Reflections
Tom Shrader sets aside his regular expository series to share seven personal reflections prompted by his wife Susan's cancer diagnosis and surgery, drawing on Ecclesiastes 3, Romans 8, and James 1. He walks through truths he held onto in the waiting room: that life's cycles are inevitable, priorities drift without intention, children are a worthy investment, all temporal things pass, God is good in every circumstance, doctrine is deeply practical, and difficult times are essential to growth in faith. Throughout, he urges the congregation to let what they know about God's sovereignty and love override what they feel in the hardest moments of life.
“It's not true because it works — it's because it's true that it works.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Standalone Teachings
Recorded: 2005 at East Valley Bible Church
Duration: 55 min
Themes: suffering, hope, priorities, faith, God's goodness, trials, parenting, perseverance, spouse with cancer, waiting on God, parent, facing illness, struggling with fear, caregiver, crisis of faith, mid-life
Scripture: Matthew 5-7, Matthew 6:19-34, Matthew 6:33, 2 Timothy 2:4, 2 Timothy 3, Luke 12:17-20, 1 John 2:15-17, Romans 5:1-4, Romans 6, Romans 7, Romans 8:35-39, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, James 1:2-4, 1 Thessalonians 4:18
Theological Themes: sovereignty of God, providence, sanctification, theodicy, divine goodness, Romans 8, Ecclesiastes, James 1
Full Transcript
Introduction and Upcoming Plans
Fifty-four days from today, we leave for summer camp. If you are going, you need to register, for three reasons. First, it is a great benefit to us. Second, it will save you money if you register before May 15th. Third, it reserves your spot. You all know that at winter camp we ran out of places. We have a set number of spots, and when they are gone, they are gone.
Open your Bibles to Matthew chapter six. I want to show you the passage of Scripture we will study next week. We are working our way through a study in the life of Christ, harmonizing the Gospels in what we can best determine to be the chronological order of Jesus' life. We are in the middle of the section in Matthew five, six, and seven identified as the Sermon on the Mount.
Next week we will look at verses 19 and 20 — "Do not lay up for yourself treasures on earth" compared with "lay up for yourself treasures in heaven" — and then verses 21 through 24 on no one being able to serve two masters. Verses 25 through 32 offer Jesus' commentary on those things He has just taught. Then verses 33 and 34 bring us to the familiar "seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these other things will be added to you," followed by "do not be anxious for tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself; each day has enough trouble of its own."
After that passage, I would assume the following week we will get through roughly verse 12 of chapter seven, and the week after that we will finish chapter seven and move on from there.
A Season of Reflection and Change
Tonight I want to do two things. First, I have an important announcement that is part of changes that have taken place over the last five or six months — philosophical changes that have expressed themselves in changes here at the church, with more likely coming over the next six or seven months. Second, in terms of the lesson tonight, I want to do something a little different.
We sat down as a group of elders, director-level people, and staff and asked ourselves: we have been at this for thirteen or fourteen years, we have this set of core principles, and we have probably learned and experienced a great deal — do we need to reexamine those principles? The conclusion was yes. So we went back, took what were called core principles, and redefined them as ministry principles. There are eight of them.
The idea is that we can sit down with any ministry and apply this grid. For example, earlier this evening I was with the children's ministry team, and we could ask, what do we want to accomplish here? The ministry principles provide the answer. We can do the same with student ministries. I had the great privilege on Friday night of being with the small group leaders and speaking for about an hour on all eight principles.
I am not going to do all of that tonight, but I do want to highlight especially the last two. Over the coming months I may take a Sunday to walk through all of them, but all of you will be affected by these principles and will see them in your areas of ministry.
The First Six Ministry Principles
The first six principles are ones you would find at virtually any church, so I will move through them quickly. Number one: we are dependent upon God. We cannot do anything apart from Him. Number two: the Bible is the final authority in our lives.
As we try to unpack life — what does it mean, how do we find answers — we find those answers in His Word. In Second Timothy chapter three, Paul writes to Timothy and describes the world you and I live in: people will be lovers of self, lovers of money. He then declares that all Scripture is inspired by God, and he charges Timothy to preach the word in season and out of season.
Paul's reason is telling: people will reach a point where they want their ears tickled. They will want to hear what they want to hear. They will go from counselor to counselor, from guidance person to guidance person, from pastor to pastor, from church to church, until they find someone who does not tell them the truth but tells them what they want to hear. We are committed to teaching the Word of God.
The third principle is the importance of what we are doing right now — worshiping together. The fourth is training. When you became a Christian, you received from God a spiritual gift, a special enablement to perform a function in the body of Christ with effectiveness and efficiency. We want to help you discover what that gift is and then begin to use it.
The fifth principle is evangelism — living and sharing the gospel. We cannot separate those two things. We want to make the invisible God visible, and we also need to speak the truth boldly. If I make the invisible God visible but do not speak the truth boldly, I am a coward — and I have been there. If I speak the truth boldly but have not made the invisible God visible, I am a hypocrite.
Relevance and Legacy
Had a discussion with a guy about three weeks ago. He mentioned a businessman here in town and said, "All he talks about is Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. I wish he'd shut up because the rest of his life is in total disarray. He cheats, he steals, he's a mess. He's driven more people from Christ than led people to Christ, and I wish he'd keep his mouth closed." We can't separate these things. We must make the invisible God visible and then speak the truth boldly.
There are lost people in your sphere of influence. Once God saves you and plants you in a place like this and you start to get engaged with people around you, you have a tendency to hang with a bunch of Christians, which is good and fine and something we need. In fact, the sixth principle is community — we need the one anothers, we need the body. But if we are light and salt and we're responsible for taking this message to a lost world, the implication is that we need to be in contact with people who don't share that same faith.
Those are six of the eight principles. It is principles seven and eight that I want to talk about tonight. Principle seven on our list is relevance — that we will express an unchanging message with ever-changing methods. The eighth principle is legacy — that we have a passion to be an influence beyond this campus and beyond this generation.
A Visit to West Valley Bible Church
I was not with you last Sunday. I was at West Valley Bible Church for their one-year anniversary, and they invited me out to speak. It was a great privilege, and our entire staff has been really involved in helping them, encouraging them, and making their church-planting experience as easy as it can possibly be.
I wasn't sure what to talk about, so I went through different passages and had three or four messages in mind. Then I decided to take these eight principles and present them. I wanted to say to them: listen, we are about fourteen years ahead of you, we have made a lot of mistakes and errors, and we have learned a lot of things. Maybe you could learn from us — take the things we did wrong and avoid them, and even the things we did well, I'll bet you can do them even better.
So I taught them the eight principles. I spent forty-five minutes on the first six — humility, authority, evangelism, training — telling stories, and they were laughing and engaged and tracking with everything. We got to number seven, relevance: we will express an unchanging message with ever-changing methods, and we are not afraid to change.
I said to Chris Mueller afterwards — Chris and Gene were there with Susan and me — that what happened next was bizarre. The room had been with me the entire time, cheering and laughing, and the moment I said "we are not afraid to change," the whole room stopped. This is a church that is one year old and doesn't even have a tradition to walk away from yet, and they were already unwilling to walk away from whatever it was they had. That change thing is hard, isn't it?
The Unchanging Message and Changing Methods
There are times that we need to change, and we live in a world that is changing constantly. We are never going to change the message. I really feel like we have earned our stripes here at East Valley Bible Church — we have not wavered one inch from the truth. The doctrines of grace are absolutely critical to us. We teach them from the pulpit every year and a half or two years, and a class on them is offered regularly. The gospel does not change.
But we live in a world and a culture that is changing, and we need to find ways, when possible, to provide opportunities to express that unchanging message in relevant ways. We will evaluate our ministries with that in mind. And then legacy is the passion to have an influence beyond this campus and beyond this generation.
A Drive Through the Valley
Monday is my day off, and I am a mall rat. I love to go to the mall. I am one of the few men in the world who will openly declare that I love to shop — I am that comfortable in my masculinity. I love to find bargains, and I found a whole rack of fifty-dollar shirts for six dollars at Dillard's the other day. Susan had questions about that.
At least once a month on my day off, I will get Susan in the car and we will go for a ride. Up in Fountain Hills there is a car wash where you pull in, stay in the car, and machines soap everything around you. I love getting in there, and when it is all soapy, Susan and I love to kiss and make out. Parents, that would be good for you to try. It is a long drive, but it is worth it.
After Fountain Hills we drove back up toward Rio Verde. I remember going to Rio Verde when they first built it — if you wanted groceries back then, you had to drive all the way to Scottsdale Road and Shea. Now it is all built up out there. We drove along and I said to Susan, "Look at this," and we wound our way back — over Dynamite, out Scottsdale Road, through Cave Creek, back around and down Tatum to Desert Ridge Mall, because there is a California Pizza Kitchen there.
Relevance, Legacy, and Change
There are a lot of churches, but there aren't a lot of good churches. You happen to be placed in a good one — not a perfect one, because you're in it. When it is a good one, it's a good place with lots of good things going on, and we still make a bunch of mistakes and screw up, and when we do, we try to deal with them, acknowledge them, and move on. But there are some distinctives about East Valley Bible Church, and when we have the opportunity — like we did with Tempe, or like we did with West Valley Bible Church — to export these distinctives, I think it's important.
It's not just beyond this campus; it's beyond this generation. I am 55, and people periodically go through ebbs and flows about how long I'm going to do this, who my successor is, and all those different things. I don't know how long I'm going to do this, but I do know I can't do it forever. I'm telling our guys all the time, and they know it and they don't fight it: the next generation is going to get the keys to this building. They can either pry it out of our cold, dead hands — which doesn't seem like a good way — or we can do what parents do with children and systematically, proactively allow that transformation to take place.
It is so meaningful for me to sit in a staff meeting with our guys who have been ministering in churches for 20 or 25 years, and then have the seven guys on our staff — Matthew, Matt Dresbeck, Mike, Justin, Tyler, Luke, and the others — sitting there with us, the oldest of them 28 or 29. They truly represent the next generation of leadership, whether here on this campus or on another campus. So we are committed to two things: relevance and legacy.
That means there are some things that, as we go along the way, we are going to have to change. In the last six months, it seems like I'm in a lot of meetings where I'm saying, "Here's what we're going to do," and people are saying to me, "But you said we'd never do this." And I'm saying, "Well, I was wrong. There are better and more effective ways for us to minister." We have specific groups — seniors, singles, for example — and the question is always how do we reach out to them. At the core of all of this are expressions of worship and corporate gathering.
Introducing the New 6 O'Clock Service
We are excited, in a sense, not to go forward but in a way to go back. Some of you who have been with us for a while know that we've moved student ministries all over the place, and at one point we moved students to Saturday night. When we did that, we put together a Saturday night service where Tim and the band led worship, I taught, and it was a great time. We've decided to bring that back — with some changes.
Beginning May 15th, the Sunday after Mother's Day, four or five weeks from now, all the morning services will be exactly as they are, and the 4 o'clock service will be exactly as it is. But the 6 o'clock service is going to change. We shot some video the other night while I was teaching with the students, and that video gives a sense of what 6 o'clock will look like.
I want to emphasize something very important: this is not a Sunday 6 o'clock service for students, though it will certainly have an appeal there. The band will be leading worship, and we'll do worship a little differently — we'll probably move things around and explore that. It's not because this is better worship. That's not it. It's another way, another expression of worshiping. The 6 o'clock service is for all of us, not just students. You are all invited.
Beginning the 15th of May, we'll be in here at 4 o'clock with Gary or Matthew or whoever is leading, and then at 6 o'clock we'll meet over in the conference center. We don't know what's going to happen in terms of people or numbers, and we don't know what it's going to do to this service, so you're going to have to hang in there with us and be patient. It's like anything else when it changes — it's always tough. But I have a lot of confidence in you and a lot of confidence in us.
Bible to Ecclesiastes chapter 3. You all know 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, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace."
The Cycles of Life Are Inevitable
The cycles of life are inevitable. I started by writing that the phases of life are unavoidable, but that has a negative connotation. I don't think you want to avoid these cycles — they are simply part of life.
Periodically I set aside the planned lesson when there is something I want to communicate. Sometimes it is prompted by something like 9-11, sometimes by something happening in the body of this church, and sometimes by something going on in my own life. I always hesitate when it is that last one, because it can sound self-serving, and I certainly don't want it to be. What drives me to speak anyway is the conviction that we are all alike, and that much of what I go through, you either have gone through or will go through.
I had a chance to teach at Fuel last Wednesday, and one of the points I kept pressing — and I think the students are a little tired of hearing it, but that is fine, because when they truly get it their whole lives change — is that they are not the exception. Every person and every generation thinks they are the exception. They are not.
I was thinking back to the first age I ever remember longing for, which was thirteen. When you were thirteen you were in Pony League, and in Pony League you wore metal spikes and you could lead off, which brought my extraordinary speed into the game. Then I wanted to be sixteen — and that is a no-brainer, because you could drive. I literally used to sit in the car in the garage and pretend to drive.
Eighteen, back then, was not that big a deal, because all that came into play at eighteen was the draft. Twenty-one was more significant — that was draft beer, and that was the party, and all the stuff that went with it. After that, I just assumed life would move on, but that somehow we would be a little bit different. We thought we were the exception too.
So I told the students the other night, and this is absolutely true: you may be thirteen years old right now and you cannot get a girl to even look at you, and you are afraid to call her. But the reality is that within ten, twelve, or thirteen years you are not only going to call them, you are going to take them out on a date, and they are going to like you — because you are going to pretend to be somebody other than who you really are. They are going to fall in love with you, and then you are going to marry them, and they still will not know who you are. And five years later you are going to buy a minivan. It kills these guys when you say that. They hate to hear it, but they know it is true, even as they argue with it. That is just how it is. They are not the exception.
Reflections from the Waiting Room
What I want to talk about tonight — and I told you this in November — is Susan. On November 22nd, Susan was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer. Some of you have done research on the internet since then, and what you have discovered is what we knew very quickly: it is a very serious, very fast-growing cancer, and it is not the kind of cancer you want to get.
I told you in November that I would keep you apprised as we dealt with this. I did not want rumors circulating about what was going on, and I did not want to leave you out of the loop. We are very private people — probably Susan even more than me — but as much as possible, we want to go through this with you. We told you there would be chemotherapy over a period of about eighteen weeks, and that at the end of that we would reevaluate and hopefully move to surgery.
We finished that chemotherapy three weeks ago, and last Thursday afternoon Susan had her surgery. It was a radical surgery. Some of you know Heinz — he is a great friend of ours, and it has been so comforting to have him walk through this with us. He was as aggressive as he could possibly be. Within twelve hours of that two-hour surgery, Susan was up and walking around, and I brought her home on Friday. We go back to see Heinz tomorrow.
Susan is all over this. She wants to get back in and ask whether they can do more chemotherapy and radiation. Radiation is indeed the next phase. There is no way they could get all of the cancer — we knew that going in — so they got as much as they could. We do know it is not in her bones or any organs, but there is a significant amount in her lymph nodes, and we still need to deal with that.
If everything goes well after we see Heinz this week, in about two or three weeks he will release us to go back to our oncologist, Dr. Calvacant. Dr. Calvacant will hopefully say we are going to do radiation every day for six weeks. That is the plan, and it is a pretty aggressive one. So please be praying for us, and for Susan.
Seven Random Thoughts
For the second time in twenty years I missed teaching on a Wednesday the week before last. I had a cold, I was miserable, I had a cough, and I was just lying around. That gave me a lot of time to think, and I made some notes. Then, as the surgery was going on that night, I was sitting in the waiting room writing on paper towels. I was going to call this "Reflections from the Waiting Room," but that felt a little dramatic. So these are simply seven random thoughts. They are not on the screen tonight, but they are on the website and you can download them there.
**Number one: the cycles of life are inevitable.**
The Cycles of Life Are Inevitable
Solomon writes the book of Ecclesiastes. Solomon is a man that God graced and allowed to experience all the things you think will make you happy. Solomon experienced them, and when he experienced them, he wrote them down and said, "I want to tell you, it's not what it's cranked up to be."
Those cycles Billy Crystal described — there's some truth to that. The specifics may change, but that is what Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes 3. See it there, verse 1:
> "There is an appointed time for everything. There is a time for every event under the heavens — a time to give birth, a time to die, a time to plant, a time to uproot what is planted, a time to kill, a time to heal, a time to tear down, a time to build up, a time to weep, a time to laugh, a time to mourn, a time to dance, a time to throw stones, a time to gather stones, a time to embrace, a time to shun embracing, a time to search, a time to give up as lost, a time to keep, a time to throw away, a time to tear apart, a time to sew together, a time to be silent, a time to speak, a time for love, a time to hate, a time for war, a time for peace."
Solomon begins this whole discussion with the observation that there is a time where you are born and a time where you die. You have heard that before, and the balance of that is the dash — the in-between. What are you going to do with the balance of it?
In his commentary on this section, Matthew Henry writes that every change concerning us, with the time and with the season of it, is unalterably fixed and determined by a supreme power. We must take things as they come.
My first point is really simple: the phases of life are inevitable. Don't try to run away from them. It's the way it is. What I experience as I age and grow older in the cycles of life is the same thing you are going to experience. And rather than avoid them —
You Are Not the Exception
Embrace your trials — and rejoice in them. This is why you need older people in your life, because they have been there ahead of you. If they have any perception at all, and if they paid attention, they can teach you so much. You are not the exception.
Priorities Can Get Rearranged Without You Noticing
Here is the second point: your priorities can easily, and sometimes unknowingly, get rearranged. I was thinking a lot about Susan — how we met, how we fell in love, how we dated, how all we wanted to do was be with each other. We would go on a date, go home, and then call each other on the phone even when we hadn't run out of things to say while we were together. That was not smart.
Then we got married, and life starts. The word I use all the time is inertia. Webster defines inertia this way: "a property of matter by which it remains at rest unless acted upon by some external force." What I am saying is that in your life, you will just go with the flow, even if the flow is not going where you want to go. The whole current of events will just sweep you away.
I love 2 Timothy 2:4: "No soldier in active duty entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life so he can please the one who enlisted him." There are entanglements. Life begins to happen.
I am going to ask you to go home and do an exercise. Take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left-hand side, list those things that are most important to you, in order of importance — I am not telling you what they are, you decide. Number one most important, two, three, four — do ten of them. On the right-hand side, list in order the things that are currently dominating your time, energy, effort, money, and thoughts.
My assumption is that the items listed on the left side should match what appears on the right side. So draw an arrow from each item on the left to where it actually falls on the right. If life were properly arranged, those arrows would run straight across — but they are probably going to look like a tangled mess. If you are married, it would be very helpful to compare these notes with your spouse afterward, to see how accurate your self-analysis really is.
This exercise will reveal why you are frustrated. If something is number one in importance to you but number ten in your actual time and energy, that is going to produce great frustration. My experience is that life reshuffles things, and what belongs at one, two, three on the left ends up scattered at ten, seven, and six on the right. You have to proactively engage in keeping your life on track. Otherwise, you will be entangled in the things of life.
Kids Are an Investment, Not a Sacrifice
Here is the third thing, and while it will not apply to everyone in the room, to those to whom it applies it is huge: kids are a great investment. It makes me sick when I hear parents say, "We sacrifice so much for our kids." No, you do not. These are investments in their lives. You brought them into the world, and you have a responsibility to them.
Susan modeled that for me. She is a tough woman, and she made a decision early on that what our children needed more than anything else was a mother. She decided to stay home to do that. It is not particularly gratifying work, especially in those first five or six years. Literally, I would come home and she would say, "This has been an awful day. All I've said all day is no, no, no, no, no." She would tell me that one of our girls was two and the other three months, neither of them could carry on a conversation, and she just needed to hear an adult voice. She would say, "Say something to me" — and I would say, "Well, what's for dinner?" That would be the end of the conversation.
But over the last three or four years, and intensely in the last three or four weeks, I have watched these girls love their mama. It is the coolest thing for me to see. That phone rings three or four times a day from each one of them — the first contact in the morning and one of the last ones at night, as they are driving to work or driving home. It is an incredible thing.
To those of you parents who are making this huge investment, going without things that people seem to think are necessary — I want to say to you, it is absolutely worth it. We will talk much more about this next week.
All Things Are Temporary
Here is the fourth thing: although some things are important, all things are temporary. We will talk more about this next week as well — about material things and the love of the world. If you love the world and the things of the world, the love of the Father is not in you. The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the boastful pride of life — this world is passing away.
We talk a great deal about heaven, and I will tell you that when you are on your deathbed, what you will already know is that it comes down to faith, family, and friends. But sometimes I am afraid we miss the fact that there are things along the way that genuinely matter. The meeting tomorrow is important. The deal you are working on is important. The classes you are taking are important. Getting the grades you need for admission or a scholarship — that is important — and you need to devote the appropriate time and energy to it.
Jesus is moving along one day, and He stops and tells a story. And He begins with —
God Is Good All the Time
This premise He laid out begins with a man whose land was very productive. By the standards of our day, he would be on the cover of Forbes magazine. If you turned to the business section of the newspaper, there he'd be. He's the kind of man who travels the country holding seminars at America West Arena.
His land is productive. In verse 17 of Luke 12, he began to reason to himself. Now there is an indication that you have a problem right there — when your favorite counselor is you, you have issues. Listen to the singular personal pronouns in what he says: "This is what I will do. I have no place to store my crops. This is what I will do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones. And I will store all my grain and all my goods. And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come. Take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry.'" But God said to him, "This night your soul is required of you. What is the profit of man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?"
By the world's standards, this man was a winner. By God's standards, He says, you are a loser. There are things that are important, but we need to put everything in context. The outer man is decaying. We look at the things that are seen rather than the things that are unseen, and the things that are seen are temporary while the things that are unseen are eternal.
Ultimately, our life here is about the next world as well. This is not home. Our citizenship is in heaven. And this is not an excuse to be lazy, not an excuse to not try, not an excuse to not work, not an excuse to not plan. We simply need to keep things in their proper perspective, recognizing that everything ultimately is temporary.
Point Five: God Is Good All the Time
I go to perhaps ten ASU baseball games a year, probably because Tyler likes to go. We went over last night and stayed for about five innings — it was Stanford, a big game — and I turned off the game in the ninth inning, and they came back and won it, which makes me sick. But as we were walking in, I was talking to Tyler, and I said to him that it is so difficult to talk to someone about a friend, a family member, a colleague, who is really a good person, but you know he doesn't care about the things of God, and you know that when he dies he is going to hell.
It is very difficult to go to those funerals — perhaps of a family member, a very close friend, a colleague, or a schoolmate — knowing that this man or woman didn't care a thing about the things of God, and they are not in heaven. It is a very difficult thought. It is a very heavy, weighty thought.
When I find myself in that situation, I want to take that heavy thought and match it up with the fact that I am going to heaven. And that is not based on anything I have done, am doing, or will do — it is based entirely on God. He saved me. He chose me. He brought me into His family. When I hold those two realities together, I find myself saying, isn't that incredible? You talk about the goodness of God, and we want to rattle off lists of blessings — but here is one of the greatest expressions of His goodness: you deserve hell, and He gives you heaven.
That thought really needs to be pondered. You need to meditate on it and think about it, because it begins to change your life. It doesn't matter whether we take the most destitute, hurting person here today — you are so blessed. I used to attend a church that was wound pretty tight. They wore a suit in the morning but would loosen up for the evening service and wear a sport coat. There were certain songs permitted in the morning that were not permitted at night. One of those evening songs went something like this: "Count your many blessings, name them one by one. Count your many blessings, see what God has done." That is great advice, by the way. You may not like the song or the melody, may think you are too cool and hip for it — but it is genuinely good counsel.
Keeping an inventory of God, of who He is and what He has done in your life, ought to radically change the way you think and act. God is so good to us all the time — whether it is cancer, whether it is something more serious than that, whether it is life or death. It does not matter. God is so good.
Point Six: Doctrine Is Practical
Last Wednesday night when I was going into Fuel, my intention was to talk about an incident from the life of Daniel. Around 3:30 that afternoon I decided to change course, and I talked to the students about stress. Some of you might say those junior high and high school kids don't know stress — but if you think that, you don't know your kids. They are under great stress. In fact, three or four students came up after the service that Wednesday night and said, "That is exactly where I am right now. I am so stressed out."
I shared with them that the American Medical Association recently reported that fifty percent of all patient visits to doctors involve stress, which makes stress more common than the common cold. It is the number one health problem we face right now. A doctor would tell you to get more sleep, to adjust your diet, to exercise. But what I wanted to talk about is what we know from Scripture.
We talked about the fact that God is in control. He knows what we are going to say before we say it. He has every step of our lives measured. God is in absolute control, and God does not change. This book is as relevant today as it has ever been — a timeless God does not produce dated materials. All of these promises, and the way God said we are to come to Him, remain as true and as needed as ever.
The Importance of Doctrine
In repentance and faith through Christ alone is absolutely true 2,000 years ago, and it is absolutely true now that at the end of this earth, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord for the believer. There is a day coming where we will be caught up and we will be with the Lord forever. In 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 verse 18, Paul says to this church, "Comfort one another with these words." Those are all doctrine.
If you want heavy doctrine, if you want to get in and unpack some heavy doctrine, climb your way through Romans 6, 7, and 8. In Romans 8, Paul asks a great question: what can separate us from the love of Christ? Tribulation, persecution, distress, famine, nakedness, peril? Absolutely not, Paul says. "I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor principalities, nor angels, nor things present, nor things to come, nor heights, nor depths, nor any other created thing can separate us from the love that God has for us."
That is a doctrinal truth. If I am a Christian, if I have come to Christ in repentance and faith, I am as certain of heaven as the saints that are already there. That is doctrinally true. For all those people who say doctrine is not important — doctrine is really important.
This is the classroom. This is where we get those i's dotted and those t's crossed, and we get our doctrine as straight as we can get it. And then we take it out into the laboratory and we discover that it works. It is not true because it works; it is because it is true that it works.
Doctrine Meets Real Life
So whether you are facing a scalpel, or facing a principal, or facing a relationship that is falling apart, listen — the doctrine is that God is not going to leave you or forsake you. I am not saying life does not hurt. I am not saying there is no pain. There are things that are hard. There is difficult stuff that comes into your life. But greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world.
That is why this doctrine is so important. That is why we hang in there. That is why we teach this. That is why we generally go chapter by chapter, verse by verse, plowing along — because this doctrine gives us the knowledge so that we have the power to go and live. We are not stressed out. Why? God is in control. He does not change. He will never leave me or forsake me. And we know God causes all things to work together for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. We rejoice in all of that.
Do not be afraid. Why? Is it because it is not a scary world? No — it is a scary world. There is a lot of difficult, frightening things in it. But we are not afraid, because God has it under control.
What We Know Trumps What We Feel
Here is the last thing: difficult times are critical, crucial, and vital to our life. Two passages of Scripture — and you probably know them well. James chapter 1, verse 2: "Count it all joy when you encounter various trials." Here is the key word — "knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance." I count it all joy. Why? Because I know that this trial, this difficulty, produces endurance.
The same idea appears in Romans chapter 5, verse 1: "Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and not only this, but we exult in our tribulations, knowing" — there it is again — "knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance, and perseverance proven character, and proven character hope."
The phrase I started using about a year ago is this: what we know trumps what we feel. I would not naturally count it all joy when I encounter various trials. There is nothing in me that responds that way instinctively. But I know something. What do I know? I know that if I want to grow deep in my relationship with Him, if I want to see my faith really grow and my understanding of who He is and how He works, that experience is going to produce that.
Susan's Faith in the Trial
I have been watching this, and it has been fascinating to talk with Susan. People will say to her, "You're a real fighter." She is gracious about it, but she will say, "Give me a break. Lance Armstrong fights. I have met fifteen people who are fighting and tough and are going to beat this thing, and they die." She says, "I just do the best I can, slug along, and then God is either going to heal me or He isn't. It's God's deal." It is so remarkable.
We had an arrangement early on — she took control of it right away. She said, "Tom, you and I need to be honest with each other. We need to talk with each other. I need to be able to tell you everything I'm thinking, and you need to tell me what you're thinking." So we are going through this, and one day she is having a bit of a low moment, and as we are talking she says, "I am so ugly. I've lost my hair. I'm just so ugly."
I let it go in the moment, but the next day I said, "Remember the deal? We are on this honesty arrangement. You can say whatever you want to me, but don't call yourself ugly. You aren't ugly." I told her, "In fact, I think you are the most beautiful I have ever seen you." And that is honestly startling to me, because I am a very superficial person and there is almost some depth to that — and it has me a little worried about myself.
But I said, "Babe, I don't care if you have hair or not." And I would never have known the depth of that love if there had not been the difficult time and the challenge in this. I would not have discovered it without the trial. I go through this — and you may not believe this — but it is painful for me to talk about these things, because it draws attention to me, and I am not —
Embracing the Inevitable Cycles of Life
These things, these phases of life, are absolutely inevitable, and you cannot avoid them. It is just part of the deal. There are things that are very important in your life, but all of them are temporary. This is the way life is, and I want you to embrace it and understand it.
For those of you who have kids, I want you to understand the importance of what a great investment they are. Unless you get involved, your life is going to get reshuffled and your priorities are going to get changed, and you are not even going to realize it. Those things you say are really important are going to get shuffled down to the bottom. That is just the inertia of life.
The Goodness of God and the Importance of Doctrine
God is good all the time. He is so good to us, and He needs to be praised for that. We praise Him in good times and in bad. Doctrine is really important to us, because doctrine helps us know the truth, and what we know trumps what we feel.
I do not know what you are going through, and it may be far greater than anything I have experienced or ever will in terms of challenge and difficulty. But I know this: God will use it for His glory and for your own good. "We know God causes all things to work together for good, to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose" — to those who are believers. If that is you, then God will use this for your good.
Closing Prayer
Father, thank You for this. Thank You for allowing us the opportunity to come together. God, help us understand that we cannot avoid these cycles of life — this is just the way it is — and the sooner we get our arms around that, the sooner we are going to live lives that bring honor and glory to You.
God, keep us looking at the big picture. I pray that as we encounter the toughness of life, as we move out into the laboratory, we take with us these classroom lessons that we know are true. For those who are hurting right now, God, I pray that You would let them experience Your comfort — perhaps the comfort of another who comes to put an arm around them, an encouraging word, a card, an email, a note.
God, I pray for Susan. I pray that You would heal her. That is our desire, but greater than that is that Your will be done. We love You because You first loved us, and we pray that that love is visible to the whole world that sees us. In Jesus' name, amen.