When Life is Hard, Look Up

When I was in college, John Piper was one of the most popular Bible teachers and conference speakers in my little circle of ministry students. He had written a book in the early 2000s called Don’t Waste Your Life, challenging young people to live for God’s glory instead of their own. Then, around my junior year of college, Piper was diagnosed with cancer. I remember listening online to his final sermon before surgery. He called it, “Don’t Waste your Cancer.” It sounds strange, but the message made a big impact on me at the time. He had not asked for cancer and did not want it. Yet he knew that this suffering had a purpose. It provided him with a unique opportunity to glorify God by trusting him and maintaining joy, even in great pain. He didn’t want to waste the opportunity. As Solomon closes his discussion about how to approach God when life is hard, he says something very similar. Suffering brings spiritual opportunity; let’s not waste it!

We can take so many wrong turns when trials come. We can heap up a lot of empty words. We can get bitter and angry. We can waste years wallowing in self-pity. We can stay up at night asking ‘why,’ demanding answers from God and accusing him of not loving us. We can even try to take control of the situation by making a lot of empty vows. Solomon says all of this is vanity. Ultimately, our trials are meant to bring us to simply fear the Lord. Like Job, we may have all kinds of questions as to why God allowed certain things to happen in our lives. Also like Job, we have to reach the place where we acknowledge that he is God and we are not.

God is under no obligation to answer my questions or meet my demands. Eventually, we learn to confess, “Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but I will proceed no further” (Job 40:4–5).

But God is not only sovereign and powerful—he is personal. He knows and loves me. He has proved his goodness to me forever at the cross of Jesus Christ. Any affliction I suffer now must have a wise and good purpose.

This reminds me of the counsel that my pastoral mentor John Newton shared with a friend whose wife was very ill. The language is old, but the message remains so relevant:

“You are in the furnace of affliction; but the Lord is sitting by it as a refiner of silver, to moderate the fire, and manage the process, so that you shall lose nothing but dross, and be brought forth as refined gold, to praise his name… What he does, however painful to the flesh, must be right, because He does it. Having bought us with his blood, and saved our souls from hell, he has every kind of right to dispose of us and ours—as he pleases. And this we are sure of, he will not lay so much upon us—as he freely endured for us; and he can make us amends for all we suffer, and for all we lose—by the light of his countenance. A few years will set all to rights; and those who love him and are beloved by him, though they may suffer as others, shall not sorrow as others; for the Lord will be with them here—and he will soon have them with him! There, all tears shall be wiped from their eyes!”

Jesus, who bore the flame of God’s wrath for me, now sits at the furnace of my trials, to moderate the fire and manage the process. I can trust him: “But he knows the way that I take; when he has tried me, I shall come out as gold” (Job 23:10). When life is hard, listen up, pay up, and look up to a faithful Savior.

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Article by Eric Smith
Senior Pastor, Sharon Baptist Church