Sinclair Ferguson: How Should I Endure Suffering?

0:00 I should also say in the interest of total transparency that Bob Godfrey and I met at the Pensacola Institute. And you know, Pensacola is somewhere in Florida and has a beach. And ever since, my dear, dear friend Bob Godfrey has insisted on introducing me to his friends as having been met in Pensacola where the only thing that was whiter than the Pensacola sand. Well, yes, you've guessed at my body. And if anything could demonstrate amazing grace, it is that we are still fast friends. Well, let's turn for the end of our day.

1:00 It's been a long day. It's been a glorious day of the ministry of the Word, a thrilling day to trace the ways of the Lord. And I have a relatively short text this evening from the letter of James, chapter 1. I want to read only verses 2 through 4, and then verse 12, James chapter 1, verses 2 through 4. This is a dark room, and James in any case has a way of hiding in the New Testament. He's after the letter to the Hebrews, and if you've got to 1 Peter, you've gone one stop too far. James, a servant of God, is the way he introduces his letter under the Lord Jesus Christ to the twelve tribes in the dispersion, greetings. That is rejoicing greetings.

1:56 Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that But the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, that you may be mature, lacking in nothing. And verse 12, blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life which God has promised to those who love Him. From time to time, the top people at Ligonier who are anonymous, who meet together to arrange for the conference, select difficult subjects.

2:53 our subject this evening is a difficult subject. So much so, I think that in all my years of ministry, although just in the course of Bible exposition I've touched on the themes of suffering and endurance in the course of a normal round of ministry, I think this is the first time in my life I've ever actually been asked to speak on the subject of suffering. And I think there is a very obvious reason for that, that suffering is not something we enjoy, and suffering is a subject from which we tend to shrink and do everything in our powers to avoid suffering. But when we turn to the New Testament, perhaps the real surprise of the New Testament is that suffering is all over the New Testament, and you need to have only a cursory knowledge of various passages in the New Testament to realize that it was for the early Christians part of the definition of what it means to be a Christian.

4:13 From the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spoke to His disciples about the fact that there was a blessing in suffering that they would experience in no other way. The last hours of His ministry before His crucifixion, He underlined for them that in the world Christians will have tribulation. They should be of good cheer because the Christ who has overcome the world will also sustain them in their tribulation. And you remember perhaps especially most significantly the Apostle Peter who rather clearly in the Gospels shrank from suffering. And even in that little conflict with the Apostle Paul, it's clear that he shrank from suffering of a different kind in connection with the Judaizers, the story that Paul tells in the letter to the Galatians.

5:15 It's illuminating and surely significant that the Apostle Peter says to his contemporaries, The one thing you should not be in your thinking about suffering is surprised because suffering belongs to the very core of the experience of the Christian, not the nature of it, not the extent of it, but the reality of it. And he understood that because he realized from the teaching of Jesus and from His discipleship that it is not possible to be a disciple, a follower of a suffering Savior without sharing in His sufferings. And the Apostle Paul saw that as so much part of the pattern that God was creating in his life that he tells us, you remember in Philippians 3, that it was part of his desire that he might share in the fellowship of Jesus' sufferings in order that he might share in the fellowship of Jesus' resurrection and glory.

6:30 And so what I want to try to do in the few minutes we have together this evening is to to think about some of the clues that the New Testament in general, and James in particular, some of the clues that Scripture gives to us about the nature of suffering, the purpose of suffering, our response to suffering, and the fruitfulness of suffering in our lives. And surely the first thing to emphasize is that what James is saying to us in this text is that suffering is a normal element in the Christian life. Indeed the way in which he uses his language here, count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet, when you fall into trials of various kinds.

7:28 Actually, the verb he uses here is the verb that's used of the experience of the man who was rescued by the Good Samaritan. He didn't need to go out to look for people who would molest him and seek to maraud him. He simply fell among them. He simply met them in the way. And it's James' way of saying that suffering is actually unavoidable in the Christian life. Again, I think it's as striking in the New Testament as it is in the Psalms how infrequently the Bible speaks about the particular way in which individuals will suffer, but gives to us such a broad perspective that when we do suffer, whether in great measure or small measure, whether we suffer as these brothers and sisters that we've seen earlier on in the screens tonight suffer, or whether we suffer in a way that nobody would ever notice, it is not possible to be a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ and to be molded into His image and likeness without God in His sovereign providence bringing into our lives discomfort, pain, challenge, tribulation, and suffering.

9:08 It is normal. And this is why, for example, the apostle Peter says that we shouldn't be surprised by it. It shouldn't take us aback. And he also underlines, does James here, you'll notice his language, count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds. Sufferings are normal in the Christian life. And James understands, he actually uses the same vocabulary that Peter uses in his first letter. He understands that we are not the determiners of the nature of the suffering or the extent of the suffering, but that Christians will experience suffering of various kinds. He uses a word that at its root means multicolored.

10:05 And what He's saying to us is that in the mystery of His providence, God employs different kinds of instruments and different believers to the same end of transforming their lives. In some believers that may be suffering of a massive scale. In every believer it will be suffering of a kind that will bring us to the place where we may, with the Apostle Paul, beg God three times to remove the thorn. And then with the Apostle Paul, discover that the reason for the thorn is that we might to understand that His grace is sufficient for us and His strength is made perfect in our weakness.

11:04 And what James says in this context, in keeping with the rest of the New Testament, is that Christians therefore should share a common response to suffering. Count it all joy. We are to rejoice, He says, in suffering. And Jesus says the same thing, blessed are you when you suffer, when men persecute you. Rejoice in it. And later on you remember when the early Christians were suffering persecution and tribulation, Their understanding of that was this is something for which we should count it all joy, that we are so identified with Jesus Christ that we have the privilege of sharing in His sufferings. Of what Paul says in Romans chapter 5, it is a glorious thing, he says, to be justified by faith in Jesus Christ.

12:10 And even non-Christians may recognize what a glorious thing it is to believe that your sins are forgiven. But he says in the Christian life there is something more than that, not more supernatural but more astonishing than that, that sits on top of that, that is possible only because of that. And that is that we rejoice also in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character, and character produces hope of the glory of God. And you can understand then that as the Scriptures begin to mold our thinking about suffering, our whole disposition towards suffering is transformed, and we begin to rejoice in it. Indeed, if you were to go through the passages in the New Testament that speak about suffering, you would be surprised how many of them are linked to the notion of rejoicing.

13:16 The very thing that is counterintuitive to us, and indeed I would guess for most of us the thing that we most fear, namely that we should suffer in any way whatsoever, is transformed by the gospel supernaturally in the life of the Christian believer into something the unbeliever finds impossible to understand. But in the midst of this, there could be and actually is joy. And even in the midst of it, that joy is undimmed in the believer, and even more than undimmed in the believer, is polished by the grace of God to shine in the Christian's life. And you know this, if you are in a living church with men and women and boys and girls of different ages and stages and backgrounds and experiences, you know there are people in your congregation who shine.

14:30 And you also know them well enough to know that they shine because of the hardness of their life that God in His grace has used to cause them to rejoice. And so the first thing I think we need to realize from what James is saying here, when he says, count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, and in this chapter he deals with the trials of suffering and the trials of temptation, yes. But when he says that we could count it joy, he implies it must be a normal element in the life of the Christian. And it should already be evident to us why he can say that. It is a normal element in the life of the Christian because it is a productive element in the life of the Christian.

15:32 It has a productive function. And the key here in James, and you see this elsewhere in the New Testament, the key here to rejoicing and suffering interestingly lies not in the sense that some of us are impervious to its pain, or we don't care what anybody says about us, thinks about us, or does to us. What actually transforms our disposition to suffering, and this is something that in many ways is so much at the core, isn't it, of the Ligonier ministry, the key lies in what you know. And that's what he says, "'Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know." And so the question is, do you know?

16:36 Well, what is it that we are supposed to know? We are supposed to know that trials, suffering in the economy of God are productive in a whole variety of ways. Actually, James uses a very interesting word. He uses an intensive form of the verb to lead. And I think that gives us a really good picture of what happens in our Christian lives for this transformation to take place, that here are our experiences of suffering, and what we need to do is to lead those experiences of suffering from our own ability to interpret them and respond to them, to lead that to the Word of God, and then to see that suffering in the light of the Word of God, and as we do so, we see it in an entirely different light altogether.

17:39 And how is this the case? Well, it's the case because the Lord has a whole variety of purposes in our suffering. And we don't have time this evening to go through them all, but let me just mention one or two of them. The first is this, that the Lord is testing His workmanship. I suppose the great biblical example of that, although there are many, is Job. What is the explanation for Job's suffering? Well, certainly a big part of the explanation of Job's suffering is that God in His glory is able to say to Satan, the accuser, do your worst to my workmanship, and it will remain in forim, If you're anything like me, generally in my life if I try to do anything practical, the other members of the family have rushed to defend the object I am trying to do something practical with.

18:48 And so I do not have the instinct to test my workmanship. But do you not think that God has the ability to test His workmanship? That if, as Paul says in Ephesians 2, we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus to good works, that He is able to test that that workmanship is firm and strong, and also that But He wants us to be persuaded that His work will last, that the good work He has done in us He will bring to completion on the day of Jesus Christ. And so He's not just testing His workmanship, as it were, for His own interests, or even we might say for His own glory, as though to say to the universe, look what I can do. But He wants us also to be reassured that His workmanship will stand the test of time and the test of suffering.

19:52 And there's another reason why He does this, and it's obviously here too. It is that apparently God does something through suffering that He does not do in a sense, I am not speaking of His omnipotent power, but that He does not ordinarily do through any other means, and indeed He understands that only the means of suffering will produce the end that He has in view. And this is the language here, that God works through suffering, that God produces something through suffering that will not be produced in any other way. And this is His language here, that this suffering produces steadfastness in the English Standard Version.

20:56 It produces perseverance, or in some of the older translations, patience. And in the New Testament there are two different words for patience. One of them conveys the idea of having, you might say, long-mindedness, of taking the long-term view. But the other, and the word that he uses here, conveys the idea of the ability to remain under something and to take the strain. And because you remain under it and take the strain, the strength of your Christian character is built up. That's the same thing Paul says in Romans 5, that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character.

21:53 Now, it is one of the most obvious evidences of the false teaching that surrounds us in the Western world and invades countries in Africa, that there are other ways to experience the blessing of God. But the Scripture teaches us that the blessing of God in character is produced only by these means that there needs to be the firmness in our lives if the gold is to become pure, and that there is no other way than God placing upon our lives weights that make our knees tremble, but in His divine process build up character.

22:56 And if the church of God in the Western world is lacking, is it not true that it is lacking in character? Much Christian-speak, little Christian character that makes men and women and young people stand out in the crowd in such a way that even if their peers hate what they believe, they cannot withstand the force of their character. And that's never produced by ease. The Masters Golf is on just now. I don't usually watch the Masters Golf because I used to play golf, and I get too emotionally caught up in what's happening. What I like to watch every four years is the Olympic weightlifting contest because I don't get emotionally caught up in that.

23:57 But I do sit and I watch. You know, I watch the snatch and jerk or whatever it's caused, or the clean and jerk, and I happen to know what the world record is. That's 588.6 pounds. And you see these people coming onto the stage, a stage like this, and they have this amazing ability to lift up the barbells, and it's extraordinary. That world record, incidentally, is like Bob Godfrey, Derek Thomas, and H.B. Charles coming up here with me and me managing to lift all of them up together. Now, you look at me and you say, Sinclair could do that. He could get off the couch and do that.

24:56 How do these men and women do that? It's because day after day, week after week, year after year, the stress and the pressure that they have been exposed to builds up strength in them. And what is true in the world of Olympic weightlifting is also true in the world of the Christian. And isn't that a wholly different way to look at our sufferings? Brothers and sisters, it does not take away the pain, either our pain or the pain of others as they watch us. I like the way John Flavel, the seventeenth-century pastor, put it. He says, "'Suffering, like frosty days, alters our hue and bleaches it white.'" Now, probably unless you're of my generation, that is mumbo jumbo to you.

26:01 But before the days of washing machines in Scotland, if my mother wanted to bleach something white, what delighted her was a sunny, frosty day. And the combination of the sun shining and the coldness of the frost seemed to have this almost chemically transforming power to the whiteness of the white. And Flavel is saying that's how it is, that this kind of Christian character can only be produced in one particular way. Derek Thomas told me years ago a story about a Welsh minister, so Derek told me, it must be true, who was approached by a lady, I think, in his congregation who told her minister that she was having difficulty with patience. She was a bit impatient. And he said something like, well, we can fix that, let's pray. And he prayed, Lord, send some affliction into my sister's life. Amen. And she said, but I said my problem was patience and a lack of it." And he explained to her that you don't learn patience by living in situations that are never going to cause anybody to become impatient, that it's actually produced by situations that at first sight might seem to create the opposite.

27:45 And you see this again and again, don't you? In Scripture, the friction of God's purposes in the lives of His saints transforms them. H.B. mentioned Joseph this morning, and there's almost a chronological vision of the way God did this in Joseph. From at seventeen, he is immature, he is proud, and he is unwise. Fourteen years later, after all the affliction, all the disappointment, all the suffering, he is mature. He is incredibly patient. He knows how to be patient for the next fourteen years, and he's been given this extraordinary wisdom.

28:42 And it's almost as though mathematically God is saying to us in His Word, don't you see this? 14 years in order to produce 14 years. There are no quick fixes. There are no quick ways of creating wisdom and maturity and character. And one of the chief instruments, as God delights to use His Word to give us wisdom, He also uses the hand of His providence to transform our lives. And I rather suspect there has never been a really fruitful servant of God of whom this has not been true. You know Amy Carmichael's poem, Hast thou no scar? Hast thou no scar, no hidden scar on foot or side or hand? I hear these sung as mighty in the land, I hear them hail thy bright ascendant star.

29:41 Hast thou no scar? Hast thou no wound? Yet I was wounded by the archers, spent and leaned against a tree to die, and rent by ravening beasts that compassed me. I swooned. Hast thou no wound? no wound, no scar, yet as the master shall the servant be, and pierced are the feet that follow Me. But thine are whole, can He have followed far, who has no wound or scar." Now this isn't in our sovereign hands, but this is characteristically God's sovereign way to transform our character so that eventually we will become fruitful. So, there's a variety in our suffering. Never let anyone tell you that they know the suffering that you should go through. That's in the hands of the Lord. There is a purpose in our suffering.

30:45 It's to build Christian character, and there's also a gloriously maturing effect in suffering. And that's what James speaks about here, doesn't he? He says, when steadfastness, when patience has its full effect, something happens to the Christian believer, and there is a maturity, there is a balance, there is a completeness. And curiously, there's also a sense of contentment, a sense that in Jesus Christ I lack nothing.

31:27 And what does that maturity look like? Well, one of the things suffering produces in us, doesn't it, is it weans us off from our devotion to this world, because there is, as it were, nothing in this world that can in any sense relieve us of the suffering of human existence or of persecution. It weans us from all the baubles of this world to which we have become so easily attached, what superglue the world works with on our lives, and yes, on our lives as Christians. And then you meet Christians, usually from other countries who have suffered great privation, and you realize you're not really, you're not really fit to either tie or untie their shoelaces because God has done something in their lives through privation that He has not done in anybody's life through plenty.

32:41 And you see, this is a heavenly calling, isn't it? The Christian life is not a worldly calling, although we live in this world. And there's another aspect to this that brings us to maturity, I think. that our suffering gives us a greater sense of appreciation of the suffering of the Lord Jesus and a love for Him that He suffered so much for us. My friends, the gospel is not simply a piece of systematic theology. The atonement is not just a matter of mathematical equations. In our flesh, for our sakes, with a view to our salvation and to our life with Him in eternity, the Son of God suffered, and there was no other way. And when we suffer, whether that just be the ordinary sufferings of life, you're feeling miserable because you have the flu.

33:48 Don't ever let somebody say to you, if you say to them when you've got the flu, I feel myself to be such a sinner. Don't let anybody ever say to you, it's just that you've got the flu. Because the divine purpose in the flu is that you feel yourself to be a sinner, and when you feel yourself to be a sinner, you come to realize what a great Savior you have who suffered so much for you in His death and rose again for you in His resurrection power. And perhaps the most significant thing of all is that this maturity, this transformation has in view, as we heard earlier on this morning, I was sitting listening to HB saying, Lord, stop I'm going any further on that text, because what He means to do is to transform you into the likeness of His Son.

34:52 what he wants. It's as though he owned a great portrait, an image of himself, and it was stolen. And the authorities came back and said, we have captured the thief, and if you're the owner of the portrait, you're relatively little interested in the thief. him is just as far as you are concerned a means to an end, and the end is, did you get my picture back? And that's what he wants in us. He wants the picture of himself back in us. And He is working everything together for good for those who love Him in order that we might be conformed to His likeness.

35:49 And when that begins to happen, something else begins to happen. We become serviceable in His hands to point others to Jesus Christ because of that increase in our lives of conformity to Him. And yes, that too can and often does involve what He does in us through suffering. Remember how Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 4, 10 to 12, he says, here is the truth that death works in us, our fellowship with Christ and His sufferings works in us in order that life may be working in others. Therefore, death keeps working in us, suffering, loss, affliction keeps working in us. And so here is a great clue that the New Testament gives us about suffering. If we ask the question, why is this happening to me, we may never get to the right answer, because the reason it's happening to you doesn't reside in you but resides in somebody else that the Lord is going to touch and draw and save and transform and bring to glory through what they have seen of the Lord Jesus in you.

37:11 And I am fairly convinced that the Apostle Paul himself learned that lesson by reflecting on the death of Stephen. I have no doubt reading the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles and the way in which Luke in those early chapters links together the life and preaching of Stephen, the character of Stephen, the Christlikeness of Stephen, and the conversion of Saul. That these principles Paul enunciates arose out of his reflection on Stephen, that the suffering that worked in Stephen, that Christ-likeness with which Luke describes him at the end of his life, the suffering that worked in Stephen was productive in the life of Saul of Tarsus,

38:07 so that whatever happened to him on the Damascus road, he probably did not have what we call a a Damascus Road conversion as though it simply happened suddenly out of the blue because he'd heard the gospel, probably contested against the gospel because I think he probably belonged to the same synagogue as Stephen. They were both from the Gentile world. And he saw in something in Stephen that he knew he lacked in himself, and it was evident in the way in which the Lord Jesus was manifest in His life. And this is what the Lord means to do. You know these words of C.S. Lewis's? He says, imagine yourself as a living house. God comes to rebuild that house.

39:01 At first you think you understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on. You knew that these jobs needed to be done, and so you're not surprised. But presently he seems to start knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is he up to?" Says Lewis, the explanation is this. He's building quite a different house from the one you thought of. He's throwing up a new wing, putting a new extra floor, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be turned into a decent little cottage, but He is building a palace because He means to come and live in it Himself. And the glorious thing for us as Christians, isn't this the truth of the matter, the glorious thing for us as Christians is that we don't need to be big public figures for this to be true of us.

40:09 I think some of the people who have made the deepest impression on me have been the people you would have passed by in the street because I've seen how the Lord is working in them. I don't know if there's anyone present this evening who might have been a member of 10th Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia in the 1990s. Thank you. We used to go there when we were at Westminster Seminary and met there a young woman. Her name was Allison Large. At the age of one, she was diagnosed with retinoblastoma. She had a malignant retinal tumor, and her right eye was removed. She became a believer at seventeen, and the tumor returned behind the other eye when she was eighteen.

41:06 It grew again, and she had surgery. She faced death or blindness, and the eye was removed and there was more radiation. The tumors began to appear elsewhere, spread to both lungs, and eventually there was no possibility of treatment, and Allison went to be with the Lord. I think of her often enough. There was absolutely nothing about Allison, a young woman. Young women want to be attractive naturally. There was really, there was nothing left of Allison physically to be attractive. left behind a testimony for her memorial service, and this is her testimony. I want people to see how rich life can be even when it's such a constant pain.

42:08 I wouldn't part with everything that has come out in the last five years. I wouldn't trade it for anything. It's the paradox of the Bible about blessings coming through pain, God's strength coming through weakness. I've had a really wonderful life, and the only reason I can see for that is that because God has allowed me who could choose to be so grumpy about the cancer, which I am many days, but I can't ignore all the blessings that came through it. I do not want to mislead anyone to have myself raised as a model of Christian faith. I often struggle in my relationship with God and I'm gripped with fears of dying. I've wept before God, pleaded with Him, demanded healing from Him, cursed Him, tried to bargain with Him. Yet, even in my darkest moments when the words of Scripture fell dead on a numb and unbelieving heart, some deep calling within, some solid thing assured me that my Father would pull me back to faith. I have suffered through many bleak periods in which I felt like a mere dust rag in the hands of a God who discarded this dust rag after use, as though I were the butt of some cosmic joke.

43:30 But all along He has hemmed me in on every side. If I say, surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me, even And the darkness will not be dark to you, the night will shine like the day, for darkness is a light to you." And in my hours of despair, he whispered to my soul, Ali, just wait. This, too, will pass. I did not understand what God was doing, but I did know that He was there and that what was happening was under His control. But what becomes ever clearer to me is that far from punishing me, He has blessed me. And whenever God does call me home, for I do believe that is what death is, I want people to know that my life was not too short, not too short for the rich blessings.

44:41 You didn't know, Alison. But those of us who knew her, deprived of all that a young woman might want, saw in her that tribulation works endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and that ultimately is the hope of the glory of God and transformation into the likeness of Christ. So may it be for us all. Let us pray. Our Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your Word. We thank You for the many blessings of this day. And we know that there are among us, surely, those who suffer, many who suffer invisibly, many who are devoted to others who do suffer.

45:36 You promised in Your Word that there will be suffering in the Christian life. We pray that we may be given grace to lead our suffering back to the gospel. And seeing in Jesus Christ both the ground of our salvation, the pattern of our transformation, And the goal of our sanctification, we may learn to say with James that we are able to count these days of difficulty and tribulation as a joy. Teach us this paradox, we pray, and grant grace to us as we all walk into an unknown future, that we may be able by Your sovereign providence to be transformed more and more into the likeness of our Lord Jesus Christ, that others may be drawn to Him, and that we may be steadfast until the day when we see Him face to face, and everything then will be seen to be worthwhile.

46:48 And we ask it in Jesus' name.