The Strange Gifts of God: The Gift of Suffering | Part 3

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

I was 19 when I first kind of went through a series of storms.

And the story we're gonna look at is a storm at sea.

And we often use that as a metaphor for suffering in life.

And you know, when I was 19, I went through my first serious series of storms, of sufferings of sort.

I had a friend that was really like a brother to me in high school who was facing serious addiction with drugs and alcohol, and our relationship was deteriorating very quickly.

In that year, my friend of mine was on a road trip to Southern California, and he died in a car accident in that matter of months of that same incident with my friend.

And then my parents were getting separated and they would head for divorce.

This was all within like really a couple of weeks.

Felt like it was kind of storm after storm.

I don't know if you've ever had those moments in your life.

And, you know, I was working at a church, I was an intern at a church, kind of trying to find my way in ministry.

And I think the people there were very concerned about me.

A lot had been going on in my life.

They were concerned that maybe something was, you know, happening, that I would not be in church or I would be out of the ministry or something like that.

There's this woman that came up to me during that season.

You know, she approached me at church one day.

She said, Chris, I woke up and uh in the middle of the night last night, and I had two thoughts.

I thought about you, and I thought about Luke chapter 22, verses 31 through 32.

Luke 22:31–32

And I was like, I don't have the Bible memorized.

Like, what is that verse?

Um and she read it to me, you know, or she she had it memorized.

She said, It's when Jesus approaches Peter, because he's about to deny Jesus.

And Jesus says to Peter, Peter, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail.

This was the first time in my life, she gave that to me as just kind of a verse to think about during this season of suffering.

It was the first time in my life that I thought that perhaps the difficult things in my life were more complicated than I originally thought.

That I actually opened my mind to a possibility I had not really considered.

I was thinking things were very simple.

Have you been here before?

You know, you believe in God, God is in control, he's powerful, therefore, everything that happens in this world happens because of God being in control.

But this verse really messes with that paradigm because it incorporates the thought that perhaps not everything in this world is designed by God, but some things could be designed by his very enemy.

There are counter forces at work, right?

In addition to this, it also opens up this possibility of human responsibility, right?

Jesus says, I've prayed for you that your faith might not fail, that your faith might not fail, Peter.

And suddenly the paradigms of suffering started to kind of open up for me a little bit, that perhaps not everything that was going on in my life was from God.

And that in fact some of the things that were happening were because of human responsibility, and just because we live in a world that is deeply fractured at its very core.

This was the first time in my life where suffering became more complicated, and because of that gave me a kind of peace, a strange peace, that actually some of the things that I was ascribing to God were not God at all.

What storms have you been through in your life?

What difficulties have you faced?

How have those storms reinterpreted who you are as a character, as a in your character, as a person?

You know, throughout literature, storms have always been a key metaphor, motif that story writers use to talk about the difficulties of life, to change a person, to arrest their character and rearrange it.

You know, you think about Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey, or you think about Captain Ahab and Moby Dick, or even Jonah and the whale in the Bible.

You know, all these stories are about a physical storm, but they're also teaching us about something else.

We're looking today at a physical storm that should teach you the complexities of suffering, the difficulties of suffering, the intricacies of God's sovereignty through this story from Paul.

I'm gonna tell you the story first, because the biblical narrative in Acts 27 is it's almost 37 verses, 38 verses long, and we don't have the time to read that much.

So I'm gonna tell you the story, and then we'll pull out the verses from it to show you these intricate, interesting moments.

This is what happens.

Paul is under arrest, and under arrest, he's being transported to Rome.

His transport includes a centurion, a Roman guard who owns his life.

As they're about to set off to go to Rome, Paul warns the centurion and everyone about to board the ship.

He goes, I'm an experienced sailor, which he is, he's been on several missionary journeys at this point.

He says, the weather doesn't look good.

He says, as we go out into this storm, I believe the ship would not only be lost, but we will all die.

The centurion says, You don't get to make the calls because you're in prison.

So we're gonna get on the ship.

So they get on the ship anyways, and lo and behold, a storm, a great tempest arises, right?

The nor'easter comes and there's this massive winds and waves, and things are very bad.

And Paul tells the people, look, I told you that this was going to go wrong.

I told you that there was a possibility because we live in such a complex world with storms and various unpredictabilities, that this is gonna go wrong.

And he says, at the same time, he said, last night, I had a vision.

I had a dream, which is very common in the book of Acts.

People have dreams and visions and things like this.

And he says, an angel of the Lord appeared to me and he said that no one will die.

But we have to be very careful and very wise.

So I believe that God has told me no one will die, but there has to be wisdom handled here, and we're gonna have to run this ship aground.

We're gonna have to bring this ship to an island and wreck the ship in order to save our lives, which was a tactic in first century nautical experiences.

So Paul says, this is what we have to do.

The men start to panic and they start to gather the life raft together, and they start to, the one boat on there that could get them off of the main ship.

And as they're doing that, Paul says, if you leave, we won't have enough sailors to really get to where we need to go, and we will absolutely die.

He says this at the same time of saying, we will absolutely not die, because I believe God told us.

You see the two hands of suffering kind of already playing into this story here.

Well, the men decide to cut the cargo, turn the ship loose, or turn the life raft loose.

The men stay on the ship, they guide it sort of to safety, they wreck the ship, but every life is spared and everybody's okay.

That's the story.

That's how it ends.

What do we learn from this?

What do we learn from this story in Acts chapter 27?

Acts 27 · chapter mention

We learn two sides of suffering.

We learn the complexity of it, and on the other side of the coin, we learn the course.

The complexity, what is God's role in suffering?

And the course.

What's the point?

Where is it headed?

When we go through storms in life, where is it head?

Where do we go from here?

And we're gonna do all this in about 20 minutes, okay?

Sound good?

Okay, uh, the complexity and the course.

First, the complexity of suffering.

What's God's role in it?

You know, this story it reveals this complex nature of human suffering.

Uh look at these bunches of verses.

If you have your bulletin, just open it to Acts 27.

Verses 9 through 11, verses 21 to 26, verses 31 to 32.

Okay, these little sections will show you three different realities.

That the world is broken and unpredictable, that humans have responsibility, and that God is sovereign, all three.

Look at this.

When Paul starts in verse 9, he says, Sirs, I perceive that the voyage will be with injury and much loss, not only to the cargo and the ship, but also our very lives.

That's him right before they leave.

He goes, I am, I perceive the world is an unpredictable place, and I'm just looking at the way the world operates and my experience as a sailor, and we're going to die if we get on this ship.

One thing Paul recognizes as someone who's, by the way, this Paul was a person saturated in the Old Testament.

He was a Pharisee, which meant he was a Jewish scholar of the Old Testament.

Part of his vision and uh worldview was that the world was a dangerous and unpredictable place.

It was not some place that is safe and under complete control like a computer algorithm.

No, the world is a dangerous and unpredictable place.

Christians often say that the world is broken.

That the world in its very nature, uh, through through nature itself, through the ways even our physiology works, does not work perfectly like a computer algorithm.

The world is a dangerous and unpredictable place.

It is broken, it is fractured as its core.

And later, when they're on the ship and they're suffering, he says, Men, look at Acts 27, 21, men, you should have listened to me.

He said, I was telling you that we live in this broken world and that things could go wrong, and then says, You should have listened to me.

Uh, because now we might incur injury and loss.

Yet, verse 22, look at this.

I urge you to take heart, for there will be no loss of life among you.

Later in verse 26, he says, but at the same time, we've got to run this ship aground.

Do you see the tension at work in Paul's language?

The world is a broken place.

We have some responsibilities, we've got to get this ship to the ground, but also God is sovereign.

God is in control.

There won't be any loss of life here.

You see, later in Acts 27, 31 and 32, when the men are trying to get out of the ship and bail, they're trying to get on the life raft and get out, he stops them.

He says, unless, look at, unless these men stay in the ship, you cannot be saved.

Well, which is it?

Is God in control and everyone will be saved?

Or unless these men stay on the ship, then we'll be saved.

Which is it?

It's both.

See, the biblical understanding of suffering in this world is much more complicated than our simplistic understanding of a God who is entirely manipulating the world like a computer algorithm.

It's more complicated than that.

The biblical writers have always said this.

And in fact, some of the great teachers and preachers on this passage that I read and listened to, Tim Keller, Oz Guinness, Willie James Jennings, these scholars that pull out this exact fact from this text, they all say, which is it?

Is it A that the world is a broken and unpredictable place, therefore that's why suffering happens, B, that humans are responsible for all of the world's suffering, or C is God sovereign and he's responsible for all the suffering?

Scripture says it's actually D, all of the above.

That we live in such a world where God is totally in control and sovereign, that he is sovereign over everything, but at the same time has given responsibility and has created the world in such a space and place that it is not a perfect world.

When God created the world, he said it is good, it is good, it is good, it is good.

Genesis 1.

He didn't say it is perfect.

There is actually a great Hebrew word for perfect.

It's never employed in Genesis 1.

Why is it not employed in Genesis 1?

Because God was not creating a perfect world, a complete world.

He was creating one that was good.

And you and I don't get to choose the kind of world in which we live.

And a part of the biblical writer's imagination was that this is a complicated subject.

Humans are responsible, the world itself is fractured, and God is still sovereign.

God is still sovereign.

The broken and fractured world that we live in is the environment of God's activity, the space in which He desires to work and will, His way.

The writers of Scripture, they understood the complexity.

We do not live in a computer algorithm, but we also don't live in complete chaos.

We don't live in a computer algorithm, we don't live in chaos, we live in a cosmos.

A universe that has both predictable features and unpredictable features.

We have things that we can absolutely count on.

We can measure a mountain, we can see its mountain range, but also an avalanche can happen.

We know weather patterns as best we can, but we also understand storms occur.

Predictable biology and mutation.

We live in a cosmos.

We live in a place that is both predictable and unpredictable.

We don't live in a computer algorithm and we don't live in chaos.

We live in God's cosmos, his space, that he is working and willing his way together.

That's how he's decided to do it.

Through a broken and predict and unpredictable world, human responsibility and God's sovereignty.

This means there is disease, things we can't control.

We live in a broken world.

There's storms and things that happen that we just can't explain or understand.

But there's also human responsibility.

We make bad choices that create this world's chaos, right?

And contribute more to the chaos.

And at the same time, God sits on a throne and is completely sovereign over this world.

He's never panicked about a thing that happens.

He's never surprised at the moments and storms that come.

You see, if you only have one of these three, A, B, or C, you'll develop a specific kind of immaturity.

And one of the things the Bible is inviting us into is to take all three in order to develop a kind of mature heart.

You see, if you have one of the three, you'll have one small faction of immaturity.

You'll have anxiety, for example, if you think that the world is just a dangerous and unpredictable place.

If you just take that option and you say, we just live in this broken world, it's unpredictable, it's dangerous, you'll be racked with anxiety.

You'll never want to leave, you'll never want to do anything, you'll never want to take any risk, you'll never want to love anyone because you'll be afraid of betrayal.

You'll never want to do anything or take a job because you'll be afraid that something will happen because you think this is a dangerous and unpredictable place.

Also, you you might develop not only anxiety, but you might develop arrogance if you just pick the human responsibility thing.

I need to make my own life.

I need to make my own choices.

I am the captain of my own ship.

I own my destiny.

I've got a plan.

I gotta do me.

Not recognizing that an honest look of your life would be mostly an accumulation of things given to you that were outside of your control: family of origin, location, race or ethnicity, financial status, and suffering.

Things that happened to you that you didn't choose that contributed to the kind of person you are today.

Anxiety, arrogance, or the apathetic, apathy.

If you just say, well, God's in control, it'll be this kind of let go and let God theology, right?

This kind of Jesus take the wheel theology.

Well, everything will be fine because God's got it.

Well, at the end of the day, you need to go get a job, you know, or like you need to fix, you know, you need to take steps towards health and healing in your life.

Like, there's human responsibility that you must take.

You see, a balance of these three helps develop in you a kind of maturity that God is inviting you to.

In order to produce this kind of maturity, we need to receive the strange gift of God within suffering.

Suffering itself is not really the gift so much, but there's a gift within it.

There's something buried behind the storm, behind the difficulty.

See, it's not about the difficulty, it's about the thing behind the thing, behind the curtain, pulled back to see what God is really giving you, what he's really gifting you.

The storm is here to show you something about God and about yourself.

And the storm is kind of a perfect metaphor, is it not?

The raging sea outside of our control, and the boat that's within our control.

And the balance between those two things.

That's perhaps why the Bible uses storms so often in the Gospels, Joe and I mentioned earlier, and right here in the book of Acts.

But it's not just about understanding the complexity, Paul also understood the course.

Where are we headed?

What is the point?

Why suffering?

The course of suffering.

Paul knew he was headed somewhere and that the world was headed somewhere.

He had like a personal course and a corporate course, like a collective course of where the world was heading.

The personal one was that he really knew God was bringing him to Rome.

In fact, if you looked at earlier texts in Acts, Acts 23.11, Acts 19.21, I have these printed in your bulletin, you'll see two places where Paul, it says, was resolved in the Holy Spirit, because he needs to see Rome.

Later it says, the Lord stood by Paul, telling him you must testify in Rome.

He had a personal understanding.

God is designing me, setting a course, sovereign over my life to put me towards Rome.

And whatever happens to me going to Rome, I will be within God's will.

And if I die, I will live.

And if I live, I will live.

Right?

To live is Christ, to die is gain, Paul will write later.

I know I'm on the right course.

He also knew a collective course, that God has a purpose in this world, that it is not left spinning out of control, but God can take the evil and suffering and repurpose it and set a course.

He knew, Paul knew that where he's going and the storm he was in still would contribute in some way to his own good and the good of the world.

We are mostly unconvinced of this.

I, like you, grew up reading the great writers who question this very thing, right?

It's like the oldest question.

Why would God allow these storms?

Why evil when there is a good God?

Albert Camus or David Hume, George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens most recently, all articulate this idea.

Hey, if you have to choose between a good God and evil, you might as well choose evil because you can see it.

You know it.

You can count on it.

This kind of nihilism fades into our culture.

That there's basically no point.

It's just chaos, right?

But many Christian scholars have always said, well, just because we can't see the course of suffering, you know what makes us think there is no course?

This is a constant argument amongst Christian theologians through time, right?

The truer statement than, well, we can't reconcile a good God with an evil world.

The truer statement is we can't think of a reason.

We can't think of a reason for how to reconcile a good God with an evil world.

Alvin Plantinga, the philosopher, he says this: given that God does have a reason for permitting these evils, why think we would be the first to know?

Given that he is omniscient, and given our very substantial epistemic limitations, the limitations of what we could possibly know, it isn't at all surprising that his reasons escape us.

Scripture does not always tell us the course.

In fact, it rarely rarely tells us the course.

The whole book of Job, you're waiting, like, is there an answer here?

There's no real answer in Job.

Scripture doesn't always tell us the course, but invites us to trust the wisdom of God in his course he sets.

Let me give you a few examples of what I mean by this.

This is God's sovereignty at work.

The ability to permit and limit suffering and to enact his power over it to change that suffering into something good.

Okay, I'm gonna say this again.

God's sovereignty is not only his ability to permit and or limit suffering, but his power to change its very course into his and our good.

We know this because we need to read backwards from this moment of Acts.

Read backwards into the Old Testament.

You look at a man like Paul, who is arrested, left for dead, falsely accused.

It should remind you of several people in the Bible.

The first it should remind you of is in Genesis, the end of the book of Genesis, the very first book of the Bible in the Old Testament.

It tells the story of Joseph, one of Jacob's sons.

Jacob being the father, you know, with Abraham and Isaac, the father, the lineage of Israel.

And Joseph is proud and arrogant, and his brothers are resentful and bitter.

And his brothers leave him for dead.

They falsely accuse him, he is arrested, he is taken into prison, but through his harrowing journey of sufferings, he somehow arises to the topped of the Egyptian political system.

He receives immense power.

And there's this great famine that comes across the land.

And Jacob's brothers who ditched him and betrayed him and left him for dead, now come back begging to the brother who is in power, who was once arrogant, but who has changed, who has allowed the complexities of suffering to shape his character.

In the end of the book of Genesis, after this kind of like, it's like a Russian novel.

I mean, it's filled with drama, sex, violence, deceit.

At the end of it, there's Joseph sitting with his brothers as they're begging him for their food and their life.

He's in a position of power, he could easily let them starve.

But he says this to them in perhaps my favorite verse in the entire Bible Genesis 50 20.

He says this to his brothers, to you, as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring about it that many people should be kept alive as they are today.

If you're reading that in the NIV translation, you'll read this You, brothers, intended to harm me, but God intended it for good, to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.

Thousands after this are saved from starvation.

The entire economy of the ancient world is reworked.

The family of Israel is preserved.

Relationships between the family are restored.

What happened?

God took the evil intentions hidden in the fabric of this world and he repurposed them and reworked them, taking the wicked motives and making them good.

Now notice and be very careful here.

It does not mean that the evil things are good.

The evil things remain evil things.

They remain with evil intentions.

He looks at his brothers, he says, You meant this for evil, but God took the intentions of you and of this broken and fractured world, and he reworked the intentions to bring about something that you could have never done.

This is why Paul on this ship could say what he said.

And it's also why Paul could write what he wrote a couple of months before that, probably actually a couple of years before this shipwreck, when he wrote a letter to the Roman church that he was about to go visit.

He sent a letter ahead of him before he was gonna go to Rome, he sent a letter to them, and in this letter, he wrote one of the most famous New Testament Bible verses.

So I'm giving you old and New Testament famous Bible verses in context here, Romans 8.28.

And we know, look at this, that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him who have been called according to his purpose.

Read that verse so carefully.

It is not saying that all things are good.

It is saying that God works the quote unquote all things, the good and the bad, that he collects the good and the bad, and he reworks and repurposes them for the good, the singular objective good of his own nature and character given to us.

A remarkable teaching of God's sovereignty, hidden in this verse, that God would see the all things of this world, the evil intentions, and rework them for good.

All things are not good, but in the all things of life, God is working them, setting them on his course.

That's his sovereignty, that's how powerful he is.

What did Paul and Joseph both have?

They had an understanding that not everything in this world is good, but that everything in this world can be used, repurposed, redeemed for God's glory and goodness.

Nothing is unusable in the hands of this mighty God.

Nothing is wasted, nothing cannot be taken, there is nothing that is in this world that he cannot pick up.

There is nothing that he is afraid of.

There's this teaching out there that's like God can't be around sin.

The cross would rebuke that.

It's not that God can't be around sin, it's that sin cannot stand the presence of God.

That sin itself cowers in fear, that evil itself cowers in fear.

It says what Tim Keller says.

He says, God uses the worst things in this world, the vast displays of evil, to bring about the very opposite of evil's intent.

Keller also says this in the end.

God let Satan and evil have enough rope to hang himself.

He let evil to intend something, but accomplish its opposite.

That's how powerful God is.

Some of you know I'm a massive gospel music fan.

And I I'm not talking about like I like Christian contemporary music and everything, but I love real traditional gospel music.

And I think I love it so much, one, the music is so good, but the theology in gospel music, around this issue in particular, is so sound.

You know, the black church has existed as this beacon of good news to say that we live in an unpredictable world with human responsibility and God is sovereign.

And in their music, there is a reckoning with the deep pain of the African American community here and the hope of Jesus Christ.

It's unbelievable.

There's just no music like it.

And there's something in there that just can't be replicated.

And one of the most famous gospel songs ever written is called Take My Hand, Precious Lord.

It's by a man named Thomas A.

Dorsey.

And his story of how he wrote this song illustrates the complexity and the course of suffering.

Take My Hand, Precious Lord.

It was written in 1932.

In 1932, Dorsey was 32.

He was born in 1900.

So this is a long time ago.

He was newly married, and he had a baby on the way.

And his baby was about one month to the due date when he took a gig in St.

Louis.

And he traveled to St.

Louis from Atlanta.

And he was at the time a jazz and soul singer and a gospel singer.

It was very common during that time to kind of have a foot in both worlds.

He was singing jazz and soul and he was singing gospel music.

And he went to St.

Louis and he was about to get on stage to go on this gig when a young boy ran up with a Western Union telegram.

And on the Western Union Telegram it said, Your wife just died.

That's all it said.

And he received that telegram and obviously took the next train back to Atlanta, where he found in the hospital his wife dead, and that she had given birth to this baby boy.

Only to that night lose his baby boy.

These are his words.

I buried Netty, his wife, and our little boy together in the same casket.

And at that moment I fell apart.

For years I closeted myself.

I felt that God had done to me an injustice I could never forgive.

I didn't want to serve him anymore.

I didn't want to write gospel songs.

I just wanted to go back to that jazz world I once knew so well.

In that moment of his despair, he had a friend who knew exactly what Dorsey needed.

He drove Thomas Dorsey to a practice room at a little black college in Atlanta and gave him the whole night in this practice room with a piano.

He didn't even say anything, he said, just stay in this room with this piano.

And it's there that Dorsey said, The Lord met him in the midst of the storm, and he wrote these words to the famous song, Take My Hand, Precious Lord.

Precious Lord, take my hand, it says, Lead me on, let me stand.

I am tired, I'm weak, and I'm worn.

Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light.

Take my hand, precious Lord, and lead me home.

Always in gospel music, there is a projection towards the eternal, towards home, towards heaven.

Because this world is broken and it is filled with suffering, but God has set it on a course to head home to heaven.

This is not making lemons out of lemonade.

This is not just have a little hope.

This is firm, fixed, sovereignty of God, heaven language.

He sang this song to his friend who dropped him off at the rehearsal space later that night.

And that friend was a minister of worship at a little church in Atlanta, decent-sized church in Atlanta, that next Sunday.

His home church was called Ebenezer Baptist Church, where their lead pastor was in their second year.

His name was Martin Luther King Sr.

It was at this church that Martin Luther King Jr.

grew up hearing the sounds of Take My Hand, Precious Lord, which he would say was his favorite song ever written.

He requested it at numerous rallies.

He even requested it to be sung once he died.

A song that sustained and inspired not only the civil rights movement, the civil rights movement's most important leader, Barnun.

The storm of a wife dying, the suffering of a wife and a boy dying is evil.

It is not good.

These things are not good.

The death was not good.

But God took the evil intention that this grief could have been for Dorsey and repurposed it, charting a new course for Dorsey and potentially maybe even this country, to channel it into a song that would change and sustain the trajectory of the civil rights greatest leader.

How can we say that God cannot repurpose evil things to good things when this is just one example of the many things God could do with evil things?

How can we be sure?

How can we know where we're headed?

How can we be sure that this course applies to all of us and doesn't just apply to these unique stories of Joseph, of Paul, of Thomas Dorsey?

We know this because when the storm is about to end, Paul gathers all the sailors and he says this to them, Acts 27, 34.

Therefore, he says, I urge you, take some food.

The journey is about to end.

It will strengthen you.

And look what he says: not a hair is to perish from any head of you.

And after he said these things, he took bread and giving thanks to God in the presence of all, he broke it and he ate it.

And they were all encouraged.

This is before their lives are spared.

How does Paul have this peace?

How does he have this complete security?

It's actually hidden in the line when he says, Not a hair of your head will perish.

Do you know where he gets that line?

He gets that line from the teachings of Jesus.

Luke, who's writing this story, is in the boat, actually.

He says he's in the boat.

He was there during the storm.

He wrote a gospel, an entire narrative of Jesus' life.

And in Luke's narrative of Jesus' life, this teaching from Jesus is in Luke 21, 18.

Not a hair of your head will perish, Jesus says.

By your endurance you will gain your lives.

He says this in the context to his disciples, where he says, You're going into a world that is broken and unpredictable.

There will be wars, there will be persecutions, there will be injustice.

You are heading out into the bad lands.

However, the promise remains that not a hair of your head shall perish, and by it you will gain your very lives.

Unfortunate English translation, the King James uses the word souls, because that's probably the better term from the Greek.

That not a head will, not a hair from your head will perish, but you will actually preserve your souls.

How can Jesus say this?

How can Paul repeat Jesus' saying to these sailors?

How can we be assured that through our suffering, even if we die, we would gain our souls?

Because that's exactly what Christ did.

Jesus was the one who not only lost every hair of his head, but lost his very life.

And yet, with the intention of evil, the crucifixion of Jesus, the bloodied and battered body of Christ, the Son of God, the evil intentions that were built into that moment, God repurposed and worked to the resurrections for his good and our good.

Death was not the end of the story there.

Death is not the end of our story.

For Paul, it was a good ending.

He landed somewhat safely on an island and he makes his way to Rome, which we'll pick up to next week.

But not all of our stories will have happy endings.

Some of our suffering will be so unimaginable we won't know what to do.

This is why we take communion.

Because in the broken body and the shed blood of Jesus, we remember that our faith is not resting on outcomes, but on promises from God.

And God says, if we lose our lives, we will gain it.

Proof is in the cross that at this moment on the cross, Jesus dying, losing his life, was giving it and repurposing it for all of humankind.

And so no matter where we go, we know the course and the sovereignty of suffering, which is that God can take the evil things and work them to good.

He can even take the most evil, wretched thing, death itself, and repurpose it here into life for you and for me.

And so let's receive God's good word not on something we might do, but something he has done to prove his goodness in the midst of such terrible time.

The hope of the broken bread is this: for all the reasons we can think of of why God might allow suffering, we can eliminate one.

We can eliminate the reason, the suspicion that he may not love us.

And we can stand on the sure ground that he does and that he's offered his life and proven that life is stronger than death.

Let's pray.

People going into difficult places.

So, Lord, we pray that this worship and this communion would be a healing agent into our life right now.

That it would be reminding us of your goodness, that death itself was not an enemy that you were scared of, but something you took hold of, repurposed, and gave it to our good.

Give us, God, the faith to see in communion and in our worship as we sing to you your goodness in the midst of storms.

God, we need you to do that in Christ's name.

Amen.

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