The Pat Riley Story: Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People

Introduction

In Psalm 22 and verse 1, the psalmist asked, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning. Oh my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer. And by night, but I have no rest. When I moved to work with the Dallin Road Church in the fall of 2003, Pat Riley was proud to be the youngest of the five men who were serving that congregation as elders at that time. I think, in fact, he had just been appointed as an elder a few months before they began talking to me about moving there. I will confess to you that the first few months that I was working with the group there and participating with the elders in their meetings, I did not know what to make of Pat.

Pat designated himself as the sergeant at arms in the elders’ meetings. The elders at Dallin Road would want you to know that there is no such position among the elders at Dallin Road. It was one of many self-appointed positions that Pat gave himself. What it basically meant was this. Pat would sit over in the corner of the room, usually on the floor, usually in his blue jeans, at an elders’ meeting. And if he ever felt like one of the elders was sort of rambling on and getting off on a tangent and away from the issue we were trying to decide, as the sergeant at arms, he reserved the right to put a halt to that, to call an end to the rambling, to bring this guy back on topic and get a decision made.

If you kind of get the feeling that was awkward, you are right. Pat would say the most blunt and direct things, and then he would he would flash that cheesy grin of his.

A fact that I really resented. I wish I could. I couldn’t. I have not known many men with whom I just thought more alike than I did with Pat. We became friends quickly. We lived in the same little section of town, often rode together to elders’ meetings, at which time we would talk about things going on in the church, and I would usually speak disapprovingly of the music that he had played in his car.

Have I explained that sufficiently good point? And the results were bad. And so they went back and they did some more tests, and those were worse. And so they went in and they did some procedures, and the finding of those things were even more disturbing. And after more consultations and more testing, the grim truth was unavoidable. He had cancer. A very aggressive form of cancer. And the doctors in Beaumont said, we can’t do anything for you. And they sent him home to die. So he had six months to live. Pat was a fighter. And he didn’t accept that. And he made his way over here to Houston in the world class facilities of the medical center. And they said, we can be a little more optimistic with you than that.

There’s some things that we can do. There are some medications and there are some procedures that can fight back this cancer and extend your life. Maybe extend it not just for months, but maybe several years into the future. But fundamentally, the diagnosis didn’t change. Are you with me? We’re not going to beat it, they told him. It’s going to take your life.

I don’t mean to imply by that Pat was not a good elder before his cancer diagnosis, but he would tell you he was a far better elder after. I still remember the Wednesday night elders’ meeting when he laid out where things were with him. And he told us during that meeting, he said, guys, I’ve got to be honest with you. We are withdrawing from people, and I don’t even know who they are. And he said, now that I know the time is quickly coming when I will have to give an account as a shepherd to the chief shepherd, we’re going to have to do something about that. Either I need to resign so that I can be ready to meet the Lord, or we’ve got to change the way we do business.

And so that night in that meeting, the shepherds of the Dallin Road Church agreed that we would change the way we did business. And we did. And Pat led the way. It began by probing deeply what the Bible said that the work of an elder is, that it’s that it’s about sheep and taking care of God’s people, not about being the board of directors, figuring out who’s going to pay the light bill. He read all kinds of other resources that he thought would help us understand that better. And he put together presentations, weeks and weeks of presentations that he would come and we would do over the years in our elders’ meeting. He just led the way with regard to all of that. And I will tell you, it wasn’t just theory talked about in meetings.

It was practice and lived in his life. He would, even with his illness, go out and try to spend time getting to know his sheep and being in their homes and building relationships with him. Especially the kids. Especially the college kids. We drafted him to teach the college class. We said, we think you need to go in there and teach that class. He said, I don’t need to teach that class. Those kids don’t. They’re not interested in hearing from an old guy like me. But we twisted his arm and he did it anyway. And after teaching that one quarter, he never stopped going to the college class until he couldn’t go anymore at all. He was a fixture in the college class. In fact, the kids gave him a title.

They called him the scholar in the corner. Another undeserved title, I can assure you. Those of us who taught the college class when Pat was just sitting in, we did not call him the scholar in the corner. We called him the tormentor in the corner. Because he would sit back quietly throughout the class, kind of lean back in his chair, and he would wait till we went past this verse of scripture or this point that was particularly thorny or difficult. And as a teacher, we would think we’d kind of gotten past that, and he would say, Oh, hang on. We went past that too quickly, David. You need to go back, and you need to talk some more about that verse. I don’t think kids get what that means.

You see why I say he was the tormentor in the corner. Kids love him. We prayed a lot for Pat. We prayed as a church for Pat. I prayed for him. I told God a bunch of stuff that he already knew. Pat is making a difference here.

We need him. I prayed a Hezekiah prayer for Pat. He needs you to extend his life and give him more time. Toward the end, it got very difficult. The cancer metastasized and got into his bones. And the pain was excruciating. I remember being called to the emergency room one afternoon when his wife had taken him there. As I walked up the sidewalk from the parking garage, I happened to meet up with one of his loved ones. One of his loved ones who had fallen away. And as we’re walking up together, this lady looks over at me and she said, I just want to know how God can let this happen to someone like Pat. He is such a faithful servant. He’s doing so much for the kingdom.

If there is a God in heaven, why isn’t He doing something about Pat? I didn’t know what to say. I was struggling with the same questions. We lost him early on Sunday morning in May of 2011, Mother’s Day of all things. And I was left with my questions. Why did Pat die? Why did he die so young? Why did God let him suffer? Why didn’t God heal him? Why do bad things happen to good people, dedicated people, disciples of Jesus? Why doesn’t God do something about all of that? Please understand that I know that I am not the only one with a story.

And if you don’t have one, just wait a little while. Your turn is coming. And you’re going to have to wrestle with the same thorny, unpleasant questions. Why do bad things happen to good people? In fact, it was interesting. Several years ago, we surveyed our community. We sent our members out and said, ask your friends what questions they have about God in the Bible. Guess what appeared again and again on people’s lips? It was one of the top questions we received when we when we categorize them together. People wanted to know, why do people suffer? Why does bad things why do bad things happen to good people? In fact, everyone who posed the question began with the same word. Why? Why? Why? In fact. One of the guys who sent in a question after writing something about why do people suffer, he said, I want an answer from the Bible on this.

I thought that was interesting. He wasn’t interested and interested in a bunch of philosophical thought and philosophical ramblings. He wanted to know. What is the all-powerful creator of the universe who’s supposed to love his people? What does he have to say about this? So let’s spend some time thinking about what the creator says about this. Why do people suffer? I want to talk about that for a while this evening, but I will tell you, at the risk of maybe some people deciding just to go ahead and get go home, you won’t be satisfied when I’m done with what I’ve said. There will still be some questions, I think, that will remain unanswered. I’ve got some questions, frankly, that remain unanswered. I don’t know that God ever intended on any subject to satisfy all of our curiosities.

But I tell you what, God does do, I think he gives us what we need to pass through those periods of trials that inevitably we all do. I think he gives us what we need to understand suffering. I don’t know that He tells us everything we’d like to know about it. So, tonight I would like for us to consider what we can know from the Bible about suffering. Basically, there are two pieces to the lesson. The first piece will involve just answering that basic question. Why do people suffer? What does the Bible say in answer to that question? And so we’ll look at that for a few minutes, and when we get done answering that question, I think it will stir some other questions, and so we’ll answer two of those, and then we’ll wrap this thing up tonight, okay?

1. Why Do People Suffer?

So, if you were to open your Bible tonight, and we will, and ask the question, why do people suffer? What kind of answers do we find there? Let me give you some of the answers that I found. Number one, I found that sometimes people suffer because they are being punished by God for their sins. Do you see that in your Bible? I do. I see it again and again and again. Well, passages like Numbers chapter 14. Do you remember what’s going on there in Israelite history? God has brought the people from Egypt to Sinai and up to the very southern border of the promised land. They’re camped there at Kadesh, and God has sent them up, and you remember what happened, right? Remember that story? After going through all this trouble during that journey to win the trust of the people, demonstrating again and again, you can count on me.

I will be with you. After doing all of that, the faithless people refused to go up. Worse than that, they said, we should be back at Egypt. Do you remember the consequence of that? God said, if you don’t want to go, that’s just fine. You don’t have to go. What we’ll do is we’ll wander in the wilderness for 40 years until all of the faithless generation dies off, and I’ll bring the next generation into the land. So for 40 years they wandered and suffered in the wilderness because of their unbelief. I read my Bible and I see people being punished, suffering as a result of their sin. How many examples are there like that in Scripture? 2 Samuel chapter 12, after David’s sin with Bathsheba. The Lord said, the sword will never depart from your house.

Read the story of David. There’s all kinds of suffering that serve as a punishment for the sin he had committed with her. Leviticus chapter 10, they’d have an abide you are consumed by fire before the Lord because they dishonored him by failing to obey his law in the way they offered their sacrifice. Acts 5, beginning in verse 1, Ananias and Sapphira struck dead before the Lord because they lied to the Holy Spirit. Read your Bible, and it’s all over the place. People suffering as a punishment from God for their sins. Do you see it in your Bible? It’s there. Now, do you remember what we said Sunday morning about slide theory? Looking at the slide up there? Points up there at the top. Big gap between that and the title?

What does that tell you? More’s coming, right? I want you to think about that again tonight, because for some people, for some people, when they think about suffering, there isn’t any more to be said. You know people like that, right? Something bad’s happened in their life, and their question is, what did I do? Why is God punishing me? As though this is the only formula for explaining suffering. Tell you, folks, people who say they just haven’t read their Bible. Sometimes people suffer because they’re being punished for sin, but that’s not the only explanation. Can I ask you to think about something else? I think sometimes people suffer as a consequence of their foolish choices. Sometimes people do dumb things. And as a result of that, bad things happen to them.

Can I give you an example? Proverbs 23. Will you look there? Proverbs 23. Down at verse number 29. Does this verse ring familiar to you? Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has contentions? Who has complaining? Who has wounds without cause? Who has redness of eyes? Does that sound like suffering to you? It does to me. Sounds like a miserable person. Why is this person suffering? Verse 30 gives the answer. Because they are being punished by God for their sin, right? Is that what your Bible says? Mine says, those who linger long over wine, those who go to taste mixed wine. Who’s suffering here? The drunk? The person who drinks too much? As a consequence of the choice to do that, they suffer. Listen, folks, a hangover is not a punishment from God for sin.

It’s what you get when you do dumb things like get drunk. How many more examples like that? Could we stop? We behave foolishly, there are consequences. I’ve got a good friend who just didn’t get that. He was raised up serving God. And when he was an adult, he abandoned all of that. And he was involved in a couple of different marriages to women that were just wicked. That’s the best way I can say that. Made babies with these wicked ladies, and then the marriages ended in divorce, and along the way, he got involved in all kinds of destructive habits like alcohol and things like that. And generally speaking, over the next couple of decades, made a mess of his life. And then came back to God.

And wanted all of that to mysteriously go away. And so sometimes he would come by my office, and we talk about his troubles, his suffering, and he would say things like, I just don’t know why God didn’t make my life better. I’m trying to serve him, and yet I still have to deal with my ex-wife. She’s making all that trouble with my kids. I just don’t know why God’s doing this to me. And I thought, God? But God isn’t doing anything to you. You did this all by yourself. In fact, if you’ve been listening to God, none of this would have happened to you. It’s happening to you as a consequence of the foolish choices that you made. I would tell you that we don’t like that.

Not one bit. We are a blame culture. When something bad is happening to me, it is someone else’s fault. But I will tell you what, that’s not true a lot of the time. A lot of times we suffer. Because we do foolish things.

Let’s take this in a whole different direction. Think about this. Sometimes in the Bible we find people suffering because of the sins of other people. That just doesn’t sound right, does it? You look at that and think, man, Mark, that went off. Back up and take that off. I don’t like it. No, I’ve got to put it on the list because it’s in your Bible. 1 Kings 21. Naboth, do you remember him? Naboth had a vineyard. King Ahab wanted it. He was unwilling to sell. So Ahab pouted about it until his wife Jezebel cooks up a plot to create all kinds of trouble for Naboth until ultimately Naboth was killed.

Listen, terrible things happened to Naboth, but it wasn’t because God was punishing him for a sin. He hadn’t done anything foolish. Naboth was suffering because Ahab and Jezebel were acting wickedly. By the way, if you don’t like that, I want you to bear in mind that’s an unavoidable consequence of having free will. God could have made us robots so we couldn’t bother each other, but when he gave us free will, along with that comes the opportunity for us to do things that hurt other people. And that’s what that’s what happened to Nabal. It happens today. Gangs start firing weapons at each other in a neighborhood, and a little child is hit by a bullet. Why does that happen? Because someone’s acting wickedly. They’re using their free will to do awful things, the very opposite of what God wants.

Sometimes people suffer because of the sins of others. And while we’re saying that, let me tag this one on. Think about this. When I read my Bible, I also find that sometimes people suffer with the wicked who are being punished. Have you thought about this one? Go back to Numbers 14, that passage that we were looking at earlier. Remember that Israel was being punished by God and forced to wander in the wilderness for 40 years until the faithless generation died. Do you remember how old you had to be to make the cut? Twenty or older was going to die, right? So if you were 18, good news, you made the cut, right? You would live to see the promised land. Bad news, you’re going to be really old before that happens.

You’ve got to wonder. For 40 years, while the faithless generation dies off. Look at Numbers 14, down at verse number 33. I want you to notice what God says about those people, the children of the faithless. Verse 33, he says, your sons shall be shepherds for 40 years in the wilderness, and they will suffer for your unfaithfulness until your corpses lie in the wilderness.

You had to take the journey. You had to endure the wilderness suffering. Why? Because you had been bad? Is that some foolish choice you made or a punishment for your sin? Not at all. Sometimes righteous people who find themselves in a wicked nation wind up suffering with the wicked. That’s not the only Bible example of that, by the way. When God brought the Babylonians sweeping down into Canaan and they took Judah, by the way, Judah was very wicked at that time. But not all of the people of Judah were wicked. We know that. Daniel was in the number taken into captivity. Ezekiel was numbered among the captives. These are good and righteous men, and yet they got hauled off into captivity. They had to live in Babylon.

Why? Because they were suffering with the wicked who were being punished. Does that kind of just make you a little bit squirmy when you think about that? Have you considered the possibility that there may come a day when God reaches the end of his mercy with a mercy?

And maybe one day this nation will be brought down for its evil. And it may very well be, ladies and gentlemen, that you and I, or our children or grandchildren, will be called upon to suffer with the wicked who are being punished. That’s one reason we see people suffering in the Bible. Let me give you another one to think about. I gotta put this one on the list because of the book of Job. How about people who suffer from the assaults of Satan? Sometimes in the Bible, we see people suffering because they are being assaulted by the devil. We know that’s the case when we look at Job’s story in Job chapter 2 and verse 7. Listen, terrible things happened to Job. I won’t go read the whole story of all the awful things that happened to him, but we know why they were happening because in chapter 2 and verse 7 it says that Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and smote Job.

He was being assaulted by the devil in 2 Corinthians 12 and verse 7. Remember that thorn in the flesh that Paul suffered so greatly with? Where had it come from?

He calls it a messenger of Satan. I had a reason for putting this on the list.

You ever heard somebody say that? I have never heard anyone in 30 years attribute their suffering to Satan. You know who I hear them attribute it to? You know where this is going, right? I have had people sit in my chairs and in an angry voice look at me and say, why is God doing this to me? Isn’t that bizarre? Who is the adversary? And yet we don’t even think about him. We’re more inclined to blame our suffering on God. Sometimes people suffered in the Bible because they were being assaulted by the devil. Let me give you one more, and this is going to finish my list. Last thing I would add is that sometimes people suffer simply as the part of the natural course of life.

In Ecclesiastes chapter 11, at the end of the chapter, verses 9 and 10, young people are admonished to rejoice in their youth. Have y’all read that before? It leads right up to remember your creator in the days of your youth. And I have been guilty as a preacher in early years of preaching chapter 11, verses 9 and 10 and half of verse 1. And for a long time really didn’t pay attention to the rest of it, which is sad because the rest of it is really at the point. Why does he tell, why doesn’t tell you, young people, you better enjoy yourself in your youth? Why does he do that? Because if you read on, he says, it ain’t gonna get better. It doesn’t get better, does it, Tony?

I mean, I mean, youth is great, but it is fleeting, and then you start getting older. And did you read chapter 12, and he talks about what happens to us? It starts hurting. Everything starts hurting, and you can’t sleep anymore. Do y’all remember sleeping until noon? That was like yesterday, right? For you guys. My body won’t let me sleep past six. It’s so irritating. 6 a.m. My body says, get up now. And you can’t see, you can’t hear, and we have aches and groans, and the body hurts. Listen, that’s part of the natural course of life. Listen, if I don’t get hit by a bus tomorrow and I live into my old age, my body is going to begin to deteriorate and ache and hurt and break down.

I’ll probably get sick, and then I’m going to die. Someone says, Well, thanks for coming all the way from Birmingham to share that great ray of sunshine with us. That is not a pessimistic view of life, folks. That is life. That’s how it goes. I am amazed sometimes. People get mad at God. I’ve heard guys say things like, I don’t know why God let my 92-year-old grandmother die. And my thought is, what did you think was going to happen?

Folks, that’s the way that we all pass. And so sometimes our suffering is just, it’s just part of the way life goes. I won’t pursue this tangent, but I’m tempted to. I think sometimes that suffering is preparing us for the way that life goes. Make it easier to unplug for the next step. By the way, that may help us a little bit understand why God let Israel suffer for a good long period in Egypt. That was a bad place. And by the time they got out in the wilderness, they were still ready to go back there. Imagine if everything had been great in Egypt. He’d have never pride them out. That’s my list. Tony’s looking at it and he’s thinking, I got three more to put on that list.

I do too. In fact, you could probably take that list and break some of these down and delineate them in different ways. I do not represent this as an all-inclusive list. I just want you to start thinking about all the different things that the Bible attributes suffering to. Second observation I want to make about the list is this. I hope it will illustrate for you that suffering is not an uncomplicated matter. You can’t just sort of explain all this with a couple of carefully crafted sentences. This is complicated. Suffering comes for a lot of reasons.

2. Can I Know Why I Am Suffering?

Some that are with not. We can’t just explain it away with a bunch of empty platitudes. Which brings us to some other questions that I said all of this may raise in your mind. It raises in my mind. And I want to address two of them and we’ll be done tonight. One of the questions that comes to my mind is I think about all the different reasons that people suffer. One of the things I want to know is, well, then can I know why I am suffering? I think that’s what people really want to know. If it can come from many different causes, what I want to know is what is the cause of mine? And I think that’s an important question because we also see in Scripture that very often people attribute their suffering to the wrong source.

Well, you go back for a minute to the book of Job to chapter 4? Job had some friends who came to visit him in all of his trouble. They are not guys that I would want to come see me at the hospital. But his friend Eliphaz in chapter 4 begins to try to account for all this stuff that’s happened to Job. He thinks he has the answer. And this is in part what he says in chapter 4, verse 7. He says, remember now, whoever perished being innocent. Or where were the upright destroyed? According to what I have seen, those who plow iniquity and those who sow trouble harvested. By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of his anger, they come to an end.

Let’s just pause there. What does Eliphaz say? I know why you’re suffering, Job. You’ve been bad. You’re holding out on us. You’ve got some hidden evil, and what’s happening to you is God is punishing you for this secret sin that’s in your life. Because, after all, he says, bad things never happen to good people, and you wonder what world did Eliphaz live in. Well, I can tell you the problem. In verse 8, he says, according to what I have seen. He should have been listening to God, not trusting his own judgment. But the truth is, Eliphaz was wrong. Job was not suffering because of sin. He was being assaulted by the devil. See a similar problem in the book of Ezekiel. Will you go to Ezekiel chapter 18?

Those captives from Judah who were taken, who were taken to Babylon, they were convinced that they knew why they were suffering, that they were suffering because their fathers had been wicked, their fathers had been bad, and now God was holding them responsible for it and punishing them. In fact, they made a little limerick to explain that in Ezekiel chapter 18 and verse 2. The fathers have eaten the sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on age. Dad was bad, and now God’s punishing us for it. It’s kind of funny. God says in verse 3, I’m going to deal with that. I’m going to answer that little limerick so you’ll know you should never say that in Israel again. Truth is, their dads had been bad, but so had they.

And that’s why they were suffering. But these are the easy examples. Because the Holy Spirit explains their suffering. We don’t have the benefit of divine explanations. So can I know? My answer to that is yes. And no. Sometimes I think we can. When a person spends their youth, for example, abusing their body with drugs and alcohol, and then they get into their 30s and 40s and they begin to be sick, and maybe they begin to have some issues with their brain functioning in the right way, and they begin to have aches and pains, and they begin to suffer. Is it very difficult to figure out what’s going on? Some people in their youth do terrible things to their body with drugs and alcohol, and when they get later in life, they begin to suffer for that.

That’s not really hard to figure out. Sometimes we can see that we’re suffering because we’re doing foolish and sinful things. In fact, I would suggest that it is not a bad idea to think about that. If you’re passing through a season of suffering in your life and you really don’t understand what’s going on, maybe one of the things to do is pause and to ask, am I outside the will of God? Am I doing some things? Am I living in a way? Am I partaking of some things? Am I exhibiting certain character dispositions that are in conflict with what Jesus wants, and maybe as a result of that, I’m hurting myself, I’m hurting my relationships, and bringing a whole lot of suffering into my life. I will tell you the good news about that is if my suffering is because of my foolish choices.

Maybe if I’ll start behaving and living inside the will of God, maybe I can begin to take some of that away. And so a good exercise is to ask that question. Sometimes I think we can know. I don’t think we can always know. Do you think Job knew? I have read this book from cover to cover. And although there are all these conversations with his friends and the conversation with God, I will tell you, folks, I just can’t find any evidence that Job ever really knew what was happening behind the curtain and who was really doing this to him. I tell you what I know about Job. With all of his frustration and all of his troubles and all of his struggles, the thing that he absolutely never did is he never gave up on God.

And so that’s my admonition to all of us. You may not know why you’re going through what you’re going through. But I will tell you what you do know. We know that God is our help and our Savior. He’s the one that’s going to give us deliverance. And so Proverbs 3 and verse 5. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. And do not lean in your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your path straight. I’m just going to keep on trusting God, just like Job did. And he’ll get us through it. Can I know why I’m suffering? Maybe I can. Maybe I won’t. But I have a second question that all of this raises for me. And that is this.

3. Why Doesn't God Just Eliminate All Suffering?

Well, why doesn’t God just eliminate all suffering? If we are his people and he loves us, why does he let us suffer at all? You understand that this is this is at least one of the paths that an atheist will use to prove to you there is no God. He’ll take some young person in a college class and he’ll say, He’ll say, You believe in God? Yeah. Do you believe he’s an all-powerful God? Your God can do anything? Oh, yeah. You believe he loves you? Yeah, I believe God loves me. So you believe in an all-powerful deity who loves you and then let you suffer and die for years and years and years of cancer. Yeah, that makes sense, doesn’t it? And so the atheists would argue listen, if children of disciples get sick and suffer and die, doesn’t that prove that either God doesn’t really love you or he’s not really powerful?

More likely he’s just not at all. How would you answer that? What would you say? I think there’s a lot wrong with that thinking, way too much to explore in detail tonight. But can I tell you one fundamental thing that I think is wrong with that? The atheist ignores the possibility that maybe God allows us to suffer not because he doesn’t love us, but because he does. And he wants us to suffer because he’s working a different strategy that will work out for our good.

It came from the devil, not from God. It caused him temporal pain and suffering. And Paul pleaded with God to take it away, and God said, I’m not taking it. And what Paul came to understand is that God used this thorn, whatever it is, as a way of keeping him humble because he had some great privileges and the danger of pride was real. God didn’t want him to do that. And so he left Paul suffer because he loved him.

Paul would talk about how he could rejoice in his imprisonment. Because it opened opportunities to share the gospel. Maybe my suffering is going to allow God to work out some good thing. It was happening in a Roman prison. And Paul said, You know what I do with that? I sit around all day and moan and groan about how hard God’s been on me. It’s not what he said. He said, I celebrate the fact God’s using me in jail. Can I say that?

Why don’t you think about your own life? I can tell you about mine. I have learned a few lessons. I’ve learned a few lessons standing on the hill of victory with my arms raised, celebrating some great success. I’ve learned a few lessons that way. But frankly, I’ve learned far more lessons wading through the trenches of adversity. Have you been there? Not long after Heidi and I were married, four or five years. The person who was preparing our taxes made a mistake. And I won’t get into the details of what went wrong. I’ll just get to the ugly reality. Over the course of a year, we overpaid our taxes by $5,000. And some of you are thinking, well, that was unpleasant, not terrible. It was 20% of our income at the time, okay?

It was like cutting off a limb for us. I will tell you, to make the first payment when we got this first tax bill, we emptied every account we had. And then to make the estimated taxes, it took, it took, we well, we just couldn’t spend anything. We ate. And we sort of kept the electricity on. But that was about it. And we lived that way for a year. I mean, we were on a budget, beans and rice and beans, as Dave Ramsey likes to say. I mean, that was us. Nothing extra. No pizza. No bluebell. I mean, we were suffering. As it turned out, a year later, we had a new accountant, providentially, I think. And he found the mistake. And the cool thing was that we got a check for $5,000.

You’re thinking Disney World, right?

I looked at our spreadsheet that we were now keeping. And I called Heidi to the kitchen table and I said, hey, look at this. I found something. Do you realize that if we took that $5,000 and applied it to all the debt that we had and didn’t live for 12 more months, just like we lived the last 12 months, we would have no debt at all. I said, how do you feel about doing that? She said, Man, I want to do that. That’s great. And we did. And within 12 months, we were, well, we weren’t celebrating Disney World. We were doing our debt-free screen. No debt.

Learned a lot during that year. And I will tell you today, if I could go back and rewind the tape and relive my life and fix that mistake, I wouldn’t do it. It was a tough year. And we suffered that year. But listen, what we learned was far too valuable. I wouldn’t change anything. I think sometimes God allows us to suffer not because he doesn’t love us, but because he does. He knows our suffering is going to help us. In fact, I think that’s another constructive way to look at suffering. If you can’t figure out why this bad thing is happening to you, maybe just stop worrying about why and start thinking about what? What can I learn here? How can this help me? How can this help me?

Conclusion

Help somebody else. In fact, I think we need to be careful about what we wish for. Because if God was going to eliminate all suffering, doesn’t it just make sense that the place he would surely have to begin is at Calvary? If God was ever going to intervene and stop suffering, surely it should have been the death of his son. And if he had, where would we be? Did we answer all your questions about suffering? If we did, talk to me, because I got a few more you hadn’t thought about them. I’m going to answer all the questions. And I will tell you for a lot of the rest, what we’re going to have to do is we’re going to have to put our trust in God, our faith in his love for us, our belief that with his help, wherever life’s journey takes us, however difficult the road, he’s going to get us through.

And this brief little blip that we’re on the planet ultimately will bring us home to him with heaven. That’s what matters. So trust in the Lord with all your heart. Don’t lean in your own understanding. Have you trusted him tonight? Let’s get ready to sing this invitation song. Do you know Jesus? Have you trusted in him as your Savior? Have you confessed that you believe that? Are you ready to turn and live your life and serve him and be baptized for the remission of your sins? Because that’s what he says to do, and you have your trust in him. Have you done that? It’s time to make that real tonight. You need to be his child. Let’s take care of that right now. Make your way to the front right now while we stand, while we sing together.

Come right now.