Category: an intense love

Practicing Pain

How do you handle pain as a believer? What do you do when you want to curl up in a ball and want to die? Understand that pain isn’t in God’s original plan. We who are hurt have got to be very much aware of this.

There are many different kinds of pain: post-surgical, chronic, and self-inflicted. The pain of separation or divorce or misguided children can get pretty destructive. There’s the pain of misunderstanding or something inflicted by a bad relationship with someone.

There are far too many possibilities and far too much hurt to go around.

At times you can’t even imagine how you’re going to handle another day. Sometimes the doctors have the arrogance to tell you that you need to get used to it because it’s never going to get better. So now you must sort things out–and apart from a miracle, it’s only going to get worse. I understand this. Truly.

Here are ten thoughts that come to my mind. They’re not in any order. (Maybe they should be? IDK.)

One

Treat false humility as a worse disease than you’re facing physically. You’ll be very tempted to milk your pain for all its worth. You’ll try to take advantage of others, and you’ll put yourself in the best possible light. But pain and ego were never meant to mix–especially as a disciple of Jesus. Renounce them now. Turn from it constantly.

Two

Never find fault with God. He’s not to blame whatever the evil one tells you. Our Father loves you deeply, and He will carry you all the way through this. Satan always tells lies. You must take a stand against him. Put on your armor! Super-glue Ephesians 6:19-18 into your thought life–and never let go!

Three

You can never lose track of a very real eternity. My special verse is Revelation 21:4, “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” Please keep this front and center. It’ll help a lot!

Four

You’ll start to learn to see others differently. There’ll always be another who has it worse. Think about them, and all that they must deal with. It helps a lot. Also, you’ll discover that your pain will be like new glasses for a strange source of spiritual astigmatism. You’ll see things far more clearly now.

Five

Your walk will deepen. You’ll learn to be joyful when all you want to do is cry. The littlest things become a cause of great joy. God values your singing more now, especially when you’re singing out of excruciating pain. The Word, and worship music, all seem to be more meaningful. Surround yourself with music (and preaching too), anything that builds you up inside.

Six

You’ll discover the art of weaving your pain into your discipleship. Sleepless nights become diving boards for prayer, reading, and worship. You’ll change and deepen, and that’s always good. Also, be open to new ways of ministry. Look for doors to open up. (They may be different than you think.)

Seven

You’ll discover that there can be solace in medications and treatment. I know that this, but sometimes a handful of Motrin or other pain meds will be a real relief. Also, listen closely to your doctor and therapist. Pray for them, pray they’ll have special wisdom for your situation.

Eight

You start to see that you’ll never be able to do this alone. God is giving you a gift. He will give you insight. You’ll also start to see people less in terms of ‘rank’ and more in the light of what they’ve had to suffer. As you begin to see pain and sorrow as odd friends, they’ll often show you who your true brothers and sisters are.

Nine

You’ll understand the Father’s love in a new way. Like an old-style pharmacist who measured out powder instead of pills, we find God measures out exactly what we need. He never gives you a single grain of medicine more than is necessary. Trust him. All that happens to you has come through nail-pierced hands. He understands pain and He understands you.

Ten

You must learn to laugh again. Little things become a source of real joy. The smallest things will make you laugh. Get a joke book, that may help, especially when you get sour and withdrawn. “A cheerful disposition is good for your health; gloom and doom will leave you bone-tired” (Pro. 17:22, MSG).

(This list is not complete. I apologize, there are many others that really should be added, but maybe this is a start.)

Also–just one more (number 11 maybe?) Be easy on yourself. You’ll find that you’ve much to learn. And that’s okay. Just open up your heart, and look to Jesus.

We must be aware that our pain allows us access to His careful grace. Our trials, properly received, endow us with special abilities.

They’re now our new ‘superpowers.’ 😁

You should learn to embrace your pain and your sorrows, and not many can do this. Our own suffering comes to us at too high of a cost to us. They’re precious and way too valuable to neglect. Squeeze them and extract all that they can give.

Here’s a quote that has always sustained me. It’s really good for me to remember, and it may help you.

“Some Christians are called to endure a disproportionate amount of suffering. Such Christians are a spectacle of grace to the church, like flaming bushes unconsumed, and cause us to ask, like Moses: Why is this bush not burned up?'”

–John Newton

Exodus 3:2-3

A good site is Joni Eareckson Tada. She’s a believer who has suffered a great deal and has a ministry to the afflicted, Joniandfriends.org.

I have another site you might want to checkout: alaskabibleteacher.com.

The Desperation Factor

  1. : Loss of hope and surrender to despair. 2. : a state of hopelessness leading to rashness.
  2. Synonyms–desperation · concern · dejection · depression · despondency · disconsolateness · distraction · distress · pang · torture · trouble · worry. noun as in rashness.

A terrific study is finding the people who fell at Jesus’ feet. Tucked in the Gospels you’ll find stories of those who despair. You’ll also see them come to Jesus in brokenness and humility, without any other recourse. I call these the feet-finders.

They came to Jesus because they had no hope otherwise. They were people who were hopeless and wretched, they had long ago run out of options. They came to Jesus, falling down in front of Him. They were all feet-finders.

They were men and women who were truly desperate.

“Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

John 11:32

One of the classic scenes in the Gospels is when Mary meets Jesus after her brother’s death. She doesn’t understand Jesus’ delay, Lazarus has been very ill and Jesus could have healed him. She is grieving and confused. But she only has one posture and one place in her heart to be– at the feet!

There are some common characteristics that feet-finders have:

  • A great need that can’t be met without His touch
  • To understand one’s true condition–humility, brokenness
  • To beg for a healing, for self or family
  • To honor Jesus as the Messiah
  • To be more receptive to His teaching, to understand Him
  • To become a witness to others (although it does seem secondary)

The following 3 verses are just a small selection of those who fell at Jesus feet.

“And great crowds came to him, bringing with them the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute, and many others, and they put them at his feet, and he healed them.”

Matthew 15:30

“But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet.“

Mark 7:25

“Then people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.”

Luke 8:35

But there are several other instances where people came to sit at Jesus’ feet:

  • Mark 5:22-23, Jairus, a leader in the local synagogue
  • Luke 7:37-38, a sorrowing mother for her daughter
  • Luke 8:41, also Jairus
  • Luke 10:39, Mary, when Jesus was teaching
  • John 11:32, Mary, meeting Jesus entering Bethany
  • John 12:3, Mary, with her perfume
  • Revelation 1:17, John to express what he was seeing (also 19:10)

In every case we find people consciously coming and kneeling at the feet of the Lord Jesus. It was a deliberate action that came from their hearts. Each had a terrible need, and each was without hope.

Formality and religious politeness are jettisoned. Brokenness and true humility takes their place. A foot-finder is no longer operating on spiritual niceties. Religion is comfortable, noble, and respectable, but it cannot heal or change people deeply.

Feet-finders know that they need Jesus desperately and will go to any length just to be touched by Him. They defy what is conventional and proper. They are not what we call respectable. You can find them at the feet of Jesus. They are feet-finders. Foot-finders weep, kneel, beg, shout. Too many tears and maybe some snot.

Hardly decent to religious people.

Are you really that desperate yet? Have you seen your need, and do you realize how lost you would be without His healing touch?

Often when I do pray, I sometimes think of the woman who was unclean. She speaks to me about approaching Jesus. I see myself in a crushing crowd of people, and I’m reaching out just to touch the hem of His robe. I know only Jesus can stop my own uncleanness. (Matthew 9.)

I’m convinced only Jesus can make me clean and whole.

I’ve tried to be holy and acceptable to Him. But I felt like a juggler, trying to keep my balls in the air all at the same time, and I could never pull it off. So I tried again and again. I was the unofficial master of religious effort.

But I found my rightful place at His feet. It’s where I belong. I love Him.

I’m not ashamed to be found kneeling.

bry-signat (1)

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Twisted and Bent

“One Sabbath day as Jesus was teaching in a synagogue, 11 he saw a woman who had been crippled by an evil spirit. She had been bent double for eighteen years and was unable to stand up straight. 12 When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Dear woman, you are healed of your sickness!” 13 Then he touched her, and instantly she could stand straight. How she praised God!”

Luke 13:10-13

When we read through the Gospels we see that Jesus never laid His hands on those who were demon possessed, rather He would first command the demon to leave. (Interesting.)

The text tells us that the woman had been bent over for 18 years. (That’s a long, long time.) The cause was being “demonized” which is very different than being possessed.

There is a difference. Demons can oppress people and influence their lives, especially if that person is living in sin and rebellion.

“The physical cause of her inability to straighten up has been examined by J. Wilkinson, who identified the paralysis as the result of spondylitis ankylopoetica, which produces the fusion of the spinal bones.”

14 But the leader in charge of the synagogue was indignant that Jesus had healed her on the Sabbath day. “There are six days of the week for working,” he said to the crowd. “Come on those days to be healed, not on the Sabbath.”

That is absurd. There’s a truth here that this “leader” is covering up. The woman is instantly healed, and this so-called leadertries to nullify what has just happened. Rather than rejoicing, he renounces what has just happened, and claims that the Sabbath law has been violated. He declares the Law is greater than this woman’s healing.

Jesus never once asserts His authority. Rather He points to this woman’s healing as being truly the very essence of the Law. In spite of what the Law means legalistically, it can never invalidate mercy.

“For eighteen years she had not gazed upon the sun; for eighteen years no star of night had gladdened her eye; her face was drawn downward towards the dust, and all the light of her life was dim: she walked about as if she were searching for a grave, and I do not doubt she often felt that it would have been gladness to have found one.” 

CH Spurgeon

Her private agony was never to be found again. She was free. The pain she lived with was no more. The captivity was gone, and she was freed. The biblical text seems to ignore this and concentrates on the synagogues leader’s response, and that’s well and good. Perhaps though we should focus on this woman’s healing from an awful terrible darkness.

She is free. The stoop is gone. The pain is gone. Jesus has set her free, she gazes at the sun after many years. She stands erect, and though everything now seems different, she now knows her deliverer, and her healer.

“Bent,” brokenbelievers.com, Bryan Lowe

Are You Drowning?

painting of a person swimming underwater
“For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia:
that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life.“

   2 Corinthians 1:8

“We should all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism.”
“But we have seen again and again, from our own experience and others’, that absolute statements of hopelessness that we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties are not sureties.”

John Piper

It is my deliberateness, and not the impulsiveness that scares me.   I know despair.  I know what it is like to be ‘backed into a corner’ and then feel a totally empty desperation.  But you must understand, there can also be a weird seductiveness to ‘being lost,’ a strange sort of nobility, a twisted kind of weird honor when it comes to despair.

Some people are convinced they are never going to change. They embrace the ‘dark certainties’ of knowing they are profoundly flawed and therefore damned. It’s these dear ones that Jesus especially came for.

Now, this really seems rather bizarre, that people could do this intentionally, deliberately.  But I’m afraid to tell you that it happens all the time.  Despair is chosen over the option of life. This is the ‘lostness’ of the race of Adam.

Perhaps suicide begins before the action? Perhaps it starts days, weeks or months before we actually do the deed?

Pop culture has given us words, albeit in a rather simplistic form.  I just happened to think right now of an old AC/DC  song, ‘Highway to Hell‘.  The lyrics are pretty basic and very simple, but the lead singer seems to really have a chronically, decided dedication to being one of the irretrievably lost. 

The songwriter formats a ‘certain glory’ to being part of the damned.  This is a simplistic approach to the next stop– a more advanced case of stark-white despair, suicide. (We can call this ‘spiritual hubris,’ or even, “sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.”)

In dealing with sin we can make two mistakes. One is to make light of it. The other is to be overwhelmed, throw up our hands, and surrender.

When we decide to live this kind of living, we’re pulled into a vortex of a black melancholy with a dash of fatalism, which makes it reasonable and weirdly heroic in some perverse way. We love the dark, and we embrace a fatal life–it becomes our identity.

To escape this ‘drowning despair’ we must first dethrone our right to personal sovereignty.  And secondly, we need to grab the concept that God’s grace has an ultimate power that supersedes our notions of a ‘deserved’ love.  (It’s completely undeserved.)

We must believe that somehow, someway, God chooses us out of a pile–a pile of the worst and ugliest that has ever existed.  And somehow, He delights in doing this, and after all, He is the Lord.

We’re meant to be the people of true hope. 

Our problems, our addictions, force us to clearly renounce our evil folly of despair.  Our issues make us vulnerable.  I’ve discovered that there is a seductiveness to giving up and taking up the sin of despair.  There can be a ‘weird romance’ that lures those who walk out this living DEATH. 

But honestly, is it not even more heroic to live in hope? To live a life full of joy?

“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?  Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. My soul is downcast within me; therefore I will remember you.”

Psalm 42:5-6