“Recycling our Pain”
Matthew 5:10
In my personal study of the gospels one of the things I have noticed is that some of the teachings of Jesus are just very difficult for us to follow. At times when we read them they don’t even make sense. For instance, Jesus said:
• If your right eye offends you, pluck it out
• If you right arm offends you, cut it off
• If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother , his wife and children and his brothers and sister, he cannot be my disciple
Our scripture for today falls into this category of verses I don’t understand when I first read them. Here it is. Happy are those who are persecuted. When Jesus spoke these words, Christians were beginning to experience persecution. Stephen would soon be stoned to death for his faith; Paul experienced great persecution. It has been estimated that more Christians were persecuted and martyred in the 20th century than in the previous 1900 years combined. So it really applies to today. Yet Jesus said happy are those who are persecuted. These are verses that we simply cannot understand until we really dig beneath the surface. These are verses we have to stop and ponder. Then we begin to understand. Jesus never wanted us to harm ourselves. He would never want us to pluck out an eye or cut off an arm but he does want us to remove sin from our lives. Jesus taught us to love and honor our parents so why would he tell us we must first hate our parents to be his followers? He was speaking to the extreme in parables to help us understand that our loyalty to Him must be at the top of the list. No one more important than Him. Should be no comparison between our love for Jesus and our love for Him.
Again, happy are those who are persecuted because they do what God requires. Most of us believe that our greatest contribution to this world we live in will be in the area where we are strongest but that’s actually not the case. Your greatest contribution-your greatest ministry—will not be found in your strength. It will be found in your weakness. The very thing you want to hide in your closet is the very thing God wants you to share.
Listen. God never wastes a hurt. What good is a trial if something good doesn’t come from it? Let’s look at the first of two questions I want us to try to answer.
1. Why does God allow pain and suffering? I see at least 6 reasons.
• God has given us a free will. You and I were created in God’s image and one of the things that means is that we have the right to choose. We have the ability to make decisions and these decisions will greatly impact our future. Now God could have created us without a free will. Basically we would be like puppets. But instead He chose to create us in His image.
Free will is a blessing but it can also be a burden. I won’t bother to ask how many of us have made at least one bad decision in our lifetime because I already know the answer. Now there’s one more thing to consider about the free will that God has given to us. He gives it to everyone else too. So when others choose to do wrong, we will sometimes be the victim.
• God uses pain to get our attention. Now pain is not the problem. Pain is a wake-up call; pain is a warning light. 3-4 years ago I was relaxing on the couch on the 4th of July and I had done some year work that day and my side was beginning to hurt. I thought well I overdid it today. But the pain just got worse and it continued for several hours. Finally after about four hours I thought I should tell my wife. I think I need to go to the ER. But the problem wasn’t the pain, the problem was a I had a kidney stone. The pain was just a warning signal. And the pain from that small stone can be incredible.
• God will often use a painful experience to cause us to change our ways. If you remember the story of Jonah, God told him to go to the city of Ninevah but instead he went down to Joppa. Look at the map. Jonah was going one way and God told him to go another. And then at the bottom of the ocean Jonah finally said this, “when I had lost all hope, I turned my thoughts once more to the Lord. The apostle Paul said this about pain—“I am glad, not because it hurt you but because the pain turned to God.” God uses pain to get our attention.
• God uses pain to teach us to depend on Him. 2nd Cor 1:8-9. Here is a truth that id very difficult for us to grasp. There are some things we can only learn through pain. Pain is one of life’s greatest teachers.
• There are some things we can only learn through pain.
• God allows pain to give us a ministry to other people who are hurting. Pain will prepare us to serve. 2 Cor. 1:4 TLB This is what this 8th choice is really all about.
Realize I am not God.
Earnestly place our faith in Jesus.
Choose to commit our lives to Christ.
Openly confess our faults.
Voluntarily submit to the changes God wants to make.
Evaluate all of my relationships.
Reserve a daily time with God
Yield myself to God.
We have said repeatedly for the last 8 weeks that all of us have hurts, habits and hang-ups. Nobody’s perfect. No church is perfect and as Billy Graham has said if you find a perfect church don’t join it because it won’t be perfect anymore. Now listen. God wants us to recycle our hurts, habits and hang-ups. Here is what I mean.
Who would be better to help an alcoholic than someone who has struggled with it already? Someone who has already gone through recovery?
Who better to help someone dealing with the pain of abuse than one who has suffered abuse?
Harry Ironside said “Don’t let your trials be wasted on you. If you keep all of that pain and hurt to yourself you will be wasting it. No matter what other people have done to you, God can still recycle the pain and use it for good. God will never waste a hurt, habit r hang-up. But we do all the time. God wants to use your pain to help other people.
Now the 2nd question. How can we use our pain to help people? The simple answer to this questions is found in 3 words…SHARE YOUR STORY! It’s that simple and it’s that difficult at the same time. Happy are those who are persecuted because they do what God requires. Share your story with those who need to hear it.
You may have never thought about it but there are only two things you can’t do in heaven. (1) Sin and (2) share the gospel with someone who has never heard it. Now which of these do you think God is leaving us here to do? All of us need to share our story for several reasons. (1) We grow when we do. It makes us stronger. (2) Your story is designed to help someone. Someone else may be developing a similar story and they need help. They are a work in progress. You are too but you may have made more progress than they have right now.
I want to briefly share mine.
For me, mine begins when I was 6 years old. I walked into our house with one of my friends and decided to show him the mess my Dad had made in the kitchen just the night before. My mother had already cleaned it up but I still wanted to describe it to him. My Dad had taken dishes from the cabinet and in a drunken rage he began throwing them across the kitchen. This went on for what seemed like forever. He then proceeded to take glass bottles of things like ketchup and he threw them as well. Leaving food and glass all over the walls and floor. I remember I stood there kind of frozen watching all of this as he threw everything he could find. My mother was in the path of much of it but I don’t recall her being hit by anything.
So I started to describe to my friend where it had all taken place and as I began to describe what happened, I still remember that my mother looked at me and said, “Shhhhh, letting me know that we don’t talk about things like that.” And so my first attempt to talk about it was shut down immediately and I never tried again. This went on for almost 20 more years until I had moved out when I got married at the age pf 23. Through the years there were more times than I could possibly count when dishes were broken, a time when he took his size 12 shoe off and hit my brother right in the head and actually knocked him out, times when my Dad would curse for hours on end at us and he would scream constantly. He was an alcoholic and also a rageaholic. It never let up. He was drunk every night and all day and night on the weekends.
I had a lot of friends fortunately and I always spent as much time as possible at their homes. Spent most Friday nights at a friend’s house for many years. Their homes were different. They weren’t wealthy but they had wonderful parents and their homes were safe. And my wasn’t. I did all the things most kids growing up did. I played sports, I dated and I developed a huge love for music. I got a guitar at the age of 8 and started playing. Looking back, it was definitely an outlet for me. I began to play in bands.
One day my next door neighbor’s Mom came over and asked if I could start going to church with them. My mother said yes and I started going…every single week. Sunday morning and Sunday night. I loved it. I couldn’t get enough of it. There were people there who were very good to me and they affirmed me and I felt the love of Christ through them. I got attendance pins for not missing for an entire year. The men of the church would tell me what a fine young man I was and made me feel ten feet tall. Then when I was 9 I received Christ as my Savior one Sunday morning. I continued to learn about the Bible and made a lot of friends. When I was 12 I felt that God had something special for me. I felt that he was calling me to the ministry. I remember that in the 6th grade we were asked to draw a picture of what we wanted to do when we grew up. The kid next to me drew a picture of Elvis because that’s who he wanted to be. He and I played music together as kids. I drew a picture of me standing in the pulpit at the church where I attended. That’s what I felt called to do.
But as I entered my teenage years, even though I was still in church things began to change. It’s hard to describe but my home life was worse than ever. Our finances had gone down greatly. My dad who had been a pharmacist who ran his own drug store was now in the used car business. No offense, Ron Berry. I remember one day my mother came to me and she said David, I think we are going to lose our house. I said why? She said well we are three house payments behind and when you get to 3 payments behind you lose your house. She told me if it happened we would have to go and live in the “poor house.” I never knew what that was or where that was or if it even existed but I knew I didn’t want to go there. So I asked her well how much is our payment? She told me the amount. I said well how much do we have in the bank? She told me and the two amounts were almost identical. So I said well why don’t we use that to make one payment, then we will only be two behind and then we will have a month to figure it out? She said OK. Sounds good. I was only 12 years old. So I was already dealing with things that a child should not be dealing with. I got my first job that year and I became a pretty responsible young man.
But as I said, things began to change. I felt different. I felt like something was painfully wrong with me and to top it off I felt like it was all my fault. I had no one to talk to about it that I knew of. So I didn’t. My friends probably wondered why I never invited them to come to my house. There were times when I would pray at night and actually ask God to take my dad. To let him die so that I wouldn’t have to live with that kind of fear anymore. There are 3 rules in a dysfunctional family. Don’t talk. Don’t trust. Don’t feel. I had all 3 down pat. In fact it was a very long time before I could do any of the 3.
Years later, when I got to college I met a lot of new people and there was pot and drugs everywhere. I had never been exposed to any of that before that time. So I started smoking pot with my friends and using drugs and that is basically what we did for the next couple of years. My time is limited so will just fast forward here and tell you that all of this really had an effect on me and my life was made much worse by all of it. I fell into a deep depression where I could not eat or sleep. I weighed 118 pounds (I have obviously gotten over that.) And as I said I could not sleep. Classes were very difficult for me to stay awake in and really gain anything so I basically quit attending. I lost my standing at school; I flunked out. When I got that letter from the school, along with everything in my life that seemed to be declining, I felt like I had no one to turn to and nowhere to go. I was in very bad shape.
I still remembered my calling and my faith and I knelt down by the bed and prayed a simple prayer…..something like this….Lord I can’t do this anymore by myself. You are going to have to help me. Amen. Short and to the point. I was desperate. I wish I could tell you that when I got up that everything was fine but I CAN tell you that something was different. I continued to struggle with my depression but I began to place some things in my life that I did not have before. I started reading His word. In fact I read ten chapters a day. I made the decision to go back to school. I had to retake many of my classes just to get back in to school. And I had to make a lot of A’s in classes in order to get accepted again at the University I had been attending. But eventually I graduated and went on and received my Master’s degree.
But during that time I knew that I had to find some Christian friends in our town to spend time with. Because it is very important that we spend time with other believers. God led me to a woman named Denise. She was walking with the Lord and she seemed very interested in being my friend. We spent many evenings together talking about the Lord and where my life was and where she was. We started serving at the church together with kids. A couple of years later I finally woke up and realized that there was supposed to be more to our relationship. She already knew that. We then started dating and got married 6 months later. We already knew each other very well.
During that time I had been trying still to help my mother with her situation with my Dad. Because things had gotten much worse. I was married now and I went to my mother and I said you need to leave dad. Things are not going to change. We will work it out. I convinced her to file for divorce. I drove her to court. I stood with her in the courtroom as my dad stood on the opposite side. It was granted and would be final in 30 days. I had nothing to say to my dad that day. I was focused on getting my mother out of a very bad situation. It is hard to imagine but my Dad only got worse. For the next 29 days all he did was drink. Literally. He had a “friend” who owned a liquor store and he made daily deliveries to my Dad. My father just laid in bed for nearly a month drinking. He looked like walking death. But he then made a very important decision. He knew he had to change. He was truly at rock bottom. He went to my mother on the day their divorce was to be final. He told her, as he had many times, that he would stop. My mother did what she always did. She believed him. Fortunately it would be different this time. The divorce papers were torn up and my Dad started what would be a 15 year journey of sobriety. He never took a drink again.
My Dad was admitted to a half-way house to get treatment. During his final days there I was asked to preach in the church I grew up in for student day at Christmas. I was honored to do that. My Dad found out and he came to church that day. When I gave the invitation he came walking down the aisle. He came to get his life right with the Lord. It was a new beginning for my parents.
15 years later in 1991, a lot of things had transpired but my relationship with my Dad was still very bad. God prompted me to make things right between the two of us. I still had a lot of pain, hurt and resentment. We were miles part so I wrote him a letter and told him that I had forgiven him and that I wanted our relationship to be different. I began by describing the very incident that I described to you today that happened in our kitchen was I was 6 years old. He didn’t understand at all how it had affected me, he couldn’t see how he had hurt our family but he did understand that I wanted things to be different. He called me and he told me that he loved me. It was the first time I can recall hearing those words from him.
Later that same year, I was reading a book titled “In the midst of the Storm.” I was serving in a church in Kentucky and all of our church staff were away in a retreat. We were doing planning and we worked up until about midnight that day. But when I started to go to bed God prompted me to finish reading that book. It was as though he wanted to use something in it to speak to me. I finished it and around 1:30 I fell asleep. About 4:30 someone came and woke me up and told me I had an important phone call. It was my wife and she simply said, David, your father is dead. I was in shock. He had a massive heart attack. I realized of course that if I had not gone to him earlier that year, he would have died without us making things right between us.
I am thankful that I serve a God who is concerned about every detail in life. I am thankful for my wife who loves me without conditions. I am grateful for a Savior who went to the cross to make things right between us and Him and I am thankful He still does that today. And I am thankful for a program called Celebrate Recovery where I can share my story with others so they can have healing also.
