When did our expectations change?

Almost to a person we expect our lives to relatively pain free.  Suffering is bad.  Not suffering is good.  Happy is better.  From the aches in our bodies to the angst in our souls, we have worked harder and harder to relieve ourselves of suffering.  The past year has seen remarkable strides in our pursuit of personal safety and personal happiness.  COVID only hastened what was already in progress.  In fact, we have extended this idea of not suffering to include not having to deal with ideas or thoughts or views we find offensive (another overused word for unpleasant, hence, no suffering).  From universities to the public square, we are to be protected against things we find unpleasant or offensive.  Anything that causes us to be uncomfortable is nothing less than hate speech or hateful ideas.  And they are not to be tolerated in a society dedicated to the end of pain and suffering.  If they won't, we will sue for, yeah, you got it, pain and suffering.

 

Christians have been swallowed up by all of this and fed and nourished by preachers and teachers who have told us, on good authority, that God wants us to be relieved of suffering, to avoid pain, and to be happy.  In fact, it is His job.  What good is a God who won't do what you want and keep you happy -- and insulated from pain and suffering?  The lie of the gospel of happiness has displaced the real Gospel of the cross in too many places and Christians are being fed a load of you know what -- thinking that this is the truth!  Even in denominations more prone to orthodox teaching and preaching, the mention of sin, pain, and suffering is all too rare and with it the word repent.  It seems the ailment of self-absorption is more common and universal than one had thought.

 

We have diagnoses for our depression, our stress, and our fear and treat them medically more than with the real medicine of hope.  Religion over all has been co-opted into this therapeutic deism in which worship is more like a session and the throne of God into our recliner as we listen to those who can tell us how to deal with our stress, how to answer our depression, how to overcome our fears, and how to reach the ever illusive goal of personal happiness, personal safety, and personal peace.

 

In fact, suffering is not an enemy of our well-being.  The goal of happiness will most certainly lead to disappointment and disillusionment with God and with life.  However, we have a God who cares enough about us not to be preoccupied by the fickle feeling of happiness.  God designed us in such a way that our contentment, peace, and real joy comes only through Him.  Faith is not a remedy for pain or suffering but faith teaches us that these drive us into that one place where true joy is to be found -- the arms of our merciful and beneficent God.  The devil and the world are always telling us that we can buy our way into happiness or satisfy it with technology or find a person to make us happy or indulge ourselves in our desires to make us happy.  God is there to strip away the lies.  As blessed Augustine once revealed from his own pursuit of happiness,  “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” 

 

From His goodness, the Lord made us and when sin threatened the goodness of His creation, the Lord delivered us at the cost of His own Son.  Our restless souls will be tempted by all kinds of empty promises but only the sure promise of the Lord will offer us refuge.  Even then, there can be no end to pain and suffering until the Lord delivers us from the veil of tears and into His presence forevermore.  Until then suffering makes us totally dependent upon the Lord, His mercy and His grace.

The Good Shepherd is good not because He successfully avoided pain and suffering but because He endured it for us.  He lays down His life for us -- no one takes it from Him.  We live in the world but we are not of it.  The Lord sustains us by His grace in this time of trouble and sorrow.  In our weakness, His strength is revealed and His grace is sufficient for all our needs.  He tells us this upfront.  We will suffer because He suffered and the same world which rejected Him will reject those who stand with Him by faith.  It is a privilege of the faith that we suffer on account of His name and those sufferings will give way to eternal relief.  We seem to have forgotten that.  We have worn Christ's name too casually and shrunk from any cost of wearing that name.  It is not suffering which is our enemy but the evil foe who offers us the tempting illusion of life without pain, burden, or disappointment.  Until we learn that suffering goes with this life, we will always be putty in the hands of the devil.  Once we realize this and fighter harder to endure through it in Christ rather than avoid it, we will have learned what it means to believe.

 

853 How Clear Is Our Vocation, Lord

 

1 How clear is our vocation, Lord,
    When once we heed Your call:
To live according to Your Word
And daily learn, refreshed, restored,
    That You are Lord of all
    And will not let us fall.

 

2 But if, forgetful, we should find
    Your yoke is hard to bear;
If worldly pressures fray the mind,
And love itself cannot unwind
    Its tangled skein of care:
    Our inward life repair.

 

3 We marvel how Your saints become
    In hindrances more sure;
Whose joyful virtues put to shame
The casual way we wear Your name
    And by our faults obscure
    Your pow’r to cleanse and cure.

 

4 In what You give us, Lord, to do,
    Together or alone,
In old routines or ventures new,
May we not cease to look to You,
    The cross You hung upon—
    All You endeavored done.

 

Text: © 1982 Hope Publishing Co. Used by permission: LSB Hymn License no. 110004930