New Foundations of Spiritual Formation II:The Disciplines of Life … · 2019. 5. 24. · 3 of 17...

Transcript - SF508 Foundations of Spiritual Formation II: The Disciplines of Life

© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 06 of 08SF508

Suffering and the Christian

Foundations of Spiritual Formation II:The Disciplines of Life

The theme of this lecture is suffering and the Christian life. It is a simple fact of life that there will be suffering, difficulty, setback, and disappointment. For some, there will be rejection. For others, there’ll be tragic losses. For others, there is no other word for it, there will be suffering. No one, no Christian at least, is immune from pain. It is part of the package that comes with life. This is a broken and cruel world. God is good but, to put it bluntly, life is unfair. God is good, but the sheer fact remains that whether we fulfill a vocation in the world or in the church—regardless of where God has called us, either in family or in the neighborhood or in our communities or in the church or in the world—we will experience the brokenness of the world intersecting our lives in a thousand and one ways.

Consequently, there are two things that must be stressed. On the one hand we should not be surprised by difficulty. We should not be derailed or overly perplexed when it comes. Some people respond as though very surprised when difficulty hits them, and you wonder if their mother never told them that life is not fair.

But second, not only should it not surprise us, it is also clear that because pain, difficulty, suffering, and setback intersects our lives at so many points, it’s essential that we make sense of it all and come to see what significance it has in our spiritual lives. We must, then, develop a theology of suffering, setback, and disappointment that intersects with, in the ways that it intersects with every aspect of the spiritual life. As we shall see, there is hardly anything more critical to one’s personal, vocational, emotional development as the nature of one’s response to difficulty, setback, rejection, disappointment, or suffering. And the evidence or sign of this is that we develop an emotional maturity and resilience to which I’ve already spoken.

First, making sense of the pain. We need a sustaining theology of pain and suffering. Without one, we will never be able to make

Gordon T. Smith, Ph.D.

President of reSource Leadership International in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada

Transcript - SF508 Foundations of Spiritual Formation II: The Disciplines of Life © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


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sense of and live with sanity in the midst of the setbacks and disappointments that we will inevitably experience in this life. We need a theology of suffering that is biblical, but we also need one that is congruent with our experience. In this regard, I find three texts of Holy Scripture particularly helpful.

I’m going to begin with Romans 8. In Romans 8, we have what is probably the most comprehensive examination. That is, the most comprehensive in which Paul gives the most attention . . . Saint Paul gives the most attention to the matter of suffering. Beginning with verse 17, he makes the extraordinary statement and assumption that our identity in Christ assumes that we will experience difficulty, setback, and disappointment.

Romans 8:17, where he speaks, “And if children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if in fact we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.”

That is, he is suggesting here that inherent in what it means to be a Christian is that we will experience suffering, setback, and disappointment. If we are heirs with Christ, we will suffer with Him. It is as simple as that. We cannot conclude from the Holy Scriptures that if we are Christian, we’re going to have an easier road. Indeed, I fear that much evangelism seems to suggest this to people: Become a Christian and things will be better for you; things will go easier for you. Rather, Paul actually says that if you become a Christian, by becoming a Christian, you will begin to identify with the sufferings of Christ. If anything, you can almost come to the conclusion that you would suffer more. Not only does the rain fall on the just and on the unjust, not only do Christians experience extraordinary trial and tribulation—oftentimes the very same sorts as anybody who’s not a Christian—but once you become a Christian, you begin to see the world through a different set of lens. You begin to empathize and identify with the hurts and the brokenness of others. If anything, I would contend, you suffer more. But the suffering of the Christian is with a difference. As Paul makes explicit, the suffering of the Christian is characterized by hope. We don’t suffer less, but we do suffer differently you might say. We suffer with hope.

Paul here—and Jesus does the same thing in John 16—Paul here speaks of the suffering that Christians experience as in some way analogous to a woman who is giving birth to a child. For if a woman were to be giving birth to a child but had no idea what she’s going through, imagine the horror, the confusion, the pain, and the



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meaninglessness of that pain. But for a woman who knows and anticipates a child, who will be a source of joy to her, the pain is no less and no more, but there is hope. There is understanding. And in the same way, we experience pain by virtue of our identification with Jesus Christ, but we experience that pain with hope.

And one more thing needs to be said here. There’s more, of course, in Romans 8, but for the moment I’ll add one more thing. The other difference is that we do not suffer alone. It’s in the point of deepest pain in our lives, of course, that we feel our vulnerability, our humanness, and our radical aloneness. Indeed, that’s part of what’s so horrifying about pain, difficulty, suffering, and failure. But in this very text Paul speaks about our prayers. He talks about our prayers—in a sense, one of our deepest points of vulnerability—and says that when we do not even know how to pray, the Spirit prays with us with groans, with groans, with groans—yikes! How amazing that the Spirit of God so identifies with us at that point. That is what is captured here, and what so many of the Asian theologians of our century want us to hear is that our God is a God who suffers and that, when we suffer, He suffers with us. He does not remain impassioned. He does not remain separate from us or aloof from us. He is one with us.

Somehow for me this is best captured in the following scenario. How many times (I’ve gone to a funeral just a few weeks ago in which this happened), but how many times you hear at a funeral something like this. In the funeral that I went to an 18-year-old boy died in an accident, and in the funeral homily the preacher of that day—probably a classic, gospel-hour preacher, an old revivalist preacher—said something that I’ve heard so many times, but one of these times at a funeral I’m going to stand up and shake my fist and say, “No!” It’s when he says, “Surely God must have so delighted in this young man and so loved him that He chose to take him to be with Himself.” I’ve heard the same thing told to a woman who had lost her child after three weeks. The child was only 3 weeks old, and the advice of the counselor, the pastor, to her was God must have so loved your little baby that He took your little baby to be with Himself.

Think about this for a moment. Think about the absurdity of it. It’s meant, of course, to comfort us but, as I tend to think, it’s comfort that hardly even gets me back to the parking lot. Rather, God aches. Why would God take the life of a little baby? Why would God take the life of an 18-year-old man? Surely God longs for babies to grow into young men, to grow into older men, to



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become grandfathers in wisdom and grace to their generation. Surely this is God’s will, what He longs for; and when it’s violated, despite the fact that it’s His permissive will, it is not a source of joy to Him that a 3-week-old baby dies. He aches with us. He groans with us. Yeah, I would say He suffers with us. So in the same way that the text speaks about a fact that we suffer with Christ as heirs with Him, I contend that the text then turns it around and says that God suffers with us. That in our pain—and indeed many of the Third World theologians, particularly in Latin America, would tell us that we only identify with God when we identify with the pain and the brokenness and the marginalized of our world.

So then, point number one, is that somehow in some way inherent in our identity as Christians we are going to suffer, but we suffer with hope and we do not suffer alone. God is with us.

Secondly, the second text that I would draw to your attention is the text of chapters 4, 5, and 6 of II Corinthians. In these chapters, the apostle Paul makes another assumption. The first is that we suffer with Christ with hope with Him. The second assumption is that our capacity to be life and grace to others comes through our very experience of difficulty. He speaks about the fact that we are clay jars and, in our vulnerability, he outlines a remarkable series of ways in which he has experienced and continues to experience the pain of this world, and he even speaks of this as, in II Corinthians 4:10, “caring in the body the death of Christ,” “caring in the body the death of Jesus.” And then, building on this thought, he concludes that “though death is at work in him,” verse 12, “life is at work in those whom he serves.” In other words, our ability to be people who are means of grace for God in a broken world, in the world or in the church, comes through our capacity to be life in the midst of death, to be a people of hope in a discouraging world. Paul himself spoke of this as his weakness. In speaking of weakness, indeed of boasting in his weakness and the glory of God evident in this weakness, he was not speaking of a toleration of mediocrity. Rather, as is clear from II Corinthians 12, the weakness of Paul was the difficulties themselves, the obstacles, the setbacks, the disappointments that were inevitably a part of his ministry. And clearly it was his conviction that this difficulty was the very locus by which God brought life and grace to others. I’ll speak to this more in a few minutes.

And then, third, a third text that I find very helpful is Romans 5. In the opening verses of this chapter, we are reminded of the simple principle that suffering, setback, and disappointment are



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the very means which by we are formed into the people of God, people of maturity and strength. We might wish it otherwise, and there is also no doubt that suffering has broken many people and left them disenchanted, bitter, and lifeless. But the fact remains that it is through the stress points of life that our character is tested and proven. As the apostle Paul puts it, “suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (Romans 5:3-4). But everything, I would say, depends on our response.

Suffering and pain either break us or make us. Through it all, we either become angry, bitter, cynical, or by God’s grace we grow through endurance and we become people of character; and through this we are signals of hope in a dark and dispirited world. Consequently, I would say the real test of spiritual and emotional maturity lies in our capacity to handle difficult and painful times. It is through these stressful events, whether in relationships or in work, that we mature in faith and grow in self-knowledge as we come to greater and greater clarity about what really matters to us—what priorities must guide our life choices—and in the end learn to love and be loved even in the midst of a broken world. And the choice is always ours.

As a Canadian who has spent half of his life overseas—first as a child of missionary parents and then in the Philippines as the dean and professor of theology of a seminary and later as a pastor—I’m impressed by a characteristic in my own culture and society and that is the propensity to feel victimized. John Ralston Saul, in his analysis of Canadian identity, speaks of victimization as a kind of Canadian sin or propensity; and he uses the example of political movements that are more regional than national. He describes how they are nourished on the sense of victimization by different regions of the country, who feel victimized by the whole country, and how it is little wonder then that they have little vision for the big picture for the whole country. And then, powerfully, he notes the dangers and the foolishness of this posture when he writes,

“All of us, it can’t be denied, are victimized from time to time, but this is quite different from believing ourselves to be victims all the time.”

There’s a great line attributed to Robert Orben, which captures this feeling of victimization but tongue in cheek.

He writes, “Sometimes I get the feeling that the whole



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world is against me, but deep down I know that’s not true. Some of the smaller countries are neutral.”

By victimized, I mean that we get lost in a sea of self-pity, live with a martyr complex, or carry this hurt around like a chip on our shoulder, becoming more and more cynical having lost the capacity to live with humor, grace, compassion, and patience. We are robbed of life.

Viktor Frankl has helped me to see that suffering is the real test of whether we transcend self-absorption and truly live for others. For Frankl, suffering imparted meaning and purpose to his life. The genesis of a person’s values were to be found in a person’s suffering. That is, life has meaning and value, but this meaning and these values are discovered, attained, and sustained by the ways in which an individual confronts and responds to the evil around her, around him, and the suffering that that entails.

In all of this then, one begins to realize that we can hardly overstate how critical it is that we learn to respond well to difficulty, setback, and disappointment. Responding positively, as we can see the essence of the issue, is this: of believing in faith, accepting the simple reality that God is good but life is not fair. It’s in suffering that we grow in faith, the very root of the spiritual life, the fountain of the spiritual life. God is good, but the world, including the church, is not fair. You will not be treated as you should be treated. You will not be thanked as much as you should be thanked. You will not be affirmed and appreciated as much as you deserve. Less confident people will get positions that you should have gotten. You’ll be overlooked and not appreciated because of false perceptions. You’ll be misunderstood, underappreciated, and wrongly accused. The great danger is not only self-pity but, worse, a martyr complex. These are pathetic, no doubt. No, there’s even a great danger. The great danger is bitterness and cynicism. Far better to go into life and ministry with the assumption that no one owes you anything and God will affirm you and bless you in His time. Only then can you begin to respond positively to setback, difficulty, and disappointment.

Which leads me then, secondly, to speak to what it means to respond positively to the ways in which pain, suffering, and disappointment intersect our lives. First, forgiveness and resolution of the past. We can only respond positively to current developments if we have already come to terms with our past and come to resolution of the ways in which pain has intersected our lives, and for this we



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must practice forgiveness. In learning to embrace with grace the points at which pain has and is intersecting our lives, it is clear that we must begin by forgiving our parents. This is fundamental. By this, I do not necessarily mean that we have been grievously wronged. Though for many that will be the case. It is merely that no parent has been perfect. No parent has been all that we had hoped that we would have in a parent. Consequently, we must forgive and in compassion let go of any resentment we might have against mother or father.

For some, this will mean coming to terms with deep wrongs. They may have been abandoned by a father or a mother whom they have actually never met. Worse yet, they may have been physically or emotionally abused by a parent, or a parent may have in ignorance not given the child all that in retrospect might have been given. They did their best, but as every parent knows, it is never good enough. My wife and I can easily look back and see how we might have done things differently, but there’s no changing that. There’s no going back to ensure that every hurt and pain is removed from the consciousness of our two sons. But we will remain forever locked in resentment if we do not begin with something so fundamental as forgiveness for our parents. Forgiving our parents is one of the most important lessons and actions of our lives. We need to forgive what was wrong in our parents and childhood but, more, we need to appreciate and affirm what is good. What is of God in our parents and in their generation and in their culture, even I would say in our religious heritage.

As I’m intimating, this resolution of childhood involves more than just forgiving our parents. It also includes reconciliation to all that our parents represented—to the spiritual, cultural, and social heritage that shaped us as children. For some, it will be a religious or denominational heritage. And in many cases, it is easy to look back and resent deeply the wrongheadedness or narrowness of a fundamentalistic perspective and that we must move on embrace a broader notion of truth, perhaps, and life. We can never sever our roots. We have to come to terms with them. Some are lost in the nostalgia of the past. Others are eager to cut off the past as so much garbage. But to do so is to discard both the good and the bad; and the truth is that we are only able to make a lasting contribution to mature emotionally and completely when we celebrate and embrace the good and gently though firmly discard what is less than good. This requires discernment—a gracious discernment but also a discernment that is characterized



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by fundamental gratitude for all that was, and is, good. Only with this discernment can we build on what is positive in our parents, in our heritage.

But second, this forgiveness must also be extended to others. One of the givens is not only that we have to forgive our parents, but secondly one of the givens is that in this life we will be wronged. We will be wronged by family, by co-workers, by the boss of the company where we work. It is not merely that we will not be treated as we deserve. I’m saying we will be wronged. People will take advantage of us. Others will speak ill of us through gossip or slander and seek to destroy our creditability. I could easily go on and list a multitude of ways in which we could be wronged, but the point remains: Our only hope for spiritual and emotional health and vocational vitality is that we learn to let go of resentment. We will be wronged in families and in homes; and if we are wronged, it is imperative that we not move between the chapters of our lives accumulating, like a stamp collection, all the ways in which there is unresolved resentment in our hearts that we take from one chapter of our lives to another—taking into our marriage the wrongs out of our family of origin, taking to the next place of our work all the wrongs from our previous place of work. One of the sure signs of unresolved resentment is anger that is disproportionate to the wrong. When a colleague blows up over something that, while wrong, simply does not deserve that response, I can only assume that there’s something in the past that is still lurking in the dark shadows of his heart and his mind.

And thirdly, a resolution of the past also needs to include self-forgiveness. It is so easy to look back with regrets, to wish that we had done things differently. We may regret that we cut short a study program or perhaps regret that now we are living with the consequences of a profoundly foolish pattern of behavior; or maybe it is no more than regrets that we were not all that we could have been to our children, to our parents, to our friends, to our co-workers in the organizations that we have worked in. Or where we have not been as good as we could have been towards somebody else. Nothing is gained by living with regret. Nothing! It’s time to forgive—forgive yourself. To learn, to resolve to bring reconciliation if possible, if that is still possible, but then to move on embracing the new moment and the new opportunity. Regret is so easily nothing but another form of self-pity, yet another form of self-centeredness and self- indulgence.

Secondly, responding positively means that we come to accept . .



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. to see and to accept our limitations and our losses. To respond positively to the pain of life, we need to learn to forgive, yes, but further we need to come to terms with losses and limitations. Parker Palmer, I think, puts this very well when he notes this,

“Each of us has been given a nature by God. To have a nature is to have both limits and potentials, and we can learn as much about our God-given nature by running into our limits as by experiencing our potentials.” And then farther down he says this, “The truth is that I cannot be anything I want to be or do anything I want to do. The truth is that my created nature, my God-given nature, makes me like an organism or an ecosystem. I thrive in some rules and relationships within that system, but in others I wither and die.”

The problem is that often our encounter with these limits is painful. We are rejected in a job application, or we are fired where we simply lacked the necessary abilities or potential for a job or a position for which we longed. In other cases, we might have had a position but we just hadn’t matured enough. That is, we came up against limits, losses, and we had our expectations and our hopes dashed. We had longed for a position but have found out that it is beyond our abilities and perhaps not aligned with those abilities.

Further, if we are honest, we usually realize that often our dashed expectations were really rooted in a desire to impress others. We had dreams and aspirations that were unrealistic, and it’s not so much that we failed as that we did not achieve what was really unachievable. But this in no way takes away from the fact that we have come up against our limits. For some, this happens early in life. For many, if not for most, it comes closer to midlife when it dawns on us. (As it’s dawning on me at midlife that I’m not going to be all that I’d hoped to be.) Some will decide finally, then, they’re not going to be the millionaire, the great businessperson; they will not get the Ph.D.; they will not have the children they’d hoped for; they will not . . . there’s nothing medical science is going to do to change that now. Whatever the hope or the aspiration, it is dashed, and we are confronted with our limits. For others, it may be a physical limitation. The recognition that one does not have what it takes to be a professional athlete, never going to make it to the big leagues, or the realization that because of a serious accident the rest of life will be spent in a wheelchair, extraordinary limitations. Surely the genius of life comes in accepting with grace the losses we experience and living with



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peace in the limits of our lives.

Again, Parker Palmer puts it so well: “The truth is that every time a door closes behind us the rest of the world opens up in front of us. All we need to do is stop pounding on the door that is closed, turn around, and see the largeness of life that is now open to the soul.”

That is, we will only be able to thrive in our life and in our work and in our relationships when we accept our limitations and within those limitations then choose to thrive.

I’m regularly reminded of the story of Nelson Mandela—now, as I speak, the president of South Africa, who spent over 20 years as a prisoner, as a political prisoner, and much of it spent in solitary confinement. He could easily have come out of that experience bitter, angry, and dispirited. Instead, he came out with more life in his eyes then when he went in. He quite simply chose to accept what was, rather than beat his head against the limitations that were forced on him.

Thirdly, still part of responding positively, we need to accept, I would say, the pain that is inherent in our vocations. We have to come to a resolution about the past, yes. We need to accept graciously the limits and limitations of our lives and our circumstances, including the losses that those represent. But I’m suggesting that we need to go further. That if we are going to thrive in that to which God calls us, in the work to which God calls us, we also need to accept that some form of difficulty or pain is inherent in what we are called to do. Jesus began His public ministry with a clear sense of call. As I noted in Mark 1, this is what I am called to do, and He was able to say at the conclusion of His life and work (John 17) that He had finished the work that God gave Him to do, but He could not finish that work unless He accepted the cross, the way of Calvary. Further, in speaking to His disciples, Jesus advised them that they are to take up their cross and follow Him. In other words, when we follow Jesus, we follow Him to the cross. We follow Him bearing the cross. Consequently, it is reasonable to conclude that in some form or another the cross will mark every vocation. There will be some way in which the pain of the broken world intersects the very thing that we are called to do.

For some, the pain that is inherent in their vocations is more obvious. For example, when Isaiah was called in Isaiah 6 to be a prophet, he was told right up front that the people of God would



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not welcome what he had to say. That the people of Israel would not welcome him [and] their ears would be deaf to his voice. In such cases where it’s inherent in one’s calling, one needs to accept with grace that the difficulty is part of what it takes to achieve that particular end. An example of this would be that the cost of being a first-class athlete or a musician is rigorous training, practice, and work; and often it’s in obscurity. And many talented individuals who might well be very good musicians or athletes never become accomplished for the simple reason that they were not prepared to pay the price—the hours and hours of training, rehearsal, practice, far away from affirmation and praise. In this sense, the pain or cross may be the “what it takes” to accomplish one’s ends. In the other case, it may be nothing more than what is inherent in a role or responsibility; and probably this is where I should have mentioned Isaiah and his call to be a prophet.

Another example would be that you cannot be in administration, I would say, if you need to be affirmed and recognized every time you do something helpful; that inherent in the job, much like the role of mothering or homemaking, is that a great deal of the work that a person does goes unnoticed and unappreciated. If you cannot accept this with grace, then you are better staying out of administration. As an artist, you will probably never find the support and affirmation you need in a culture that is fundamentally pragmatic. As a businessperson, you will always live with the ups and downs of the market and of consumer trends and of fads and fashions. As a teacher, you will consistently be amazed that the people who seem to understand what you taught never really got the point or, if they did, they did not appreciate everything you taught them or choose to live consistent with what they learned. Jesus faced this also, as we see from Philip’s question in the initial verses of John 14.

As a surgeon, you will save many lives but you will also lose some; and you will lose some that you probably could have saved. Somehow you need to accept the possibility of loss of life, otherwise you will not be able to save life. As a politician, part of the cross will be that you will never be able to satisfy all of your constituents. And many who might have supported you at one point can so quickly turn and condemn you because you dashed their hopes; and they will never be able to understand your need to compromise. Difficulty, I’m saying, is inherent in some form or another in every line of work and is at the heart of every vocation.

Where this difficulty intersects our lives and our work is not



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incidental. As I suggested in the examination of a theology of Christian suffering, it seems to me that it’s at this point that we have the very place where we are grace and life to others. Where we feel the mark of the cross in our vocation is the locus wherein we personally grow in dependency upon God for His sufficient grace, but also where we are grace to others. And, to note, the book of Hebrews speaks of the cross as something that Jesus endured for the joy that was before Him. It was something, in other words, that was a necessary means for the fulfillment of His vocation and of His joy. The cross, then, marks each vocation not as a limitation but ironically as the very means by which God enables us to know joy through the work and calling that He calls us to. We must then learn to accept graciously the way that pain intersects our lives, our work, and our vocations.

It should also be noted that many fall into the trap of attributing their difficulty, especially their difficulty in their work or in the fulfillment of their vocations, to some form of demonic opposition or attack. How frequently, for example, I have read missionary letters in which it seems like every difficulty they experience in their life and in their work is attributed in some form or another to demonic opposition or attack. This applies whether or not, for example, everybody else in the country is experiencing the same thing. To read a missionary complain about traffic in Manila, I just want to say,

“Well everybody in Manila has the same difficulty with the same bit of traffic. In fact, by going there as a missionary, you contributed to the traffic problem.”

But also it’s sometimes a failure to recognize, because oftentimes they pray as though this should be removed. And while in principle it’s certainly possible that the difficulty that they, or that we, are experiencing could potentially be attributed to demonic opposition or attack—while in principle this is surely possible, most of the difficulty we experience is either part and parcel of what it means to live on planet earth, as I’ve suggested about the traffic, or it is something that is clearly being allowed by God because it is in some form or another inherent in our vocations. That is, to ask God to remove it would be like asking God to remove the cross from Jesus’ life and work. To attribute this difficulty to the evil one, while in one sense true, is to actually give more credit to the evil one than is due because God has chosen to allow that difficulty to intersect our lives. That is, we can accept it as from the hand of the Lord in one sense. And then, of course, if



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we fail to embrace that cross, we fail to be the very means. We fail to see how that is the very means by which God brings grace and strength to others. I’ve even wondered if one of the most fundamental means by which we bring grace to others is because of patience in traffic, and that every time we complain about it, the irony is that we undermine the very thing that God wants to do through our lives. I wonder that.

And then, number four, still on how do we respond positively. Point number four, of course, means this should come as no surprise that we need to learn to respond positively to failure and setback. We will only suffer with grace when we learn how to handle failure. One of the most crucial capacities we have in the fulfillment of our lives and in our work is learning to respond with emotional resilience to setback, failure, and indeed rejection. On a personal level, it would be very easy for substantial health problems or a major family problem with a spouse or with a child to leave one feeling profoundly sorry for oneself. Few things cut the nerve of joy and vocational vitality quite like self-pity. Invariably, those who thrive in life and work, those who move towards spiritual maturity and vitality, are those who learn the power of gratitude, hope, and faith in the midst of darkness and pain. And there’s no doubt that if we do not develop the capacity to accept with grace the setbacks of life and work, whether from our own failures or through the actions of others, justified or not, we will be nothing but angry and bitter and hard people.

As mentioned earlier, in some cases our sense of failure was based on an unrealistic expectation. That is, we failed because we were not all that we had hoped we would be. That is, what is really suffering here is not . . . this is not suffering so much as just a wounded ego. But I acknowledge that it still hurts, but at least we can begin by saying we were trying to be more than God was calling us to be. We were trying to live beyond our own limits, beyond our own abilities, and we needed to accept the fact graciously but accept the fact that failure was . . . was indicative of where we were in terms of our limits.

In other cases, it seems to me that we were living with false notions of success. That is, many times pastors, for example, feel that they have failed in their understanding of the life and work of the church because their church has not grown numerically, quantitatively, as much as they should have. But it may well be that in God’s mind there was no failure because He had another agenda for that congregation at that particular time. That is,



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sometimes rather than being content with what God is doing in our midst in whatever line of work—whether it’s in business or in pastoral ministry or in education—rather than being content with what God is doing, we feel we have failed; but it’s not failure in the eyes of God. Wisdom demands again that we accept this with grace. Sometimes our potential for success is limited by the performance of others. Sometimes we have unrealistic expectations. Sometimes, let’s face it, all we are doing is comparing ourselves with others and saying we wish we had done as much as that person had or we had the same kind of profile as that person had or have published as much as that person had or our church had grown as fast as that person’s had; and it’s a false notion of failure.

But in other cases we have failed. That is, as we look back, it’s not just a matter of coming up against our limits, and it’s not just a matter of false notions of success. In some cases, we have failed. As we look back, we can see the things that we did that with more care, with more foresight, with more discipline, with more consciousness and conscientiousness, we might have been able to avoid it. We were not careful. We said things we should not have said. We did things out of selfishness that we should not have done.

Humility demands that sometimes we acknowledge that we were not all that good at something. That as a preacher on that day, maybe over a season, we did not preach well; and there is no excuse. All we did was fail to be all that God had called us to be. We had the capacities and the resources, and we did not live up to them. Or perhaps as an investor, a professional investor, you made a bad investment, and you and your clients have now lost money; and there’s no excuse. You knew how to do it, and you did not do it well. Or as a mechanic, you knew that when the car repair assignment—when somebody brought their car back, and it was not working properly and you were the mechanic—the fact of the matter is you didn’t do it right. You were not careful. There are no excuses. There are no extenuating circumstances. There’s no way to avoid the simple fact that what has happened is failure.

It seems to me that one of the greatest and most significant things we can do in our spiritual lives, particularly when we think about our life and our work but also our relationships, is to accept with grace where we have failed. Where I have not been the father that I should have been or I have not been the husband that I should have been. Where I have not been the teacher or the preacher



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or the pastor or whatever responsibility or duty or relationship to which I have been called. I do not need to be defensive. I do not need to dig up for excuses. We can acknowledge that we were not perfect, that we will learn from our mistakes; and that even though we failed, it does not mean that we tolerate mediocrity. We can press on with faith, hope, and love.

I would note this in passing: It’s important to acknowledge failure and important to note those ways in which suffering intersects our lives as a result of our own failure. Often the unwillingness to acknowledge failure means that we remain in a situation, our relationship, or work situation that merely reinforces the failure. But by acknowledging it, we have the capacity to move on. We tend to be crushed by failure when we should probably merely close the door of our lives, cut our losses so to speak, find reconciliation with those that we have wronged, and seek to move on. And when we do, there’s probably more ahead that could possibly be imagined. And in time, especially if we learn from our mistakes, our hearts, our relationships, our work situations will be healed; and we’ll be able to look back on that failure as something that is a distant memory.

All of this is my way of saying that in some form or another it is imperative that we seek and find spiritual maturity, and a critical means by which we come to that is by coming to terms with difficulty, suffering, and disappointment—that we respond with grace to difficulty, suffering, and disappointment.

I had noted the text in Romans 5 where Paul says that suffering produces endurance, that endurance produces character, and character produces hope. This is what can happen. This is the potential that we have through difficulty and suffering. And it’s for this reason that Paul here in Romans 5, that James in James 1, and Peter in I Peter call us to embrace, indeed to rejoice in, suffering; and one response might be to say,

“Why would I ever do that? Why would I rejoice in difficulty and suffering?”

Because it’s through the very furnace of difficulty and suffering that character is transformed, and we have the possibility of being grace to others. That is, this is the very grist, the mill, the grist for one’s mill that enables us ultimately to be all that God has called us to be. And so it’s imperative that as Christian believers we develop the capacity to respond with grace; and I’ve sought to



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outline in this lecture the various ways in which we need to learn to respond to the grace of God that is available to us in suffering.

Let me also go back to this—the reminder that I made almost at the every beginning that when we are experiencing difficulty, suffering, failure, and disappointment, even if it’s the result of our own foolishness, God never abandons us. We are never alone. In the midst of suffering and disappointment, God is with us. God is under us. God is beside us. God is over us. God is in us. To feel the presence and intimacy of the Lord at that time, more than probably at any other time, is imperative to know that in that difficulty and suffering we do not go alone.

And finally, to say this, we will only be able to thrive in the midst of suffering, setback, and disappointment if we learn to draw on the means of grace that are offered to us in the life and witness of the church and the disciplines of the spiritual life that enable us to know the grace of God. Obviously, again I come back to the Word of God and prayer. We will only be able to thrive, survive yea thrive and flourish in difficulties, suffering, and disappointment—so that it leads ultimately to spiritual growth and vitality—if we are men and women of the Word and prayer. Minds indwelt by Scripture, lives that are disciplined in the regular practice of prayer so that we draw strength from our union with Christ, so that we have minds and hearts that are integrated and informed by the Word of God.

Furthermore, I want to stress the importance of community; and I’m going to stress it when we come to the next lectures on the importance of spiritual formation and the communal dimension of that. But let me just say this: One of the things that has always impressed me in times of difficulty, suffering, and disappointment is that while one side of me says I am alone, in actual fact I am not alone. Not only is God with me, but the people of God are with me; and if I’m willing to reach out, there has always been somebody there. That the people, I’m convinced, who say, “Nobody was there when I needed them,” that as often as not they didn’t have the courage, the humility, to ask for help; to reach out to a pastor, to a friend, to an elder, to a neighbor.

That is, we are probably not as alone as we feel we are, and in those times of difficulty, suffering, and disappointment, rather than being filled with self-pity, what we need to do is find those who are prepared to lock arms with us to walk with us. I know this full well that in the deepest valleys of my life, the most difficult

Transcript - SF508 Foundations of Spiritual Formation II: The Disciplines of Life

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moments, there were always people who were praying for me every day, who were encouraging me, who were there when I needed them. For this, of course, I’m deeply grateful to God, and I increasingly learn to draw strength from my sisters and brothers who walk with me as I want to walk with them through times of difficulty and suffering.

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