. Oftentimes, God is bringing you through suffering because when life squeezes you, you get to see the reality of what comes out.

Right? You will be humbled. And that is Good. So that you can grow and change and become more like Jesus. Jesus.

Oftentimes God is using suffering to reveal what's in you. The second way is that God uses suffering to refine you. All right? Think of the story of Jonah. God came to Jonah, the one who was supposed to be a prophet.

And God said, go. And Jonah said, no, right? Jonah ran the other direction. He found a boat going the opposite direction. So in love, God sent a storm to chase down the boat.

All right? And then they tossed Jonah overboard. And God sent a fish to swallow up Jonah. He stayed there for three days. And God refined Jonah, right?

Jonah's suffering, definitely on him. Definitely an own goal could have been avoided. But God used suffering in his life to refine him. So when that was spit that fish, spit him back out. He was ready to listen and obey God and surrender to him.

Oftentimes, God is using suffering to refine you, melting you down to remove the impurities. Oftentimes, development and growth has to come through suffering. It's true in exercise, it's true in education, and it's true in your walk with Jesus. No spiritual gain without spiritual pain. All right?

Third, God might be preparing you for a future ministry. All right? Sometimes, like I said, it's an own goal, like Jonah. Other times, your suffering is a little more like Joseph, right? Joseph did nothing wrong, but his brothers sold him into slavery because they were jealous.

So Joseph could cry out and say, why, God? Why am I sent away from my family? Why am I spending years in the dungeon, in prison unjustly? What's going on? When God had a specific ministry purpose for him, that God was gonna need him decades later to serve and to fulfill, right?

Sometimes you are walking through suffering because God is putting you in the place he needs you to be for a future powerful ministry purpose. Fourth, God may be using your suffering to save others, other people. When suffering hits, there's really one of two outcomes for Christians. All right? Suffering hits.

So we pray there's two outcomes, all right? God answers the prayer. He delivers us from the suffering. He heals the disease. He extends the life and removes us from the issue, right?

In that moment, we glorify God. We praise him. We point to the people. We point to God for the people that are watching and say, he answered our prayer. He delivered us.

Praise him. And people are blown away by that truth. But here's the reality. Non believers can always explain away miracles. But what they can't explain away is when a Christian suffers.

When a Christian prays the prayer, when the Prayer is not answered and the loved one dies and the follower of Jesus worships through it. That can't be explained, right? That points to the reality of Jesus outside of this world. The circumstances didn't change, but we as followers of Jesus still give praise to God in the midst of that unanswered prayer. That is a powerful opportunity to display the goodness and the love of Jesus.

Next time you are suffering, next time you are in a season of unanswered prayer, think about the beauty and the power of the opportunity that you have to point the people who don't know Jesus who are around you to the goodness of God in the way that you serve suffer. Fifth final one here, God. Fourth is save others. Fifth is sometimes God will use suffering to save you. All right, some of you in here are likely, with this many people in here, not a follower of Jesus.

And oftentimes God will use what we Christians call a severe mercy to wake us up and to show us our need for Him. Right? He will show you that you're trying to avoid suffering, you're trying to escape. Suffering isn't working out. You can't hold it all together.

You can't keep doing life the way you were because suffering hits and you've been shaken too much and you can't keep going the way you were going. Oftentimes, God will bring suffering into your life to wake you up and to show you that you need to surrender the illusion of control and submit your life to Him. Right? This is severe. It is painful, it is suffering.

But when God uses it to draw you to Himself, it is a mercy. So if that's you in here this evening and you've been wrestling with God, trying to put your life together, but you find yourself just stuck in anxiety or anger or bad coping, you might just be operating off of the world's vision for suffering. You might just need to throw your hands up tonight and say, jesus, I cannot do this anymore. Will you save me? I give myself to you.

Will you take the life out of my hands that I have not been able to hold onto myself or. The reality is that I don't know exactly why you are suffering. You don't know probably all of the nuances of why you are suffering. It might be for you, it might be for someone else, it might be for the glory of God. It's probably all of these things and many more.

But here's really what I want you to see. One of the reasons that we face suffering as followers of Jesus is that God loves us. God loves us. We have to expect suffering. And really what this all gets to, what I want to point to is this, because this is true.

This is what it all means. Suffering is not a reason to deconstruct your faith. I want you to lean in for this right now. Suffering is not a reason to deconstruct your faith. Deconstruction of the faith movement is a thing that's going all around and it's something that's conversation popular and oftentimes some difficulty comes in.

You get to a place where you can't believe God would allow something to you. But what we need to understand is that suffering was not hidden in the terms and conditions of the Bible. I mean, just open up and read front to back. God did not hide this. The reality of the world is that it's a broken place, people are sinful, God loves you.

So you are going to come across suffering when it hits you. Don't be surprised. It's not a reason to deconstruct. Nothing has gone wrong. It's actually par for the course of God working something beautiful into you.

And if you're in a place where you want to step away from God because of your suffering, I just say, what other option do you have? You can listen to God's word and the truth here, or you can go to the world's option even if I'm anxious and angry and addicted to substances. But there is going to be suffering in your life regardless. And in this scripture we see the best vision for suffering is God's word. The world said, avoid.

God says, expect and trust in the midst of it and become a person of peace and steadiness even in the midst of suffering. Charles Spurgeon, the great 19th century preacher, said it this some plants die if they have too much sunshine. It may be that you are planted where you get only a little, but you are put there by the loving farmer because only in that situation will you produce fruit unto perfection. Remember this. If any other condition had been better for you than the one in which you are divine, love would have put you there.

You are placed by God in the most suitable circumstances. Trials must and will befall, but with humble faith to see love inscribed upon them. All this happiness. To me the world says that you should avoid hard times. You can, you cannot do it.

God's vision for suffering is that you need to expect hard times. Let's look back at first Peter 4:19 says, Therefore let those who suffer according to God's will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while Doing good. All right, here is the next principle of the Bible's vision for suffering. It's this. To love life during hard times, endure in doing good.

Good. I'll say up front that you should get out of suffering if you have a righteous and God honoring way to do it. Like step out of suffering when you have the opportunity. But that's not what we're talking about here. We are talking about being faithful in the midst of suffering when you don't have a way to escape it in a righteous way.

And this teaching from Peter can be a little insensitive, right? When we think of people in suffering, we kind of want to give them a pass, right? Want to say, oh, you're really hurting right now. So maybe if you didn't take this whole God thing as seriously and you felt a little bit better and you didn't obey all of those things, then maybe life would be a little bit better for you can feel a little bit. It can be a little bit insensitive to tell someone who's suffering to endure in doing good.

But Peter could not be more clear here and throughout all the passage. Even when doing good is the explicit cause of the suffering. In many of these verses, he says, don't stop doing good to get out of suffering. First. Peter 3:10 says explicitly, if you desire to love life and see good days, turn away from evil and do good.

3:17 says, it's better to suffer for doing good if that should be God's will, than for doing evil. The end of 1 Peter 4 is a whole list of commands to love one another, do good, serve one another in the church in the context of really hard times. So here is a little bit of a Bible reading hack for all right? As you're reading your Bible and you come across different commands in the Bible, one of the things that you can do with that is assume that human nature makes us want to do the opposite, right? God put it in there because we like to do the other thing.

Don't steal because we want to get stuff easy. Don't lie because we want to work our way out of situations without facing the consequences through lying. And in this passage, the same thing is happening because God knows that nothing tempts us to sin like suffering, right? When we suffer the shame of being a public Christian, sometimes we're tempted to stop talking about our faith. When we suffer the feeling of temptation, we often want to just go to immediately gratifying our flesh.

When we suffer the betrayal of a friend, we're tempted toward responding with Evil and reviling. When we suffer financial hardship or uncertainty, we're tempted toward hoarding. When we suffer with parenting hard kids, we're tempted just to give in or to check out. When we suffer with mental illness, we are tempted to just give up and identify more with our mental illness than what God says of us as children of God, right? Nothing tempts us to find an easy way out like suffering.

So Peter reminds us, endure in doing good. A decade ago now, I trained for a half marathon. You wouldn't believe it today, but I could run back then, and it was great. I trained for a long time. I beat the time I was hoping for.

But I was left with one big regret. All right, 12 miles in, I'd been running great, just knocking it out of the park. And 12 miles in, I caught a cramp. I caught a cramp in my side. And for about 50ft I walked.

And it's like my biggest regret. I trained all those months to show up and then walk in the middle of the race. How did this happen? I regret it. But here's what I wanna say.

What I'm pointing at is for 12 miles, I didn't have a cramp and I had no temptation to walk. But as soon as soon as pain hit, I wanted to take the easy way out, right? It's that way for us spiritually as well. When suffering comes into our lives, we're tempted just to choose and to take the easy way out. We see this in the story of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, right?

Abraham and Sarah received a promise from God that they were gonna be the parents of the people of Israel. The promise, or the problem, was that they were in their 80s and 90s, so they were well past the childbearing age. All right? So they have this promise. They're in a season of waiting and prayer.

And they could have prayed and waited and trust God's timing. But rather than sitting in the pain and the suffering and enduring and doing good, they chose the easy way out. Sarah called her servant Hagar, had Hagar sleep with her husband and provide a baby. All right? When they chose to choose the easy way out in that situation, it didn't accomplish God's promise.

The future baby Isaac, was coming one and two. It brought in relational devastation into their marriage, into the life of Hagar and her son Ishmael. Right? We are so quickly turned around to try to take situations into our own hands because. Because nothing tempts us to sin like suffering.

When you take the easy way out, it is always double the pain and zero of the gain. That is what it's going to be every time, even if in the moment it feels like great relief. So I'll just ask you, where in your life right now are you tempted to take the easy way out rather than enduring and doing good in the midst of suffering, big or small, right? Don't hide your faith because of pressure from other people. Don't stop praying the prayer that's painful to pray because you want it to come true, but it's been so long.

Don't give up. Don't take things into your own hand to find an easy way around God's purposes. Or how about this one? Do not lie in order to escape the painful consequences of a bad decision, decision that you've made, right? Where are you tempted to choose the easy way out rather than endure in doing good?

Here's a question I think that is important to address at this point. The question is, what is the benefit of enduring and doing good? Because many of us in the midst of suffering, pain or difficulty would say, I'm willing to make the trade a little bit of spiritual pain. You know, Jesus might, you know, be a little upset with me for a little while, but he forgives me. And so why would I not just, you know, bow out in this moment and choose sin to get out of the felt need of suffering?

And here's what I'd say. You're giving up so much when you make that decision. These are the things you're giving up. All right, you're giving up the five things that I mentioned before. God's purposes through suffering in your life.

You're giving up all those things you might be giving up your child coming to faith because they see you suffer faithfully through a difficult season. You're giving up so much there, but even more than that, you are giving up in the midst of it. A unique access to the presence and power of God. This is Hebrews chapter 13. This is.

So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore, let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured. Here's what I want you to see there. There is a special way that Jesus presence and power are available to us outside of our comfort and in the place of suffering. You see, verse 13, it says, therefore let us go to him outside the camp.

He went there and suffered. And so when you are in a season of suffering, you have a unique opportunity that is not always available to you in seasons of comfort. To experience sharing the sufferings of Christ and knowing the presence of power of God in a unique way. So if you press through and if you endure in doing good, rather than choosing the end easy way out, you will have access to deeper joy and fellowship with God in that unique promise. He suffered outside the gate.

Let's go to him and meet him there. And this is the beautiful thing about church. You don't need to do it alone, right? You do not have to do this by yourself, right? The church is for sure an army for the mission of God, taking the message of the gospel and the hope of the gospel to all the people of the world.

The church is a voice for those who don't have a voice, right? It is that. But the church is also a place where we get to care for and carry the burdens of one another, right? The church is a hospital for sinners and for sufferers. So as you are walking through difficulty, as you are trying to muster up the endurance to endure in doing good, you have a people around you that want to care for you and pray for you and bear your burden burdens with you.

At the end of our service, just in a few minutes, what I'm going to do is actually invite those of you who are walking through a season of suffering, or who know a loved one who's walking through a season of suffering, to stand and to receive prayer and for people to lay their hand on your shoulder just to show you the incredible power of a church that's helping one another endure in doing good and to know the presence of God in difficulty. I want to give you a heads up because if that's you, if that, if you're in one of those two categories, I want you to be ready to stand and to be prayed for by the people around you here in just a few moments. The church is a beautiful thing and we want to be able to pray for you. Right? The vision of the world is to escape suffering when it strikes at all costs, leads to bondage, it leads to sinful patterns, it leads to addiction.

But the vision of God is that you would endure in doing good and know his purpose, presence and power in a unique way. Let's look back at first Peter 4:19 again. Therefore, let those who suffer according to God's will entrust their souls to a faithful creator while doing good. Now here's the last way this verse shows us to find a path to loving life in hard times. And it's to entrust your soul to God.

Entrust your soul to God and Trust in the New Testament was a banking term. It's when you would give your resources or your money to another person to keep possession of it. But the problem was there was no FDIC back then. Not everything insured for you if something went wrong. So when you gave your resources to someone else, you were trusting them a lot.

You give your life savings to someone else to hold onto. They could run off with it, they could steal it, they could take it, their investments could crash and you would be out and have nothing. So you really had to trust the people that you were giving your resources to. And this is what Peter calls us to do with our lives, with our souls, to God. In aviation, there is a scary and often fatal phenomenon called spatial disorientation.

All right, Spatial disorientation overtakes pilots when they fly into thick clouds, heavy rains, or sometimes get lost over the horizon and the ocean, where they lose perspective of where they are at. And the danger of spatial disorientation is that their inner ear, which gives us a sense of balance and up and down, gets thrown off and thrown whack and thrown awry. So they can feel like they're dive bombing into the ground when they're actually flying level altitude, or they can feel like they're flying level altitude when they're actually dive bombing into the ground. Pilots, when they enter a posture of this spatial disorientation, their life expectancy goes to 178 seconds. There's only one way to survive.

There's only one way to survive this spatial disorientation. They have to make the conscious and willful decision to reject the feelings that are screaming at them that they're dive bombing and choose instead to listen to the instruments on the plane. They have to choose to listen to the altimeter that tells them they're flying level and straight and not their inner ear and their whole body that feels like they're dive bombing to their impending death. Right? If they listen to their feelings, they will die.

But if they listen to a source of truth outside themselves, they will live. This is exactly what Peter is saying to us when he says, entrust your souls to a faithful creator. Right? When we enter the cloud of suffering, it is so easy for our feelings to say, God, you've abandoned me. Me.

It's so easy for our feelings to say, God, why would you allow this to happen to me? You cannot be good. It's easy for our feelings to say, God, you're not even aware that I'm here. Or you're not even Real right. Our inner ear is off, our sense of truth is not stable anymore and we have to look at something outside of ourselves.

Proverbs 3, 5, 6 is a favorite verse of mine and it says this says, trust in the Lord with all your heart. Do not lean on your own understanding. In all of your ways, acknowledge him and he will make your path straight. A mentor years ago told me that there's four clauses in this passage. So get out your Bible, turn to Proverbs 3, 5, 6.

I flipped open and did it. He said, all right, read them clause one by one. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Whose job is that? Mine.

Do not lean on your own understanding. Whose job is that? Mine. In all your ways, acknowledge him. Whose job is that?

He said, draw a line right there and he will make your path straight. Whose job is that? His. My job is to trust in the Lord with all my heart. Your job is to not lean on your own understanding.

Your job is to acknowledge him in every single one of your ways and entrust your soul to a faithful Creator that He will make your paths straight. We are called to trust him, to entrust our soul to God. But the reality is when suffering hits, this gets really hard to do, right? When suffering and pain hits our lives, there's nothing we want more than to grab the reins, to use our wisdom and try to get our lives back on track, right? When we see the suffering in our lives, we ask the question, God, where are you?

And then if we're self aware enough to get beyond ourselves and we look around at the start suffering of the world, we're asking God, how could you let things like this happen, God, why don't you do anything about it? And it's at that moment that we need to go back to our source of truth, the word of God, and be reminded that God did in fact do something about it, right? Jesus left the comforts and the safety of heaven to take on flesh and give himself on a cross for you and for me. You will only be able to trust God through the suffering in your life when you see that even Jesus did not avoid suffering and escape suffering, but he endured suffering for you. 1 Peter 3:18 says, For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous, for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.

The message of the gospel is that Jesus came and lived a perfect life that we couldn't live. He went to the cross and he took the penalty for sin, enduring suffering for us that we deserve to die. The cross was prepared for us. Jesus Expected suffering, right? He lived out this verse, 1 Peter 4:19 perfectly.

He expected suffering. He came from heaven with a missionary purpose. He knew he was going to go to the cross and die. The Gospels tell us that he set his face like a flint toward Jerusalem and nothing would knock him off of his purpose and giving his blood for. For you and for me.

He expected suffering. All right. Jesus also endured in doing good on the cross. He could have called down legions of angel armies to smite the people that were unjustly putting nails through his hands, Right? Instead, the Creator of the cosmos who hung the stars, allowed them to put them through his hands on the cross, enduring and doing good for the joy that was set before him.

So. So that you could be adopted as a daughter of the one true king. All right. Jesus entrusted his soul to God at His death, bowing his head and saying as he died, father, into your hands I commit my spirit. See, Jesus does not invite you to go anywhere where he hasn't already been.

Jesus went outside the camp. He bore the reproach. And now we get to go to him and enjoy his presence and power there because of his sacrifice for us on the cross. The cross is why Peter in this verse can call God a faithful creator. Those two words together are so powerful because faithful means that God will keep his promises, every one of them.

There won't be a word that God speaks or in the Scriptures that does not come to pass in fullness. You can bet your life on the promises of God because He's faithful. He's not just faithful. He's also creator. He's sovereign over all things.

He created the world and holds everything in his hand. So that means that nothing that you face, no suffering you come through, even the really difficult and really bad kind came through the Father's hands as a gift to the world or to you. And he's doing something in you. Many times we won't understand, right? Many times we'll be lost in the purpose and the clouds of the storm of suffering.

But we can always look back to the cross. Charles Spurgeon also said, God is too good to be unkind. He is too wise to be mistaken. And when we cannot trace his hand, we must trust his heart. Right now, there's a family in our church that's going through some acute, intense suffering.

Dean, a good friend of mine, has been an active man. He's 67 now and traveling internationally, playing golf day by day. I mean, just the life of the party. A great, loving man. But just a few weeks ago, all Of a sudden, he couldn't make it to the end of his driveway without getting winded.

He was out of breath. They got some tests done, some blood work done, and they found that he had an extremely aggressive form of leukemia. And so for the past three weeks, God's opened doors for care, but now he's in isolation, receiving daily chemotherapy, trying to prepare for a bone marrow transplant and to find some healing from this disease. He's walking through just incredible physical and emotional and spiritual suffering. His wife, Mandy, is suffering, too.

With so much uncertainty about the future, asking the question, I didn't expect my life to turn out this way. What is going on? We're too young for things like this to be happening. I was on the phone with them this week, and I was just blown away, just blown away by the way that they are suffering. Well, Dean shared that every morning he wakes up and he puts his headphones in and he worships.

And then he opens his word and he prays, and then he reads, and then he gets down on his knees and he prays to Jesus. Now, he said he had a dream last week where he woke up thinking of First John. So he opened the book of First John, read First John 4, was reminded of the love of God and Christ for us and the love of that we then have for others. And he said, I've been following Jesus for decades, and it just hit in a new way, with a new depth I've never seen before. Mandy talked about how for decades, they've been storing up Bible verses and surrounding themselves with followers of Jesus.

So now, in this time of difficulty and suffering, these stories of Old Testament heroes walking in faithfulness through difficulty are coming to their minds and encouraging them. And they've got 1500, hundred people praying for them and reaching out and checking in on them. Kind of overwhelming. But what they've done is they've built their lives and they've built their marriage on God's vision for suffering rather than the world's. Right?

What they did was they expected it. So in peacetime, when there wasn't suffering, they were storing up verses, surrounding themselves with the people of God, preparing in the little ways for the big suffering, right? They're enduring and doing good. They're using this as an opportunity, opportunity to share the gospel and invite people to church up there in Winston Salem, where they're at, right? And they have entrusted their souls to a faithful creator.

They're finding joy in the presence of God even in the midst of the darkest times. All right, I don't need to tell you that you walk into the room right now, it's not happy, clappy and chipper, but it is so rich, it is so full, it is so purposeful, right? In the midst of hard times, they found the way to have good times. In the midst of bad days, they found the secret to having good ones. Alright, the vision of the world for suffering is a void and escape.

And it will leave you anxious and angry and coping in all of the wrong ways. But the Bible invites you to a better vision. If you want to love life even in hard times, take it from the apostle Peter, take it from God, take it from Dean and Mandy that you need to expect suffering in the midst of suffering. You need to endure in doing good. And you can entrust your soul to a faithful Creator because He gave himself on a cross for you.

I want to invite you to bow your heads now and I encourage you to open your hands on your lap there just posture of surrender to the Lord and, and what God wants to do. And as I mentioned earlier, I do want to invite those of you who are in a season of suffering here in a moment to stand up. Or if you have a loved one who's just in a season of suffering and difficulty that needs prayer to stand up. And what we're gonna do is we're just gonna be the church. We're gonna be the church.

We're gonna bear one another's burdens and we are going to pray for one another. So I'm just gonna count down from three, just, just to make it very clear about when you should stand up. And I'd encourage you to stand up for a couple reasons. One, you need prayer and we want to pray for you. One.

But two, the church needs to pray. We need to bear one another's burdens and you're going to give us an opportunity to do that. You don't have to hold it all together. You don't have to hold it on your own. God will take care of you.

And the people of God want to be here to pray for you and to help you walk faithfully. So I'm going to count down from three. If you are in a season of suffering, if a loved one is a seizure of suffering, I'd encourage you to stand up and we'll pray for you. 3, 2, 1. Stand.

If there's someone around you who is standing, just put a hand on their shoulder. Put a hand on their shoulder. And we're gonna pray for them altogether. So you can stand up around them too. But stand for them, we're gonna, as Connor mentioned earlier, a symbol of laying hands on someone.

So lay a hand on shoulder of someone who's around you and we'll pray. Church let's pray. Father, we thank you for the promise of Psalm 34:18. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit many ways. God, to be brokenhearted and to be crushed in spirit is to be in the place where you do your best work.

So I pray for my brothers and sisters standing up here in church today that you would meet them in their place of suffering, that you would meet them in their loved one's place of suffering, and that you would remind them of the truth of the gospel. Shower them and cover them with your presence in a unique and tangible way. Fill them with the Spirit, God. Give them an endurance to continue doing good even, even when it's so hard to walk in faithfulness while hurting. And God, remind them that they don't have to hold their world together, escaping and avoiding, but they can entrust their soul to you, their faithful Creator, to know you, to enjoy your presence and to find peace in the midst of difficulty.

Bless them as they're walking through difficulty. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.