Suffering is
one of my favorite things to avoid. I
have not been to the dentist is years, but when I do go, it will be bathed in
prayer. But I am aware that suffering
makes up a large part of the life of believers.
Those who hold to faith in Jesus as the Messiah and Savior of all
humanity from their sinful nature do something that attracts hardship. In a series of books about Greek heroes in
modern times, the writer makes a comment that heroes attract monsters, the more
powerful the hero, the more attractive they are to monsters. I don’t know where he got that idea, but it
works something like that for believers.
The
hardships that come to me take several different forms. A lot of the time, I bring them on myself;
the whole hairpin-in-the-wall-socket sort of thing. Sometimes they come from my Master to help me
grow and develop in my relationship with Him.
But there are also times that don’t come from Him, but which He permits
because they are identification with His suffering. They come to me because my relationship with
my Master attracts such suffering. Jesus
attracted such attention as He was obedient to the Father. I will attract such attention as I am
obedient to Him.
A case can
be made that it was such attraction that put Him on the cross, but in reality,
Scripture puts that event in the bucket of things my Master brought about rather
than permitted. That event split the
world, all humanity, and all of history into two parts. That was no accident, nor simply the result
of human frailty. It had to happen, and
my Master made it happen. But now He asks
me to walk that same road. I walk a road
of hardship sometimes simply because I am His, and sometimes because He sends
me down it. Either way, my Master and
King uses me in those times to build His Kingdom.
In 1 Peter
4:13, Peter says that I rejoice in suffering only to the degree that I share in
those sufferings of my Master. When I
push my participation in what He went through to the stops, then my joy will
know no such stops. It’s not easy to
take those steps though. I remember
playing a game with my buddies years ago.
It was a roleplaying game and I was playing my favorite role. One of my friends had a fairly powerful
character, and got his mind controlled by a “Mind Flayer”. He turned on the group, and to enable the
group to escape I took him on even though I couldn’t win. I didn’t like it, I was even pretty angry
about the game master putting us in that position, my friend for being so dumb
he would take on something like that, and so on. But I did it anyway. That’s sort of how I obey my Master:
sometimes with kicking, screaming, pouting, complaining, and just plain anger
and frustration. But I go.
As Peter
says, my joy matches the degree to which I participate. So, the kicking and screaming only take away
from my joy at the end. Jesus tells a
short parable about a father with two sons, both he told to go work in the vineyard. One says he will go but doesn’t, the other
says he won’t but does. Which one was
obedient? The one who went was the
obedient one (Matthew 21:28-31). So I go,
sometimes with difficulty, down the road of suffering, often without
explanation, and sometimes with reluctance.
The thing my Master wants is for me to go. So, here I go. Just ignore the whining sound you hear in the
background, it’s just me.
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