Preached August 23, 1992, morning service First Baptist Church, Garrett, Indiana
For any of you who have ever had children, you know the problem of the 2 or 3 or 4-year old who suddenly begins to outgrow his afternoon nap. If he gets a good night's sleep, he gradually doesn't need that nap in the afternoon as much. The problem is, he still needs a little bit, and the result for our son Scott was that he'd have afternoons where he would not sleep, and then evenings where he was so wound up that it was impossible to communicate with him. I would say "no" to him, and in reply I would get this series of uncontrollable giggles.
Well, it was at this point, that I felt I must get his attention, since words just are not doing the trick. And so I would open the palm of my hand and bring it here to here (show stroke) at considerable speed, and see to it that his cute little bottom was about right here.
That's what's known as a spanking, and that temporarily painful but harmless little act was usually very effective in getting his attention so that we both could enjoy each other's company a whole lot more.
One of the functions of pain & suffering in our world can be as God's megaphone, God's way of shouting to us & getting our attention. C.S. Lewis speaks of pain as God's "megaphone". The image is helpful for seeing how God uses something that is bad and the result of evil in our world to teach us things about our world and ourselves that we would learn in no other way.
The Psalmist says, "Before I was afflicted I went astray; but now I keep thy word. Thou art good and doest good." And then again in verse 71 he says, "it is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn thy statutes." He is saying, his affliction was the megaphone of God that it took for God to get his attention so that he could "Keep the word" of God or "learn thy statutes".
I'd like to look with you at areas of our lives where pain and suffering do indeed function as God's megaphone, and suggest that we all be open to the voice of God in all life's circumstances. I'd like to suggest 3 areas of experience in our lives, 3 things to which pain as the megaphone of God can call our attention.
FIRST, pain and suffering call attention to our dependence. How many times in your life and mine doesn't God have to remind us that we are dependent? We get going along in life and work with an intensity or level of anxiety which shows how much we really believe everything is depending upon us. And things go well, and we're happy, and we start making all kinds of plans for the future, and BANG! something happens.
Maybe it's financial. Everything seems to be going well, and we really don't seem to be needing God too much, and then our car breaks down, or we get slugged with medical bills, or we lose a job, or we have a business setback. All kinds of miserable circumstances can be used by God as His megaphone to get our attention, and positively to bring us back into a proper relationship of trust in Him and a proper view of ourselves as the dependent people upon Him that we are.
Physical sickness is another real megaphone God uses to call us to dependence upon Him. How easily we take our health for granted and unconsciously assume that we can do about anything. It never fails, about once or twice a year, just when I am really busy, and when I'm absolutely positive the whole world is going to fall apart if I don't work 40 hours over the next 3 days, I get wiped out with the 3 day flu. I wake up and have all these important things to do, and I'll be lucky if I can sit down on the couch and keep my head and mind clear enough to follow the plot of the World Wrestling Federation.
And then of course, If even minor illnesses can have that effect of reminding us of our dependence upon God, it is all the more true with serious illnesses. How many time hospital beds and gravesides have been where God finally gets our attention.
How many times our faith in God is tested for the first time when a calamity strikes our lives and we finally have no place to turn but to God.
It's then that the seeming judgment of pain and suffering becomes grace, in that we're called back to trust and obey the only person worthy of trust and loyalty, our God in heaven.
SECOND, pain has a way of calling attention not only to our dependence upon God, but also to the brokenness of our world, to the strains of a sin-filled world. Pain reminds us that not all is well in our world. Modern "man" as a whole has lost touch not only with his finiteness, his dependence, but also his sinfulness. Not only are we weak and dependent, we are wicked and accomplices in a broken world.
I say that people today have lost touch with that reality. Even many so- called Christians have a naive optimism about life and the moral quality of life. If you ask 100 people to choose between saying the world is "basically good" or "basically evil," most would say, "Good, of course!" That kind of basic optimism about life and people is the air we breathe. Even though there are signs of that sentiment breaking down, it is still the predominant feeling around.
And the view of life's purpose that many people have is consistent with that. We're here for a good time, to enjoy ourselves. Nice home, plenty of things, opportunities for us and our children -- those are the parts of the American dream. And we have a blind confidence in the ability of technology to save us from whatever side-effects our riotous living might bring upon us or our environment.
The problem is, reality doesn't add up to being such a grand, good place to be; and pain and suffering are always there to remind us of that. Consider our recent past. The country which produced a Bach and Beethoven and Luther also gave us Hitler, Eichmann and Goering; the country which fathered the Constitution of the United States brought us slavery and the Civil War.
In all of us, streaks of brilliance, creativity and compassion compete with streaks of deceit and selfishness. Our generations have mastered nature to an incredible degree; we have also exploited it to an even greater degree.
We have never been so capable of saving life and improving the quality of life in terms of medical care; but we have used that same knowledge and sophistication to make abortion the number one claimer of life in this nation, as simple as a tooth extraction, and nearly as acceptable.
For all the signs of optimism and of humanity come-of-age, able to conquer the world and its problems, the fact is, our world is broken, and pain reminds us of that daily. God's megaphone comes shouting to us, "NOT ALL IS WELL. COME TO GRIPS WITH REALITY."
FINALLY, not only does God's megaphone remind us that we are dependent upon God, and that we are morally broken and incomplete without Him; it reminds us that we can never totally escape and resist God.
Pain comes into a world that has rebelled against God and cries out to its victims, "You cannot avoid God forever!" C.S. Lewis says very beautifully, "Pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel fortress." In the midst of rebellion, pain plants the flag of truth. It calls us to reality. It calls us to our knees. It calls us to GOD.
Not long ago I talked to a man who was dying a slow death. And that conversation was a very precious one. This person was a non-Christian, and the family was very concerned about that. And here I stood, in his hospital room, alone with a man who, for over 70 years, had effectively denied God. I stood there at that bed and so much wanted to share my own faith in Christ. (And anyone who says that's easier for a minister to do was never a minister.) I couldn't find the words to say or the questions to ask, so I asked him to pray with me. After I said "Amen" I immediately proceeded to ask him some questions about some things I had just prayed. I asked him, "Do you pray?" He said, "Yea".
The problem with that one is that so do 200 million other Americans when they're in those circumstances. So I asked him, "Have you prayed more since you've been sick, or prayed any differently?" And he very quietly and thoughtfully said, after some hesitation, "Yea."
We talked some more. I asked him, "What do you pray for?" I expected him to say peace or hope or comfort, or freedom from pain -- all things I had prayed for with him. Instead, his eyes cleared up from a fog they had been in for our entire conversation and he said, "forgiveness....for ALL my sins."
I shared with him my joy at hearing him say that, and I shared with him the significance of that for his life here, and more importantly (for him) for his life after death and a meeting that he would soon have with God. And I shared the joy that this would bring his family. And then again, this broken man, overwhelmed with pain, who for 70-plus years had been resisting God, laid back in his bed and said, almost as if he were the pastor and I the patient, "You can't shun God..." I can still hear him say that.
Pain and suffering can be THE MERCIFUL MEGAPHONE thru which God cries out, "I am here. Believe on Me. Recognize reality for what it is."
One person has said that pain is the "rumor of transcendence." It is the rumor in our world, amidst all the conflicting stories of how "this is all there is" or "you only live once," the rumor of transcendence, the rumor of God, the rumor that there must be more, and we'd better come to grips with it.
Pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel fortress. I happened to see the movie "When Hell Was In Session", a movie on a prisoner of war in Vietnam and his terrible 6 year ordeal. The movie was reported to be a very realistic account of what happened in Vietnam.
In that movie the war was coming to an end, and these prisoners had been isolated for years, each man in his own cell.
But finally, the Viet Cong were ordered to let them be together. And when all these men came together with other men they had never seen but had only maybe heard in the next cell or communicated with by code, what did they do? They came together and held hands and PRAYED. They prayed and sang together!
They had been facing death for years, and their pain and suffering had driven them to confront the real issues of life and death. And they could not express their love to each other in this dramatic moment of their release without expressing their gratitude to God for life. Yes, pain is the megaphone of God, and pain is the rumor of transcendence.
But for us who know God thru Jesus Christ, the good news this morning is that we need not live just with "random shouts" or "unconfirmed rumors." We have God's Word as the full statement of truth to which our suffering calls us, and we have Jesus Christ as the truth come in the flesh. And HE confirms that we are dependent upon Him, and that our lives are broken and incomplete without Him. And He confirms that God is in this world, and that He is calling us to Himself thru not only His Word and His Son, but thru all of life's circumstances.
Again, as we saw last week, we face the choice as to how we will react to the call of God. We can hate Him for allowing such misery, or we can be grateful for the truth to which it points us -- the truth of our need and God's grace.
May we say with the Psalmist, "It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn thy statutes." Let us open our ears to God; let us allow all of life to be God's megaphone and to be God's teacher to us of who we are and who He is. If we can positively do that, then we have the promise that even our suffering, the second it has a meaning and a purpose and a message, can become a strange kind of friend and ally in the battle of life; a stepping stone to completeness and to the day when our shouts of pain will be cries of praise, and when suffering will be no more.
