Equipped 2026: Youth: "Why Bad Things Happen in the World" by Caleb Colley

Okay, this is great, I've never been out here before, in the barn.

Are some of you members at Temple and Trace, or your family are members, so you're out here in the barn a lot?

Okay, good, this is cool.

And why do bad things happen in the world?

One way to answer that would be to say, why should we expect that any certain number of good things or bad things would happen?

The only reason this might be a problem for anyone is because we believe in an all-powerful, all-loving God.

And so the problem is supposed to be, if there's an all-powerful, all-loving God, then finally there may be anything evil or painful or bad that would ever happen.

Because if God is powerful enough to remove all evil and pain and suffering, and He's good enough to want to remove all the evil and pain and suffering, then He would just take care of it.

Some people think that the world is like a dog that has a horn in its paw.

And so God surely, if He loves us, would want to just take the horn out of the paw of the world and make it where we don't hurt anyone.

If you have dogs, if you have a horn in its paw, then you surely want to remove it and help the dog.

So why doesn't God, if He's so good and if He's so powerful, why doesn't He make it so that we don't have any problems?

And some of us are so young that we haven't had a lot of pain problems, maybe, in our lives.

But then some of us are old enough to where we've had some pretty hard things to happen to us.

And you may even ask yourself, why would God let that happen?

So that's what we want to talk about today.

Here is our purpose in life.

And I want to say at the beginning that our purpose in life is not to have no little horns in our paws.

Our purpose in life is not to be comfortable.

Our purpose in life is not to be happy.

You ask yourself, why am I on the planet?

The answer is not, so I can have an easy life or so I can have fun.

It's nice to have fun.

It's nice to have it easy.

And we would like to there be as few problems as possible.

But did you know that God did not make us and put us on earth so we could have everything just as easy as possible?

Just play video games and have fun and hang out with people.

God did not want it to be all easy.

God wants us to glorify Him.

That's our purpose.

So if you ever ask, why am I on the planet?

The purpose is to make God glorify Him.

That means to glorify God.

And passages that you might want to note down would be Isaiah 43, 6 and 7.

Where God says, all of my sons and daughters I created for my glory.

Or 1 Corinthians 10.31 says, whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the what?

Do all to the glory of God.

Or 2 Thessalonians 12.13 says, here God I give you this commandment for this is the whole program.

This is the whole duty and obligation of man.

So everything to do to glorify God.

So we're not God's pets.

If you have a pet, you want to just make your pet comfortable.

You want to help your pet to have a good time.

My little girl has a hamster at home.

And has a little area for it.

And has a wheel for it.

Changes out its food every day.

Changes out its water every day.

The whole thing of having that pet hamster is to help the hamster have fun.

And make the hamster comfortable.

If you've got a pet, it's probably the same way.

We're not God's pets.

We're higher than the animals.

We are creatures God has made to choose.

He wants us to make a choice.

To have a relationship with Him.

And hard things, bad things that happen in life actually might serve to help us make better choices.

And actually I'll tell you this.

That's why your parents let you go through some hard times.

Your parents actually love you so much.

Not because they let you suffer terribly.

But they will let you have a hard time.

Let me give you an example.

Would you say that it's good for a dad to give his little boy a bicycle?

Bicycles are good.

I'm glad my parents let me have a bicycle when I was young.

But what if you run your bicycle into a tree and skin your knee?

Your parents might let that happen.

They might let you ride your bicycle and run it into a tree and get your knee skinned.

But that will actually teach you.

I don't know if a kid can really do a good job at learning how to ride a bicycle without falling somewhere.

It's just going to happen.

But it's not your parents' fault.

It's not child's fault that you ran into a tree and hurt yourself.

It's actually part of your learning.

And part of being human on this planet is learning through some hard things.

So that's what we're going to be talking about for the next few minutes.

Why bad things happen.

We've got some reasons to tell you.

The first thing I want to say is here's the argument that people give.

And we're going to say that this is not an argument.

But it says if an all-powerful, all-loving God exists, there will be no evil or suffering.

But there is evil or suffering.

Therefore, it's not the case that an all-powerful, all-loving God exists.

That's what the atheists say.

You know what an atheist is?

An atheist is someone who says there's no God.

And over the past few hundred years, up until about 50 years ago, this was the main argument they gave against God.

They said, see all the bad things that happen?

Surely if God is real, and God is good by what sense he is, and all-powerful, and all-loving, there will be no evil.

The problem is we don't know everything.

And God may have a lot of reasons for allowing bad things to happen that we would never even know about.

Because he's God.

God knows all of the effects of every cause that ever happens.

When anything happens, God knows all the effects.

And we only know a few of them.

You might say that God is always doing a thousand things at once.

And we only know five or six of them at a time.

God can arrange things that we implicitly never would understand.

So, there is no way to prove that an all-powerful, all-loving God would disallow evil in himself.

He might very well allow it.

I'm going to illustrate that in a couple of different ways.

But first notice, this is a philosopher named Peter van Dyck.

And he says, it used to be widely held that evil was incompatible with the existence of God.

So far as I can tell, this thesis is no longer the case.

He's a very smart philosopher from Notre Dame University.

And he says, the philosophers, they don't argue against God's existence in this way anymore.

And it's because we don't know it.

Even philosophers who don't believe in God say, this is not a good argument.

And it's not a good argument because, for all we know, an all-powerful, all-loving God might allow evil.

And there might be reasons that he would allow it that we don't even know about.

Now these people, a lot of them, who say this don't believe in the Bible.

They're not trying to get people to be Christians.

They just say, we admit that if God exists, he knows a lot more than we do.

Let me illustrate by talking about an airbag in your car.

Do you know what an airbag is in your car?

That's the thing where, if you were to ever have a wreck, the airbag would come out and make it so you could get your head on the side of your car, on the inside.

So let's say you have a light come on in your car and it says that your airbag needs to be fixed.

And you take it to the car shop or your dad does it.

You say, we're going to have our airbag worked on.

You turn in your car to have it worked on.

And then you're kind of watching.

And they start to work on the car in the air.

And you see them opening up the trunk.

And you say, why are they opening up the trunk if they're going to work on the airbag?

And you think, maybe they got the wrong car.

Maybe they think there's a problem with my trunk.

But really the problem is the airbag.

So you go in there and say to the person, I think you have the wrong idea.

You're working on the wrong part of my car.

I need to work on my airbag.

I don't need to work on the trunk.

But what if the person says, oh, you don't understand.

I know we've got to work on the airbag.

But we've got to disinvent the battery.

We're electric people.

We work on the airbag.

And the battery is in the trunk.

So we have to open the trunk first and disinvent the battery.

So when we work on the airbag, we don't get shocked.

It's all part of the plan.

See, that's not how it is with God.

He may be allowing something to happen to someone who's saying he's opening up the trunk.

We don't know why he's opening up the trunk.

But God has a plan that is beyond what we know.

Let me illustrate this.

I heard about a preacher who said that he had this job because of a door that was left unlocked in another state.

Let me explain.

He said he had this job because he went to a certain school and trained under a certain teacher.

That teacher was only there because of another student in that school, a student who had had visa problems.

He couldn't get to the school because he wasn't allowed in the country for a while.

And one of the other students in the school was the son of a president of the United States.

He was the son of Gerald Ford, who was the president back in another century.

And so President Ford was president only because of another president getting sort of kicked out of office because of some dishonest things that were done at a hotel called Watergate.

And that was only discovered because the door was locked.

And so the professor at the school was able to come because one of the students knew Gerald Ford and made it where he got his visa so he could come to the school.

But Ford was only president because of Watergate.

And Watergate, the scandal, was only discovered because somebody left the door unlocked and their dirty business was discovered.

So you could say there's a creature in place in a particular state and he was there only because a door was left unlocked somewhere far away.

That just shows you we don't know all the effects and causes.

And that person who left the door unlocked was only there because of who knows how many different things that had happened leading up to that.

So we just really don't know how things work.

There are people who study something called chaos theory.

And that is that there are all kinds of effects on things in nature that we don't even know about.

Like a butterfly on a twig in South America can be part of causes that produce a hurricane over the ocean.

And if the butterfly does not flap its wings, there would either be no hurricane or a very different one in a different place.

And it hinges on even just something as small as a butterfly.

What I'm trying to say is there are all kinds of things that happen and we don't know why.

Who knows? Who is the only one in the universe that knows all of those causes and effects?

Only God knows all of them.

So when something bad happens to us, we say we don't know how God is working all this stuff.

God's providence is beyond us.

It's on a level where we just don't understand all of the causes and effects.

There's a movie. I'm not asking you to see the movie. I'm not advertising the movie.

We watch a lot of movies on social media.

So there's probably bad stuff in the movie that's got to cut out.

But there's a movie called Sliding Doors.

Some of you may have seen it.

Where at the beginning of the movie, Elaine is getting on a train to go to work.

She's going to get on a train.

And she's late for the train.

She missed the train because there was a little baby playing with toys.

And she has to get around this baby on the steps going down into the subway to get on her train.

And so when she gets to the door, it's sliding and it closes.

And she misses the train by just a second.

And then the movie splits.

And you see an alternate possibility.

Where that baby is not playing on the steps.

And she goes right down the steps.

And she misses the train and gets on it and gets to work.

And her whole life is different.

Based on whether she made that train on the way to work or not.

And so you see part of the movie is her life if she misses the train.

And part of the movie is if she didn't miss the train.

And that shows that our life can change in ways that we do not expect.

Based on things that we don't know.

So if somebody says, oh, we all have a problem with God.

We don't know what to believe in God about.

We just don't know what God is going to turn us on to.

God wants us to glorify Him and bring other people to glorify Him.

He wants all that they say to come to a knowledge of the truth.

1 Timothy 2.4.

He wants all to come to a religiousness. 2 Peter 3.9.

Well, what leads to that?

A lot of falsehoods and lies.

So we have to admit what these philosophers do.

You don't use this argument anymore.

Instead, we just don't know what God is trying to prove.

We trust His providence that He can work our things out for good.

Okay.

That's the first part.

To say there's no way to prove that an all-powerful, all-loving God would disallow evil.

The second thing I want to do, and this is the last thing I want to do,

is to say that God has told us why He allows evil to happen.

So there's no way to prove that He wouldn't.

But then in the Bible, He's actually told us why He does.

I heard about a preacher in another state.

This is far away from here.

But one of the students that he was working with came and said,

Why did God allow this bad thing to happen?

Some tragedy happened in his life, and the preacher just said, I don't know.

Well, that's true in a way.

We don't know everything that God might be trying to prove.

But we shouldn't leave the conversation with just, I don't know.

Because that makes the person think God's not really caring.

God doesn't have any plan for it.

God's not organizing anything.

God's not trying to make them better through it.

Actually, the Bible tells us there are four reasons why God allows bad things to happen.

So I want you to try to remember these four things.

And that will help you when bad things do happen.

And I don't know what the bad things will be.

It will be probably a lot of stuff you don't expect.

Because all of us who are grownups look back and say,

Here's a terrible thing that happened to me, and I did not think that was going to happen.

I didn't see that coming.

And we can list a bunch of bad things that happened to us, and we did not think that it would happen to us.

So how do we hold on to God even though those bad things happen?

We have to say there are certain reasons He lets them happen.

And the first one is that suffering helps people to come to know and love God.

The Bible tells us over and over that this is how.

If you're taking notes, I'd like for you to write down three passages that teach you this.

God says, and when I let bad things happen to you, it will be to help you come to know and love me.

The first passage is 2 Corinthians 12, verses 7-10.

2 Corinthians 12:7–10

I'll tell you what it says, what it now reads.

This is about the apostle Paul dealing with a thorn in his flesh.

We don't know what a thorn in the flesh is.

Some people think that it's an eyesight problem.

Some people think it's all the persecution he had to endure in chapter 11 of 2 Corinthians.

That's probably what it was.

But Paul had some type of problem.

And he wrote about how he asked God to take the bad things away.

He might have been saying, I don't know why God would let this bad thing happen to me.

But here's what he said.

Because of the surpassing greatness of revelations, he got to see heaven.

So that's the revelation he's talking about.

For this reason, to keep me from exalting myself, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh.

A messenger of Satan to torment me.

So where did that thorn come from?

Not from God.

It came from the devil.

God let it.

So we're asking, why does God let it?

He says, to keep me from exalting myself.

Concerning this, I endured over three times that it might leave me.

And he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.

So Paul says, I'm actually better because of that thorn.

And actually, if you get exalted with pride, he said the thorn kept me from getting exalted with pride.

If you get exalted with pride, you can't go to heaven.

So, and that's your first opportunity to create qualifications for helpers.

That's the snare of the devil, is pride.

And Paul says, this thorn kept me from getting in the snare of the devil, so I would be lost.

Did the thorns help him or hurt him?

Well, the answer would be yes, it hurt him.

He didn't want to have it.

And you may have a thorn in your life right now.

You don't want it.

But God says it will actually draw you closer to him.

That's what I did with Paul.

He said, when I am weak, then I am strong.

And when you get grown up, you will look back and say, some of the hardest things that happened to me were the things that made me strong.

So remember that.

That's why I ask you.

And I want to see the rest of it.

And go back to chapter four.

Verses two through four.

That's the second passage of the book of Matthew.

And it says, count all joy my brethren when you encounter various trials,

knowing that the test in your triumph of your faith produces endurance,

and let endurance have its perfect result,

so that you may be complete, wanting in nothing.

So James says, when you have these trials, that will help you be complete.

You can't really be the whole Christian that God wants you to be,

unless you can trust him through some type of hard things.

The apostle Paul said in Acts 14.22, through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.

So if anybody goes to heaven, they will go through many tribulations to get there.

And each person has his own tribulations.

That means testing, or hardship that you have to go through.

So James 1 through 4 is another passage.

What's God telling you?

He's saying that these trials will actually draw you closer to him.

And the third passage I want to bring up is Romans 5.

So if you could write down these three passages, these will help you.

And you may not understand everything that they say right now.

But whenever something bad happens to you, you can go back to these passages.

And you can see that this is what God is doing.

Okay, Romans 5, 3 to 5.

We consult and rejoice in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance,

and perseverance through the character, and through the character of hope.

And hope is not disappointed because the hope of God has been poured out within our hearts

through the Holy Spirit that was given to us.

Okay, so he says you can rejoice in your tribulations because that's going to build your character.

I used to hate that when my dad would tell me that some bad thing was going to build my character.

I didn't want to hear it.

But did you know he was right?

Now that I'm older, I look back and say, well, I did build my character.

But I didn't want him to tell me that at the time.

So Paul says it will draw you closer.

That's the first thing God is doing.

C.S. Lewis said this, he said, God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences,

but shouts in our pains.

It is his megaphone to rouse the devil in the world.

And the point there is when you have easy things, when life is all just ice cream and summer vacation,

then that doesn't really teach you this much.

But he says pain is God's way of shouting at us and saying, think about things that are really serious.

Think about things that are important.

There's a book by a very prominent thinker at New York University where he said when we go through tragedies,

he says actually the people who are most mature are people who have gone through some type of tragedy.

And he says if they become more resilient, that means they're able to bounce back from bad things that happen to them,

their relationships get stronger, and suffering changes their priorities and goals.

So he says people start to think about the most important things when tragedy hits them.

And they start to value relationships more, and it makes it where they can bounce back from hard things.

The first time a hard thing happens to you, it's harder to bounce back.

But the next time, you'll be a little bit more prepared for it.

Think about maybe in school.

If you get into eighth grade, then eighth grade would be really hard if you were just thrown into eighth grade.

But if you've already got sixth and seventh grade, then that was kind of challenging.

And eighth grade was not as bad as it would have been if you started without going through some hardship earlier.

I want to read as an example a letter that a friend of mine wrote who had cancer.

You ever heard of cancer?

You know that cancer is a disease that really kills you.

It's a very terrible thing.

Well, I have a friend in Florida where I used to preach who had cancer.

She doesn't have it anymore, but she got very, very sick.

And she wrote a letter about how it helped her.

See, what I'm trying to tell you is that the bad things that happen to you will actually help you be stronger.

And she wrote about her cancer and said that it made her stronger.

Okay, so here's what she said.

She said, cancer gave me a chance to hug my friends and tell them how much I love them.

It gave me the very best of my friends and showed me how deep their loyalty and compassion could go.

It gave me time with my little girl, time to just be with her, play games with her, and enjoy her.

It gave me a chance to see the strength of my older children, to see them become independent, and to see their devotion to me.

It gave me a chance to evaluate or grade the most important job I had, that of being a mother.

I'm not happy. Notice what she said.

I'm not happy that I had cancer.

I am, however, truly grateful for the knowledge and changes that brought about in my life.

I know now how truly blessed I am.

Okay, so when disaster strikes, like big cancer, that's when people learn to lean on the Lord more.

Because they seem uncertain.

So you start to depend on God more, and you start to depend on your friends and loved ones more.

So when something bad happens, we shouldn't say, well, I have no idea what God is doing.

God says He's going to work things together for good, but I have no idea how He's going to do it.

God says, I'm going to use a problem and help you be better as a result of it.

Okay, so that's the first thing I want you to remember is that God says it will draw you nearer to Him.

But number two, the second reason God allows a bad thing to happen to us is that it glorifies Him.

God is glorified in our soul.

Let me tell you how that works.

If we stay true to God, that shows people around us that God is worth serving even though life is terrible.

And this is what we learn from the book of Job.

Have you heard of the book of Job in the Bible?

Do you remember what happened to Job?

That Job lost all of his children at one time, all ten of his children at one time.

And God got very sick.

I mean, Job got very sick.

God let him stay.

He hurt Job physically.

He got a sore all over his body.

So he was extremely painful.

He was scratching himself and was hungry because it hurt so bad.

And also, he lost all of his livestock.

He was a very rich man, but after the devil exploited him, he had nothing.

And so Job lost all this, and he was very sick himself.

And his wife was nasty to him.

She said, you should just curse God like that to die.

You're so bad off, you should commit suicide.

You should kill yourself.

And then Job also had three friends.

And these three friends, and they were so shocked at how bad off Job was, they couldn't even talk to him for seven days.

They just couldn't say anything.

They were just, have you heard the word flabbergasted?

They were flabbergasted.

They could not believe that Job was that sick and that all those bad things had happened to him.

And the point of the book is Job said, thank you, God, even though all those terrible things happened.

And did you know, we're still reading about how wonderful Job was in his patience.

And it's been thousands of years since this happened to Job.

And we still study his book.

He still sets the example for us.

And as you grow, you're going to learn that there are some people who have it a lot worse than you have.

And yet they have saved through Job.

There are people who have lost loved ones.

They've lost jobs.

They've been sick.

They've had financial problems, meaning they've had very little or no money.

They've had times when they had to go hungry.

They've had all sorts of bad days.

People have hated them.

And yet, they're still Christians.

Jesus said, blessed are you when they shall persecute you for righteousness sake.

That means if you say true to God, even if people hate you for it.

And all Christians will have people who go against them because they're faithful.

Section 53 of the book says, all who do this awfully will suffer persecution.

Meaning people are going to not like you and try to hurt you in some way because you're a Christian.

And God says you have to be pure to them.

But what does it do when we can do it?

When we keep going and serving God no matter all those things.

No matter who doesn't like it.

No matter who looks at us mean or says mean things about us.

Or fires us from our jobs.

Or whatever might happen to us because we're Christians.

What does it show when we stay true to God no matter what happens like that?

It shows that God is worth serving even if we don't get anything out of it right.

And sometimes it's good social to be a Christian.

There are some times when people really want you to be a Christian.

Maybe like when you're in church with your youth group.

They're very encouraging.

Do you act like a Christian?

They think that's great and they support you.

But then there are other times when if you act like a Christian that doesn't make you more popular.

People do not like you to be a Christian.

And it shows if you're willing to still be a Christian and act like Jesus even in those times.

That shows it's worth it to do the right thing even if you don't get anything out of it right.

Because the devil at the beginning of the book of Job said the only reason Job is serving God.

Is because you give him so much stuff.

You make his life so easy.

And if you let me make his life a little harder.

Then he will curse you.

He will not serve you anymore.

So let me change his circumstances.

And he'll leave you.

And God said okay try it.

And the devil did it and Job was saved.

So when we do like Job.

If we do then that will set a great example of glorifying God.

And you won't.

Other people will look at you and say well Christianity must be very important.

Because look at her.

She did the right thing even though it cost her a lot.

I don't know what it will cost you to be a Christian.

But it will cost you something.

Jesus said you have to take up the cross.

You can't follow Christ unless you take up the cross.

So there will be something that you're carrying that's difficult.

And you have to say it's worth it.

And after glorifying God suffering doesn't.

Number three.

This life suffering.

This is the way it works.

The infinitesimal insignificance compared to our everlasting reward of heaven.

Okay infinitesimal.

Do you know what infinitesimal means?

It's so small that it's not even hard to imagine.

If it's infinitesimal you can't even see it with a microscope.

It's so tiny.

And what I'm saying is our suffering in life becomes so tiny.

If you compare it to being in heaven forever.

And that's what Paul said.

The first one I'm going to write down on that is 2 Corinthians 4.

16 through 18.

Paul says that our life which, that suffering in life, bad things that happen.

Which is but for a moment.

Works for us in an exceeding and eternal way of the Lord.

And then he says it's beyond all comparison.

So the reward you get in heaven is so great and so long.

That it's beyond comparison.

When you buy something on earth.

You have to think is it worth it.

Like let's say you're thinking about buying a shirt at the store.

And the shirt is $10.

Most shirts are probably more than $10.

You go to the store.

You say I'm looking at this shirt.

Is it worth it for $10?

You have to think about how good a shirt is.

Will it last me a long time?

Does it fit with other clothes that I have?

Do I like this shirt?

Is it modest?

You go through all the things in your mind that you think of before you buy a shirt.

And then you think $10.

I can do something else with my $10.

I might want this shirt.

But then I might want to save my $10.

And do something else with it.

So you have to go through.

And that's what we call the cost benefit analysis.

The cost benefit versus the benefits.

And Paul says when you think about heaven, it's worth paying anything you have to pay in terms of suffering.

It doesn't matter how hard it is.

Because heaven is forever.

So the suffering of this life, the longer you've been in heaven, how big is the suffering that you have to go through in life?

The longer you've been in heaven, it just gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it's not even worth mentioning.

You've been in heaven for years and years and years.

Millennia and millennia.

And whatever suffering you've had in life, it just gets smaller and smaller by comparison.

So I don't need you to remember your suffering when you're in heaven.

That's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying it is so small.

The suffering in life is so small compared to what it would be in heaven.

And it'd be worth paying anything.

Jesus said it this way in Mark 9, 43-48.

He said if you had to cut off your hand in order to go to heaven, it would be worth it.

Or if you had to pluck out your eye in order to go to heaven, it isn't going to be worth it.

But he said if you had to make that deal, that would be the right deal to make.

So God's heaven would be so great.

So you see how heaven is so wonderful that life, the suffering of life, is just mine.

So always remember your reward.

And then the last one, the last reason why God lets us suffer is the odds.

Knowing God is an incomparable good.

I mean you can't even compare it.

We like to make comparisons.

And we say this restaurant, for example.

I don't know what your favorite restaurant is.

We just got, in our town where we live, we just got raisin tins.

We like raisin tins.

And so we were very excited.

We have some people who go to church with us who went the first day of the project at 530 in the morning.

And they got three raisin tins for a year.

Because they were in line for the first, like, 20 people who ever ate that meal.

Isn't that cool?

Well, I don't know what your favorite restaurant is.

But don't you compare them and say that one is better than the other or one is worse than the other because of something.

You might say, why?

You might say, I like Chick-fil-A better than raisin tins.

Because Chick-fil-A has more bread.

Or you might say, I like raisin tins better than Chick-fil-A because the chicken is tastier.

Or you might say one has no choice and the other doesn't have no choice.

Or you might compare it and say there's one that's better because it prepares more cake.

Okay, well, the Apostle Paul said that knowing God is an incomparable.

The incomparable means one is so much better than the other, you can't even really compare it.

And here's what he said.

He said, I grew up as a Jew who was very prominent.

He explained to me that a Pharisee who was a leader, he was like, he was trained by maybe the smartest Pharisee who ever lived.

A man named Gamaliel.

And Paul said, I was prestigious.

I was looked upon as being very smart and had a bright future.

Paul says, it was so good.

And I was in a very important tribe, the tribe of the Egyptians.

And everybody was looking at Paul as like the most likely to succeed.

The one who was going closest.

And Paul said, I was keeping the law of Moses so good.

You couldn't find anybody who was keeping the law of Moses better than I was.

I was a Pharisee of the tribe of Benjamin, a very spiritual person.

And he said, I pushed out all the wealth and counted it as loss.

I counted it as nothing but garbage.

I treated it as garbage for what?

What would I be willing to trade?

What would I want so I would be willing to trade all that I had for my wife and children?

And that was telling the truth.

He said, to be a Christian was worth pushing away everything that I had to contribute.

You might have to make some choices in your life.

Where you say, it is worth sacrificing whatever I have to sacrifice in order to keep being a Christian.

That may be a friendship.

Where you have to say, I used to be best buddies with this person.

And he's trying to get me to want to do the right thing.

So I can't be as close to him as I would like.

I want him to do well.

I want to help him.

But I'm not going to be able to be as close because he's pulling me away.

Or you might have to make it where you have a job that doesn't make you as much money.

Because the job you could have is one that could cost you a million dollars.

Just as an example, I knew somebody in another state who had a very prominent job.

But he worked for a restaurant.

And his job working for the restaurant was to try to get people who came to their restaurant to spend as much money at their restaurant as they could get.

So try to get as many people to try to eat things as much as they could at the restaurant.

This is called bargaining.

But in the process, part of his job was to try to get people to drink as much alcohol as they could at the restaurant.

So his job was saying to people, eat, eat, eat.

Drink up that alcohol.

And he needed to stop it.

And I hope he has stopped it.

I don't know if he has or not.

But he was a good Christian.

He needed to learn that we don't promote people drinking alcohol.

So his job, and he might be able to keep his job and not do that.

I don't know.

But see how his job worked against Christianity?

So we have to make sure we have a job where we don't promote things that go against Jesus.

I heard another friend of mine.

I'm almost done.

But another friend of mine was working in real estate.

And his boss, and they rented out houses.

Real estate is where you buy and sell and rent houses.

So his boss said, you need to tell these people who are looking at this property that you have a lot of other people who are looking at the property too.

So that they'll want to rent the property.

He said, well, we don't have a lot of other people looking at the property.

That would mean a lot.

If I told people, potential customers, that we have all these people looking.

We don't have anybody looking.

And he said, well, I don't know.

But you tell them anyway.

You tell them a lot.

But this is a very hot property.

And he said, well, I really don't want you to do that.

So he didn't.

And he still has a job.

And he didn't get fired.

But what if he had gotten fired?

Would it have been worth it?

It would have been worth getting fired, to be honest.

Because what did Jesus say?

He said, because you're a believer.

He said, put away lying.

Don't lie to one another.

So we have to draw a line and say, if God says don't do that, I won't do that, even if I suffer.

So, looking back, what have we done?

Let's make sure God calls for an answer before I let you go.

The first thing we said is there's no way to prove that the loving God would not allow bad things to happen.

So people have given up on trying to prove God told them to do bad things.

There's no way to do that.

But then the second thing is God has actually told us why he allows the bad things to happen.

And he's told us four things.

And here are the four things.

If anybody wants to write these down or if you want the slides, you can just tell me and I'll make sure you get the slides.

But it would be good for you to try to remember these four things.

But I don't want you to get to be like 15, 20, 25 years old and something bad happens to you.

And you say, I wouldn't think that God would allow bad things to happen.

Remember this life is very short.

And you will be in heaven forever.

So endure those bad things.

And remember that God has purposes in allowing those bad things to happen.

And we will never know until eternity.

And the full impact of anything that happens may not be known in your life.

And it may be in another country.

There are things we just don't know about how God will work things out.

Remember God is doing a thousand things when we don't know five or six of those things that God is doing.

He's so much greater in his knowledge than we are.

And God loves you and will take care of you.

But the care that he shows will not be fully known until we get to heaven.

Okay, that's enough.

And if you want to talk to me about any of this, you let me know.

Or if you want the slides, let me know.

And I appreciate your good teaching here.