SOUND MIND - Hope for Helping Others

Search for peace, I search for hope, I search for love, and one

day for release. God give me strength to accept

the things that I just cannot know, that even when I lose

control, I will not let. You go.

Good morning. My name is Daniel.

I am one of the lead. Pastors.

Here at Res Church, welcome if you're visiting, welcome.

We are in the last and final week of our series, Sound Mind.

We are in week 6 of a series about mental health and the

intersection between mental health and our faith, where

we've been. Opening the Bible and looking at

hope. For all of these different

afflictions and things. That we, we are particularly in,

I think more modern culture, have begun to define and talk

through anxiety and depression, hopelessness, burnout.

And so today, as we finish up the series, we're going to talk

about hope for helping others, what it looks like to walk with

others through their suffering, to walk with others through

their affliction. And so I hope this has been

transformative for you. We, we've had some really

phenomenal conversations. We've seen God work in powerful

ways through the series as we have continued to go back to the

Bible to talk about what God says about these issues and

dealing with them. May 31st, which is about, I

don't know, 8-8 days ago. Yeah, about 8 days ago.

May 31st is my daughter Dansley's 13th birthday.

And Dansley is. Her birthday is only 14 months

after Kaya, my third daughter, and Quentin is 14 months after

that. So I think if it's under like 16

months, they call them Irish twins.

So I guess I have Irish triplets.

Is that how that works? So Dansley was, so it was a.

Friday, and it was the day before my wife was going to go

check into the hospital to give birth to Dansley, and I got a

phone call while I was at work and she was just sobbing.

She'd gone. To that last.

Check up before going to the hospital and found out that

there was no heartbeat. And so we found out the day

before basically that Dansley had passed away.

And so I, I, I raced down to the doctor's office and we like it.

It is the worst case scenario if you're if you're pregnant is the

worst case scenario that you know can happen, but you're

never prepared for it to happen. And we ended up having to go

into the hospital and I sat with my wife while she went through

the labor and delivery of a dead baby.

And so trying to trying to put words to grief is actually

really difficult because it doesn't affect everyone the same

way. And and because it's, it's hard

to articulate confusion, emptiness, numbness that is

involved because the, the, the shock of loss is often so

intense that you just want to feel something.

In fact, we see a lot, a lot of times we make a lot of mistakes

in our grief. But one of the things that I, I

never, I never really was prepared for it in those days

and weeks after our loss was the number of people that would come

and say, how can I help? Bro?

I don't even, I don't even know how to live right now.

I don't know how to do basic life function.

I, I, I feel helpless. I don't know how to tell you how

to help. I can't figure out my own life,

let alone tell you or guide you on a way to help me.

And I wasn't prepared for the number of times I would be

asked. Here's what the people closest

to us did. They just showed up.

They cleaned our house, they took our other kids places, they

made food, they made themselves available.

They didn't tell us anything profound.

They didn't try to to speak encouragement into our lives.

Like we were in shock. We couldn't have heard anything

anyways. Now, there were plenty of other

people that tried to help in plenty of other ways, and most

were not helpful. For me, this is my my first real

introduction to what it would look like to walk with people

through their suffering, to walk with people through their

affliction. And as a pastor, I've had an

opportunity to do this a number of times where I get to walk

with people. Here.

Here's one of the. One of the things that we, I

lament about our modern culture is that in, in kind of Western

civilization, so Europe and in the US now in this postmodern

world, we don't even understand what it means to grieve anymore

in the West. Now the, the, there was a study

a couple years ago said in our culture, now the, the, your, the

expectation in our society is that you're, you're allowed to

grieve for about 72 hours and we expect you to be done with it in

about 3 days. If you've been through any real

loss, you're not ready usually in three days to go back to

normal, but that's the. Expectations often put on us.

And So what I want to do right now is we want to open the Bible

and we want to take a look at what it talks about when it when

it, when we're looking at not just suffering, but how do we

walk with people? How do we comfort people when

they're suffering, when they're going through affliction?

Here's the big idea. It's in your hand out today.

It's this God prepares, provides and positions me to comfort the

afflicted. God prepares, provides, and

positions me to comfort the afflicted.

I'm going to be primarily going to be in Second Corinthians

2 Corinthians 1 · chapter mention

chapter 1 today. This was a letter written to the

early church in the city of Corinth by a man named Paul.

He was a missionary who who started really most of the first

churches. In these cities, in these Greek

cities. And he is a guy who has, we

would call him an expert on suffering.

I don't know if they make experts in suffering, but if

they didn't, if they may, if they had experts in suffering,

it would be the Apostle Paul. Listen to his resume real quick.

He was imprisoned and repeatedly flogged.

That means whipped and beaten as well as he was stoned and left

for dead. He had been in dangers from

rivers and robbers as well as from Jews and Gentiles and false

Christians. He was shipwrecked.

He was snake bitten. He knew many cold and sleepless

nights and hungry and thirsty days.

And on top of all of that he was constantly anxious for the early

churches, that he had started praying for them and worrying

about them. And he, his ministry was under

constant attack, both from external sources, the Roman

government and the Jewish Pharisees, but also from

internal sources inside the church, from false teachers and

power hungry men that were inside the church.

He knew suffering. And so, so when he writes these

words about suffering, I want you to understand it as a man

who knew it well. Here's what he says in Second

2 Corinthians 1 · chapter mention

Corinthians chapter 1, starting in verse 3.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the

Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all

our affliction. So that we may be able to

comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with

which we ourselves are comforted by God.

For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through

Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.

If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation, and

if we are comforted, it is for your comfort.

Which you experience when you patiently endure the same

sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken,

For we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also

share in our comfort. We spent a few minutes today

unpacking these words from the Apostle Paul A an expert in

suffering. He starts with this idea.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the

Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in

all our affliction. For as we share abundantly in

Christ's suffering, the universal truth of humanity is

that we will all suffer. Congratulations, welcome to

Resurrection Church. The Bible actually promises

this, that we will suffer. Why?

Well, look, I maybe you're new to the Bible.

Maybe maybe you've never read the Bible.

And if you turn to the very beginning and the very first

book of the Bible is called the book of Genesis.

And the 1st chapter, God creates the world and by the 3rd chapter

we mess it up. Like literally look at this.

We are this far into the Bible and we've already rebelled

against God and messed up creation.

It doesn't take us very long and and by Genesis chapter 3, as we

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

have rebelled against God, humanity who knew no death, knew

no pain, knew no suffering, rebels against God anyways and

falls under by Genesis 3A curse because of sin, that death

enters into human nature. And that means that every one of

us has now been born underneath the curse of death, the curse of

suffering. Here's the good news.

God does not let us go through this alone.

He actually prepares, provides, and positions us to help one

another. He prepares.

God is preparing you and I through our suffering.

In fact, both the affliction and the comfort are part of the

preparation. Both the suffering that you

experience and the comfort that you receive is part of the

preparation. And here's what I mean by that.

The word that's being used here in this passage for affliction

is the word phlipsis. It's a Greek word, phlipsis.

You need to spit just a little bit when you say it.

Phlipsis right over sitting in front of you in the Pew right

now is not happy and this word it means any type of suffering

any type of trials. In fact, it would mean any of

the three types of suffering in the Bible.

There are actually three different types of suffering in

the Bible. What are those you say well,

thank you for asking well timed three types of suffering are

mentioned in the Bible. Let's talk about all three.

The first type of suffering is this suffering because the world

is broken. That's, that's what Genesis 3

talks about is we are born under this, this curse.

Listen, the world tilts toward chaos and evil.

Can we all turn on the news? Things don't look good.

They never have the the world seems like it is devolving.

It is just always leaning toward chaos and evil and darkness.

This is what the Bible actually explains.

And so we should not be surprised that we might suffer

in a world that is under a curse.

So some of the suffering that you and I experience is because

we live in a broken world. But secondly, we also suffer

because of my own bad decisions. Amen.

Has anyone here made a bad decision?

Has anyone suffered because of it?

OK, can we stop calling that a test?

God is not testing me when I do stupid stuff.

I love having a truck. I don't have a truck right now.

Someday when they're cheap enough and Elon lowers the

price, I'm going to buy a cyber truck.

But years ago I decided I I would I would make an impulse

buy. Horrible decision.

Never do that. And I would buy this truck and I

bought like a an older used Ford F-250 diesel.

You already know where this is going.

I am also not mechanically inclined and I know nothing

about cars. So I bought this thing and I

mean within like 6 weeks it's spilling oil everywhere.

And I and I and I realized like there's more, there's more work

to be done to this engine than the whole truck is worth.

And I just have to get rid of it and I lose like thousands of

dollars in the process. OK, listen, God was not testing

me, was just an idiot. OK, so some of the suffering

that we go through is like, Oh my, is it?

If it's not the consequences of my own bad decisions.

So we suffer because the world's broken.

And often times we suffer because we make stupid

decisions. Amen.

What did you learn today at church?

I'm stupid. OK, But but there's a third

reason in the Bible we suffer, and that's we suffer because of

persecution for Christ. The Bible say to love Jesus is

to be hated by the world. And so.

So now we don't listen. Let's be real.

We live in America, so most of us don't experience a great deal

of religious persecution here because we love Jesus.

Amen. Like like literally persecution

here is like, Oh my God, they forgot whipped cream on my

starbees. I don't, I don't think that's.

Target got my order wrong. I got to walk inside.

But there is real persecution in this world.

Not, not just historically there, there are, there are

countries right now today where you can be imprisoned, where you

can be killed or beaten for declaring faith in Jesus Christ.

So three types of suffering or you can suffer for any or all of

these reasons that we do. But here's the here's the hope.

The hope is this. If you and I have put our faith

in Jesus Christ, if we are believers in Christ, we actually

suffer with a purpose. Now, even if we suffer because

of our own actions, God disciplines us to teach us

because He loves us. All suffering has a purpose for

the believer. This is what the Bible says.

If you turn to Romans 5, three and four, we'll put it on the

screen real quick and say this. Not only that, but we rejoice in

our sufferings. You're all like, well, I don't.

We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces

endurance and endurance produces character and character produces

hope. The apostle James, who is Jesus

half brother and James one, says it this way.

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various

kinds. For you know that the testing of

your faith produces steadfastness and lets

steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect

and complete, lacking in nothing.

What are these passages saying? We're going to suffer, It's

going to happen. But if we're believers, God will

actually transform us through our suffering.

That's what this is saying, that there is a refining that will

happen to us as we suffer. Now, how many of you have gone

like maybe you when you were younger, you went to like a like

a camp or you have to go to like a retreat or something?

Like you go in the mountains and you have this like phenomenal

spiritual experience. Anybody, 4 of you.

We got to do more camps apparently.

Holy smokes, guys. If you've ever had like, what I

would kind of call like a mountain top experience, when

you get away and like God is just moving in powerful ways and

you just like, man, this is such a great experience.

Look, I love those things too. But most often in my life, when

God has actually transformed and changed my character, it has

been in the valley of the shadow of death.

It has been in the suffering, it has been in pain.

It has been in difficulty. That requires great faith and a

desperate clinging to God. So, yeah, we love the

mountaintop experiences, but God does a lot of work in the

valley. Amen.

It is it is pain with a purpose because but it is in the

suffering that we begin to have real clarity about convictions.

That doesn't make the pain better necessarily, but it but

it's not senseless. But when I walked out of the

hospital room after we had lost our child and I went to the

waiting room, it was my my brother-in-law was one of the

people that met me in the waiting room.

And he's, he's mourning and he's crying and and he's trying to

make sense of it like all of us are and up talking to him.

And, and this is the most serious spiritual conversations

I ever got to have with my brother-in-law were right after

the loss of my daughter. And all of a sudden he's talking

to me about eternal things. He's talking to me about God.

And he begins to get serious about his faith over the next

few months. And he gets to investigate and

pursue the Lord and go to church and read his Bible.

And why did that happen? Because in loss there's a

conviction, A clarity about what's important and what's not.

And that that loss also galvanized my faith.

Why? Because I had to decide if God

was. Good, even when things were bad.

So I had to make that choice because it is a choice.

If you go back to verse three, I want you to, I want you to catch

a title that's used in here. It's very interesting.

It says the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort.

Now that's a really interesting word that's used there.

It's the first time it shows up in Second Corinthians, but it's

going to show up 10 times in this letter.

And that word comfort is a word paraclesis.

It's a Greek word, paraclesis, and it means comfort, not like

like you bought a new mattress and it's super comfortable.

Not that kind of comfort, but comfort, like encouragement,

like a verb, comfort, the God of all comfort, paraclesis.

Now, the reason that's such an interesting word and it's

repeated over and over and over again, the reason that's so

interesting is there's another word, another Greek word that is

the root of that word. It's called paraclete.

And Paraclete, we see that word show up.

Jesus uses it and he uses it in John 14.

In John 14, Jesus says this. He says, and I will ask the

Father and he will give you another helper to be with you

forever. And what Jesus is doing in that

moment is he saying, listen, I'm going to leave, but I'm going to

send you the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is what for

believers in dwells us, except the name that He uses for the

Holy Spirit is not helper, it's Paraclete.

It's capitalized like a noun, like a proper noun, like a name.

The actual literal name of the Holy Spirit is the encourager,

the comforter. So.

So if you're a believer, God didn't just save you from your

sin. He didn't just just raise you

from the grave to new life. He also took encouragement,

supernatural encouragement, and indwelt it into your life.

Truth alarm. Did you hear it?

God is not just the God of encouragement.

The very spirit that indwells believers is called the

encourager, the comforter. That is how God provides a

supernatural source of comfort for you.

So, So God, he prepares, He provides.

In fact, I was thinking, I can't even imagine going through

suffering. Without the hope of the Holy.

Spirit to encourage me, to teach me one of the most important

lessons that I have learned over the course of my life in

suffering is really that we find out in suffering, in difficulty,

whether or not we really believe in the Bible.

Like we really find out a lot about our faith in suffering.

And what I mean about that is like so like 8 years ago I had

an issue with my kidney. That put me in the ER and I'm in

the ER over the weekend and the pain had gotten so intense that

I end up rolling off the hospital bed and I'm like

rolling, rising on the ground just in pain.

And, and in that agony, God is speaking very loudly to me and

he's asking me about some very specific acts of obedience.

And he has called me to, and he's reminding me of scripture

and he's really pressing on whether or not I'm going to be

obedient in those areas. And, and, and really here's what

I would say is this. You can say you believe that God

is good, but do you believe it when the circumstances you're

going through aren't good? Like we say this a lot.

You only believe the parts of the Bible that you live out.

Did you know what I mean by that?

We live in kind of a pseudo Christian nation, you know,

where people are like, Oh yeah, I believe in the Bible.

And what they, what they mean by that isn't what the Bible would

say. Like, well, if you say you

believe in the Bible, but you don't want to follow the Bible's

guidance on the hard stuff, on sex, on marriage, on purity,

like you don't believe in the Bible.

If you say you believe in the Bible, but you consistently

follow your emotions or your pride instead of humility and

gentleness, you don't actually believe in this Bible.

Believing the easy stuff is in faith, It's in suffering that

the spirit changes our character.

He he's refining my character. He he's really pressing on the

stuff that I don't want to do. My faith in God, my faith in his

word, because the the Bible becomes entirely a different

book when instead of just reading it, I have to live it.

Amen. Like the Bible is perfect, but

lived out Scripture is potent, it's powerful and living out

Scripture is hard. Can I get an Amen?

Like you have read that whole love your enemies thing, right?

Like it's easy to read, but doing it.

But let me just let me, let me submit this to you because we're

talking about walking with others, right?

You know, the person that I will immediately pay attention to and

listen to when they speak is the person that I watch living this

out when it's hard. Do you know what I'm saying?

The the the person that responds to the conviction of the Holy

Spirit through obedience to the Scripture when they're suffering

that I mean, I that person has my attention that the spouse who

is faithful and enduring when their spouse is making life a

living hell and they're only doing that not because they want

to, but because the Bible commands it.

The the the sister in Christ who is praising God with all of her

might, even though after God made her a widow far too early,

because she believes what God has written in his Word.

The person who is hurt. And and it's suffering and yet

they they're extending forgiveness even though every

fleshly desire and emotion is screaming for revenge because

the Bible commands it the the person that is living out

scripture when it they do not want to that person I'm

listening to because I know that faith is real.

I know it means more than lip service.

You see if you'll do this, if you'll live the Bible out when

it's hard, not just when it's easy.

Not only will God change your character, but He will begin to

position you to help other people too.

What He's doing is giving you a testimony.

A testimony is a first person perspective of God at work.

And the third thing he's doing is he's positioning you.

He positions. Let me show you that again, if

you flip to verse four, he says God the Father who comforts us

in our affliction and then look at the so the word.

So it's leading us to the rationale for this comfort so

that we may be able. To comfort those who are in any

affliction we go through. Character refinement and

suffering. God comforts us so that we can

comfort others. So God doesn't just use our

suffering to refine our character.

He does that, but also he, he refines our character not only

for our benefit. He does it so that he can

prepare and position us to get ready to go pour ourselves out

for other people. We suffer, we are encouraged, we

grow through that, and now we're in a position to help other

people. Let me see if I can give you an

analogy that helps. This can be a tough analogy

because we live in Bakersfield, but imagine you're in a

Blizzard. See, I told you it was going to

be tough. Imagine get caught in a Blizzard

and maybe, you know, maybe you're at home, but like the

heat goes out, right? It's getting colder, it's

getting colder and it's getting colder.

And so, So what, what we were praying that God would, would

take the storm away, that, that, that it would stop snowing and

it would stop being cold because we're freezing to death.

And, and sometimes God does that, but sometimes God doesn't

remove us from the storm. Amen.

But it says he, he comforts us even in that.

So, so sometimes instead what God does is he gives us a, he

gives us a blanket. This is a prayer quote.

By the way. We have a quilting team.

If you know that they make, they make custom quotes every time

someone goes in the hospital or we get some sort of prayer

request, they make a quote specifically for that person.

And, and we, we pray for them and we tie a little knots for

every prayer and then we go give it to them to help comfort them.

Sometimes he gives us a blanket. So does it change the

temperature around us? It's still a storm, it's still

cold, but he actually gives us a way to be comforted through the

affliction. And, and The thing is that once

you have begun to realize this and participate in this, and you

begin to lean into the Lord as he comforts you, you're in a

position when other people are caught in a storm to teach them

how to use this. Does this make sense?

So sometimes our suffering is not only to refine our character

for our benefit, it's to refine our character so we now have

something to go teach other people.

Here's the idea. Everything that God does for you

is meant for more than just you. Everything that God does for you

is meant for more than just you. You see, we live in America, so

we're all egocentric. The world revolves around

Daniel. Oh God, how could you do this to

me? God's like because I have.

Something for you, you're going to go help other people and I

need to prepare you for it. So you're going to have to

suffer a little bit. Look at the verse Romans 15 one

and two. This is one of the toughest

verses in the Bible. You're welcome.

Here's what it says. We who are strong have an

obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to

please ourselves. Let each of us please his

neighbor for his good, to build him up.

How do you get strong spiritually?

How do you get spiritually strong?

What's the recipe? In the Bible.

For getting spiritually strong suffering.

Oh, no, thank you. Not none of that.

Please. I I like carrots, not suffering.

Nobody, no one wanted to voluntarily ask for more

suffering. Amen.

Like no one this morning in prayer time was like God, you

know what I need more suffering. No one wants this, but it's how

you get strong as you go through storms, you learn how to use the

comfort and you get stronger as he refines your character.

Let me explain how we talked about the Holy Spirit's name,

Paraclete is is is the encourager.

Let me tell you how how the Holy Spirit encourages you most of

the time, OK, most of the time, it's not some like super warm

and fuzzy feeling that your heart starts to glow like a

little Care bear Nobody. It's a pretty old reference, I

realize that. OK, sorry, couldn't think of a

new one. Iron Man is that Iron Man with

the little. You know, you got the little

thing OK. Most of the time it's not the

Holy Spirit like you get all warm and.

Fuzzy, right? You know.

How you get encouraged most of the time.

Let's do another believer. The Holy Spirit prompts another

believer and, and then they come up and they go, hey, I don't, I,

I just the other day, about 2-3 weeks ago, I was, I was on a

horrible week. I get a call out of the blue

from someone that's not even in the state and they're like, Hey,

I'm driving down the road and I just felt like God said call you

and you needed to be encouraged. And I was like, you were right.

I'm having a horrible week. And they just encouraged me.

After first service, someone came up to me and they go, I've

never done this before. And it was super weird.

But I, I just had this building conviction throughout the

service that by the end of the service, there's this person a

couple of rows in front of me. And I was supposed to go tell

them that God loves them and he's going to heal them and did

not give up. And he hasn't forgotten them and

he sees them and I don't even know who the person is.

And I was like, did you do it? He's like, yeah, I was.

Like what happened? I was like, they broke down

crying and they told me all the stuff that's going on in their

life. The primary way that the Holy

Spirit encourages you is through other believers.

So He prepares you and positions you to go use the power of the

encourager to encourage the body of Jesus Christ.

Does that make sense? Does that make sense to more

than four of you? 8 1/2 We'll go with it.

And here's the thing, you kind of already intuitively know that

that the people that have been through a lot of suffering and

become dependent on the Lord are absolutely the people that you

would depend on if you were hurting.

OK, You already know that like that.

I don't have to teach you that. You would know that

automatically. Like the people that are best

suited to comfort you to have the Holy Spirit and battle

scars. Amen.

Those are the people that you go to in a crisis.

I I guarantee you you'll already do this If you're having

marriage problems, you no one goes to the couple who's like

we've never had a fight. You don't want to talk to them.

You know who you go to? You go to the people who you

think that their marriage almost dissolved and almost got

wrecked. Maybe there was infidelity.

They were angry at each other. There was evil and God turned

that. Evil to good.

And he redeemed that marriage and he took that weakness and

that mess and he made something glorious out of it.

And they got scars. That's who you go to.

You know why you trust them. They've been through it.

If you lose a child, you don't go to someone who's never

experienced loss. You go to someone who's

experienced great loss and leaned on the Holy Spirit in

that process. You go to them for help, for

comfort, for encouragement. So you intuitively already know

that if you're going to go and look for someone to help in the

moment of affliction, you're looking for battle scars.

Well, often times as we're, we're, we're, we're suffering.

We see it as, as being senseless.

But, but, but God is refining. In fact, he's doing more than

just refining us through it. He's preparing us to pour out

for others. That that's, that's what this

text is saying. You don't just suffer for

yourself. You suffer to be ready to help

others who are suffering. God prepares, provides, and

positions me to comfort the afflicted.

Maybe you're maybe you're sitting here today listening or

you're online. You're listening.

You're like, man, I, I wish someone would do that for me.

Maybe you're, maybe you're new to church.

Maybe you're just visiting. You don't even know anyone yet.

Or maybe maybe you've, maybe you've been going here a while

and there's no one. You feel like you're forgotten

and you're overlooked and, and no one's no one's comforting

you. I have good news for you today.

This is what Jesus does for us. Jesus suffered more than any of

us, and he remained faithful. That means that you and I can

have confidence in his comfort because he can really relate to

us. He can relate to temptation.

He can relate to pain. He can relate to betrayal.

He can relate to suffering. Jesus is perfectly prepared,

provisioned, and positioned to offer you and I comfort in our

suffering. In a few minutes.

I want to I want to talk about the four practical ways to walk

with someone else who's going through suffering.

But, but first, let me ask you the most important question that

you're going to hear today. It's the most important question

you're ever going to consider. Do you know the God of comfort

personally? Do you know him personally?

Maybe maybe you walked in today or you're watching online or on

YouTube and and you're a skeptic or or you doubt this or you just

don't have a religious background and you're doubtful

that that anything like this could even be real.

And you came in with serious wounds or or suffering or

difficulty. And let me I cannot offer you

anything more powerful than Jesus, but you can only partake

in his comfort if you know him, if you have placed your faith in

Jesus finished work of salvation on the cross.

That's what the Bible says in Romans 10/9 and 10 if you

confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, believe in your

heart that God raised him from the dead, that you can be saved

for with the heart 1 believes and is justified, and with the

mouth 1 confesses and is saved. Do you know him not have you

heard about him not do you go to church?

Not do you read a Bible? Do you know him?

Have you given him your life to reign and rule over?

Because if not. Let today be that day so you can

partake in His comfort. The Bible says that you must

believe and declare. That's what those verses just

said. You must believe because you

must believe that you are in need of a Savior and you can't

save yourself. You must believe that you

rebelled against God and therefore do not have the power

to live perfectly on your own. Believe that He rose from the

dead in power and wants to save you.

You must believe that Jesus is God and you must declare.

Declare him as King of your life and Lord over you.

Declare to surrender your will and your desires to him.

You must declare him publicly and not be ashamed of Him.

And so if you would like the opportunity to surrender your

life to Jesus today, I want to give you that opportunity.

If you bow your heads and close your eyes for a brief moment, if

you're willing to ask Him for forgiveness and salvation with

every eye closed and every head bowed, I just want you to

quietly or silently repeat this prayer after me.

It's nothing magical, just a declaration of faith.

Jesus, I know I'm a Sinner and I can't save myself.

I want you to save me. I surrender everything to you.

I receive your promise of forgiveness, of adoption into

your family, of eternal life. Be my Lord.

Please, Jesus, if you prayed that prayer for the very first

time right now, would you be brave and raise your hand so I

can see it? Thank you, thank you.

You can put your hands down in Jesus name, Amen.

Jesus loves you more than you realize and more than you can

imagine. And if you gave your life to him

moments ago, welcome to the family.

In a few minutes when we respond to this message, if you gave

your life to Christ, we have something for you.

We have tables in the back that say I raised my hand and

there'll be people back there. We have a gift for you we want

to celebrate with. You and we want to talk about

what's next. How to?

How to? Pursue a relationship with Jesus

ongoing and grow as a believer. So in just a moment, when we

stand, I want you to go back there and say hi to those

people. They love you.

All right, Maybe you've been listening.

And you've been thinking like this sounds great as a concept,

but I have a friend who's suffering and I still don't know

what to do. All right, four steps, 4

practical steps to walk with someone through their

affliction. Here we go.

Number one, serve. Don't speak.

Serve, don't speak. In 2020, it was a, it was a

Friday evening. I got this frantic phone call

that a really close relative of mine who lived right down the

street from me had taken his life.

And I remember getting the car and driving over to his family's

house. I've been there 100 times and it

looked completely different. The entire block is, is filled

with emergency vehicles and lights and everything going off

everywhere. And it, you know, and I and I

walk up the steps and I open the door and I walk into the living

room and the family sitting on the couch and everyone's shell

shocked. And I remember just thinking

like, I have no idea what to do. What do you tell kids who just

lost their dad? What do you tell a wife who just

lost her husband? But, but eight years earlier, I

had been the one in the living room when I lost my daughter.

I'd been the one on the couch. And so I I did what I wanted

people to do back then. I sat and I didn't say anything.

I just mourned and I just grieved.

And when I found an opportunity to serve them, I went in and I

was the one that cleaned the bathroom because I knew they

couldn't handle that. No one needed my words.

No one needed my advice. They just needed my presence.

Then he didn't know they weren't alone.

They needed to know it was OK to not be OK.

They needed to know that no one was going to put a time limit on

how quickly they needed to get over it.

They needed me to protect them from well-intentioned people who

would like to help and didn't know how.

And so Step 1 is that in the rawest of moments when people

are suffering, is simply to be present and be silent.

Secondly, don't offer advice. Answer questions when you have

earned. In fact, do you know how you'll

know that it's time to speak? They'll ask you.

They'll ask you. And until they do, just be

there. The Bible says to be quick to

listen and slow to speak in the Book of Job.

After Job loses his entire family, his friends show up and

for seven days and seven nights they just sit with him morning.

He'll say anything. In fact, if they had continued

like that, the book of Job would have been very different.

They just. Sat and you wait until they ask,

and you're going to have an opportunity when they ask to

point them to the truth. That's Step 3.

Answer when you're asked with gentle truth, not opinion.

Gentle truth, not opinion. This is the inspired, inerrant,

infallible Word of the living God.

The Bible is perfect but lived out.

Scripture is potent and powerful.

We answer questions and doubts with Scripture.

But if you have lived out this scripture, it is so much more

powerful. That is the power of a

testimony. That's what God is preparing you

for. If you really want to help

people, you cannot offer them an answer from a Bible you don't

actually believe. If you really want to help

people, you have to not just learn your Bible.

You have to live your Bible. Man, every time.

And I get this all the time. This is this is multiple times a

week. Every time I'm talking to

someone about the really hard stuff, the stuff they don't want

to do, I get the responses like I don't care what the church

wants me to do or, or the church is pressuring me to do these

things. No, no, it's not.

The Bible is the Bible's pressuring me to do really hard

stuff that I don't want to do. The church is just encouraging

one another to do the hard stuff of the Bible.

When you'll do this, when you'll do the hard things when you

don't want to, you're going to have a lot more ground to stand

on when you have to go and talk to somebody else about the hard

things. Guys, I desperately need

encouragement from those closest to me to do the hard things that

are in here because I do not want to do them.

That's what makes them hard. I need to be encouraged because

I don't want to do that and you don't want to do it either, if

we're being honest. So so in those moments where

we're asked those questions and the and the truthful answer from

scripture is going to be difficult, we do it gently.

The Bible is non negotiable. It is not a buffet where you

take what you want and you leave the rest.

So regardless if that question is about mental illness

treatment, if it's about forgiveness, if it's about

walking in grief or just dealing with suffering because of sin,

we answer with gentle truth. And if you get a chance to speak

the truth into someone's life in the middle of suffering, we

grounded in scripture. We saturated in scripture.

We drowned in scripture. I got a message from a friend

this last week. They, they, they, they don't go

to our church. They live out of state.

And they're going through something awful right now.

And they watched my sermon on forgiving others.

And they have this really deep, really raw wound from someone

that betrayed them in such an intimate way.

And they show no remorse. And they're, and they're

actually blaming my friend. They're gaslighting them.

And so they listen to my sermon. Here's what they said.

No, I can't forgive them because they don't deserve it.

Now, that's not biblical. That's pain and agony and

emotion making an unbiblical opinion seem justifiable, and I

can't change that. I could gently.

Point back to scripture. And I can be patient and I can

pray for them. That's Step 4.

Be patient and pray we got to be patient.

Hearts don't change quickly. Amen.

They are a stubborn, fibrous thing.

Think crock pots, not microwaves.

You try to microwave someone's heart for three minutes, you're

just going to get something hardened and stubborn.

So instead it's low and slow. We walk with people through

their addictions. We walk with people in their

messes. We walk with people as they

grieve and as they heal. I can't.

I cannot force people to change. In fact, I can't make people

love Jesus. I can't change hearts.

I can't heal wounds. And you can't either.

Only God can do that. But you can pray for them.

And I mean actually praying for them.

I don't mean the little emoji thing on their social media

post. I mean you can take their names

and you can go into the throne room of the King of Kings and

the Lord of Lords with their name on your lips and in

humility and boldness as a child of God, you can lift up their

need to God over and over and over again.

You can pray for them and be patient.

And we're going to finish our sermon doing that today.

Go ahead and stand. We're going to sing a song.

And here's what we're going to. Do.

I want to offer you the opportunity, the chance to come

up to the altar today and pray for that person in your life

that you're trying to walk with. Maybe it's somebody that you're

close to. Maybe it's a friend, maybe it's

a relative. Maybe you're the one that's

struggling and you need to come up and pray.

Maybe you want to pray alone at the altar.

Maybe you want someone to pray with.

Our primary mechanism of encouraging is the Holy Spirit

through believers, encouraging other believers.

It is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

So we would love to pray with you.

We would love to encourage you. I want you to come and be

encouraged today. Let me leave you with one final

story and then we'll respond to this.

Every Sunday morning at 6:30, a number of us elders, deacons and

and church members join together at the church office and we pray

for about an hour. We, we just pray.

We pray for other churches and we pray for their congregations.

We pray for their pastors. We pray for this service.

We pray for the visitors and the volunteers and the speakers and

the worship. We just pray.

And as we were starting to pray today, I looked around.

I realized that every single person sitting in the room

praying for you was going through significant suffering in

their life. Children that have rebelled,

children that were far from God, significant health problems,

chaos in their life. And yet they were there at 6:30

to pray for you. Say me, they were being prepared

through their suffering and the comfort to be ready to comfort

you. And so early in the morning you

were on their lips and on their minds and on their hearts to

take you in to the throne room of God to pray for you as you

would come in today. That is the model the Second

Corinthians is telling us is that we will be comforted in our

affliction in order to prepare us to comfort one another.

So we want to pray for you. We want to pray with you so you

come as the Lord leads. We love you guys.