Harbor Church - Mid City

Suffering (Is. 14: 24-27)

Mid-City 8/28/11

 I really wish I wasn’t preaching on suffering this week, but for me to preach on anything else this week would just be flat out disingenuous b/c, well, suffering is what we’ve been doing this week.  Just as we began to celebrate with all of you the wonderful gift of pregnancy, wham….miscarriage.  So this morning I am going to get you to walk with me through our journey of losing a 5^th child to miscarriage.  I hope that this will be helpful for those of you who are suffering right now and for all of us in the days ahead as we face suffering.  Here is the first big thing we have learned in our journey of 5 miscarriages and that we experienced again this week:

1.     We have a loving daddy whose plans can’t be thwarted (Is. 14: 24-27)

This text in Isaiah is where our Father took us on Tuesday morning when things were dark and bloody.  He began to speak to both Bradford and I.

The Israelites had all these amazing promises that God had given them about them being a great nation and living in a land full of milk and honey and abundance, but when they looked around at their life, they were like, really.  Is this it?  See the Assyrians had come into Israel during Isaiah’s lifetime, they had ransacked the northern capital city of Israel and exiled many citizens.  So they had an occupying enemy with their boots on their neck and that enemy was Assyria.  And into this confusion God speaks through his prophet Isaiah.  “Surely as I have planned, so it will be, and as I have purposed, so it will stand.  I will crush the Assyrian in my land; on my mountains I will trample him down.  His yoke will be taken from my people, and his burden removed from their shoulders.  This is the plan determined for the whole world; this is the hand stretched out over all nations.  For the Lord Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart him?  His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?

So God says, “You are feeling and experiencing suffering.  Your enemy, the Assyrians, seems to have the last laugh right now.  But it won’t always be so.  I will take care of them and you.  The yoke of slavery on your neck will be lifted. My plans can’t be thwarted.  Hear v27—oh how it spoke to us Tuesday, “For the Lord Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart him?  His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?” 

We looked at each other and remembered, “God’s purposes will be worked out here in the midst of this miscarriage.  Nothing can thwart them.  His hand is stretched out, and His hand is loving and kind.

And we talked, briefly, about the perfect plans of God and the permissive plans of God.  This is an important distinction that you need for your journey.  See God’s perfect plan is what is laid out in the Bible.  It is life as it should be.  God’s perfect plan gives us a picture of how the world should be and how the world will be one day, when He makes all things new.  But, until that day, God has a permissive plan.  He permits certain things to happen that are at odds with His perfect plan for the world.  A miscarriage is one of those.  God didn’t cause it, but God does permit things like miscarriages to happen.  Yet, miscarriages can’t and won’t thwart God’s perfect plan.  His hand can’t be turned back.

That language of understanding God’s perfect & permissive will has been helpful.  But other language, that we throw around as clichés and that you inevitably get when you suffer, often times isn’t helpful.  When you’re suffering, people who love you want to comfort you, and often, even though they love you so much and want to comfort you, they say things that aren’t that comforting.  This has happened with virtually each of our miscarriages and Bradford and I have learned to just smile as the unhelpful clichés come rolling our way and think to ourselves, “This person really loves me, that is why they are saying this unhelpful cliché to me right now.  And we’ve really learned to be thankful for their love despite what they are saying.” 

Let me give you an example, maybe the most famous cliché that is thrown around when you suffer.  Finish this one for me.  Well, we know that everything happens for a ________________.  Got that one this week.  True enough, there is a reason behind everything, but that doesn’t help me.  You know why?  B/c I don’t know what the reason is, and there is a good chance that I never will.  And if you try to spend the rest of your life figuring out what the reason is for your suffering, then you will be absolutely miserable b/c you may never know.  God never told Job.  So that cliché just isn’t too helpful.

But here is what helped us this week. God’s hand, the loving hand of our Father, is extended to us, working out his purposes in our life and the world, and His hand and His purposes can’t be thwarted by this miscarriage.  That is Rms. 8:28.  That is a verse you must know as you suffer.  That somehow, someway, our loving Father has a way of working all things for our good.   See now, on miscarriage #5, we know this to be true.  We’ve seen him do it over and over again.

I told you last week I am reading The Hiding Place.  Got to finish it in the hospital this week.  No better way to gain perspective on your suffering than to read a memoir of someone living in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany.  Man, our miscarriage just didn’t feel so bad after that.  Here is one way the Lord spoke to my heart through Corrie Ten Boom.  See the girls, when they were young, would ask their dad about hard things in life, as kids often do.  Why did this happen?  And Corrie, as a little girl, asks this. I  "Father, what is sex sin?" He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case off the floor and set it on the floor. Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?" he said. I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.
It's too heavy," I said. Yes," he said, "and it would be a poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It's the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger, you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you."

Parents take note of that one.  That is a great little parenting jewel isn’t it.  Well, Betsie and Corrie grew up, yet they often repeated this line in the concentration camp.  In the midst of beatings and starvation and mass death and disease, they would simply look up at their heavenly father and say, “Papa, it’s too heavy.  Can you carry this.”  I have learned that some things are just too heavy.  I felt this way about 3 AM Tuesday morning when we were in triage.  Not a fun place—your exhausted.  And there are women around you in labor—screaming and moaning, magnifying your pain.  I just looked up and said, “Dad, this is too heavy right now.  Can you carry us?”  And He did.  So, for now, I rest knowing that my Daddy will carry the stuff too heavy for me, and that my strong Dad’s hand can’t be thwarted.

(2)  We have a loving Daddy who makes everything beautiful (Ecc. 3: 1-2, 11)

Jesus directed Bradford and I to Ecc. 3 this week.  He spoke tenderly to us and said.  Here this.  “There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die….He has made everything beautiful in its time.  He has also set eternity in the hearts of men.”  Oh, man, this verse spoke to us.  We all go through seasons in life.  And you are going to have one of 2 experiences.  On the one hand, you will become jaded and cynical.  Life is a vapor, it is meaningless.  You reach the pinnacle of success and you’re still empty.  Or you go through the season of death—your loved one is ripped from you and you can’t cope.  You just get jaded and you stop living.

Or, on the other hand, you know the hand of a loving Father is making you beautiful through this in his time.  And not just you—he has made the loved one you lost beautiful.  And if that is the case, v11 happens.  Eternity gets set in your heart.  You long to see the beauty of your loved one & be reunited with them.

Well, that is what 2 Sam. 12 says happens for those who are in Christ.  David’s son is dying and he is sick b/c of David’s sin.  He fasts and prays and says, “Who knows?  Maybe God will intervene.” 

By the way, this is what I did this week.  Fasted, prayed, and called out to a God who heals and intervenes b/c we have experienced God do this in our lives.  He heals.  See he did this in our last pregnancy.  Bradford was bleeding and all signs looked really bad.  All of the elders from Harbor were getting together and we decided to go, in the midst of our crisis, because we thought, “Well, we already have a called meeting of the elders.  They can pray over us.”  We fasted, prayed, And God heard our prayers and miraculously saved little Virginia Grace, my precious little girl.  I don’t know why he chose not to heal in one case and not in this case.  That knowledge is too heavy and complex for me to carry. 

But here is what I do know.  In the story with David, God didn’t intervene either and heal David’s son.  And there is this amazing promise.  All of you who have lost a child or a loved one.  Here this.  David says in 2 Sam. 12: 23, “I will go to my son, but my son will not return to me.”  See David knows Ecc. 3 to be true.  His Son has been made beautiful, already, by God.  And He, David, will go to Him, one day, and they will be reunited.  Doesn’t that set eternity in your heart.

It certainly did me this week.  I sat often and pondered the Phelan family reunion in heaven.  5 children that I never held; 3 that I did.  What fun, what joy, what laughter when Bradford and I sit around the fire of our Father’s love and tell stories with all 8 of our children.  Eternity burned in my heart this week as we reflected on how our loving Father has already made our 5 children beautiful and as we longed to meet them. 

(3) We have a loving daddy whose grace is sufficient

While I can’t answer the question for you of why God heals sometimes and not in others, I can tell you this:  in each case, his grace is sufficient.  Oh how Jesus spoke to us through 2 Cor. 12 this week.  See Paul also had something that God didn’t heal.  This should Make you feel better for the times when God hasn’t intervened and healed you when you asked him to.  The guy wrote half the New Testament.  See it really isn’t about whether God likes you or not b/c, well, if you are in Christ, God likes you as much as he can possibly like you.  He can’t like you anymore.  So get that notion out of your head. 

Now, to Paul’s thorn.  Paul had a thorn in his side that theologians spill all sorts of ink arguing over exactly what the thorn was.  Bottom line—we don’t know what the thorn was.  But here is what we do know.  The thorn wasn’t pleasant.  It bothered Paul quite a bit.  So much so that he pleaded with God 3 times to remove it (see v8).  God said, “No.”  v9 “But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you.”  I am not going to remove the thorn or heal you Paul, but I am going to give you something better:  grace.  Suffieient grace.  Grace enough.  And that is what we have experienced in miscarriages.  Grace enough.

I really can’t mention this text without mentioning my saintly neighbor next door who is the closest thing to Jesus that has skin on b/c it is one of her favorites and she quotes it almost every time I am with her.  Maria.  In her 90s, osteoperosis and severe parkinsons, shakes like crazy.  Bed-ridden.  3 miscarriages.  Husband died in her arms of cancer.  As a single mom, a widow, raises both of her boys and her son contracts a disease that left him socially and physically disabled.  And now she can’t get out of bed.  Ever.  Shakes like a leaf.  And you will never, in all your life, meet someone with so much joy, some one who has suffered as well as she has.  And here is what she says to me everytime I am with her. “Fly, fly, fly to the fountain of his grace.  For his grace is sufficient.”  And she throws her head back and laughs.  Spirit-filled women do this.  She was experiencing His sufficient grace in that moment and it was sweet.  See that is the gift of suffering:  it makes the waters of self-sufficiency taste like poisonous vinegar.

And when you experience his sufficient grace, what happens is you are in insufficient.  Abraham Lincoln put this really well.  In 1863 with the nation in Civil War Lincoln was reflecting on America’s success leading up to the Civil War,  “We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown.  Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

I remember when this first happened to me.  It was when faced our first miscarriage when we were in seminary.   Up until that time I felt bullet-proof.  School, sports, married the girl of my dreams.  Things were rolling.  Then phi-slamma-jamma with the death of our dreams and the death of our son.  And we found out that Bradford had a chromosome condition that makes us far more likely than the average person to have a miscarriage.  But what was even worse was the chemical affect that first miscarriage had on my wife.  It sent her spinning emotionally and chemically into a deep, dark depression.

And so I did what guys do.  I put on my fix-it hat.  Let me see, “Depression.  Never had that one, but I’ll just use my go-to.  Now this is a true-story.  And I am about to make all the guys in the room who are married look incredibly sensitive.  Your wife is going to think, “Well, at least you aren’t as bad as Pastor Stephen. 

Here is the best I could come up with.  The one that had always worked for me.  “Well, babe, think about it this way.  At least both of your legs aren’t broken.”  I remember her looking over at me and saying, “Really?  Is that supposed to be helpful.”  Oh, yeah, see, you can still, you know, (motion with fingers). 

And so, there I was.  Wife struggling to get out of bed.  Food had no taste anymore.  Emotionally flat-lined.  And I was at the end of my self-sufficiency.  Out of tricks.  Nothing left in my bag.  Over months and months we learned that His grace was and is enough.  And He showered his grace on us and we got chemical help and we experienced His grace in community and his restoration.

See it was through suffering we learned the value of community.  That is why we shared our news with you last week of pregnancy and it is why, this week, when things went south, that we found ourselves so thankful for the hands of our community that showered the sufficient grace of Jesus upon us this week with calls, prayers, meals, emails, taking care of our kids, and more.  See rather than wondering, “What is wrong with Stephen and Bradford, you knew—they are hurting and we’re going to love on them.”  And you have, and you have been reminders to us this week that His grace is enough.

See this week you have helped us hear the voice of our Father saying, “I know you are hurting and I hurt with you.  For I too lost a son.  See I really can’t imagine what it was like to willingly give up your son as our heavenly Father did with His Son Jesus Christ.  I have involuntarily lost of 5 of my children. God voluntarily gave up His one and only Son on the cross. Why?  So He could do something about our suffering.  See this week, through you, through prayer, through the Bible, we have experienced the loving, weeping compassion of a Father coming to us, whispering, “I know your pain.  But take heart, for my Son’s death wasn’t in vain.  No, no.  His Resurrection means that your kids are resurrected.  His Resurrection means death doesn’t have the last word.  His Resurrection means that you’re gonna make it.  And He’ll give you all the grace you need for the journey.  B/c My Son is alive and He is with you.  Grace enough, my son.  Bear up.  Grace abounds.  Take heart in my sufficient grace, grace that is enough.

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