A purpose that enable's us to face life's difficulties

EXPLORING CHRISTIANITY - PURPOSE

THE BIBLE
Can we trust a book written 2000 years ago?

EYEWITNESS
Did the writers of the New Testament get their picture of Jesus right?

GOD - MAN
Is Jesus really God?

RESURRECTION
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

RELIGIONS
With so many religions, why Christianity?

SUFFERING
If there is a God, why is there so much suffering?

TRINITY
Understanding the Trinity.

SCIENCE
The complementary nature of Science & Christianity.

FORGIVENESS
What it is and why it matters?

GUIDANCE
How does God guide?

REPENTANCE
What it is and why you can't get to heaven without it.

BORN AGAIN
What does it mean to be converted and born again?

SAVING FAITH
The kind of faith that will get you to heaven

ASSURANCE
Can I know for sure that I am going to heaven?

TRUTH
What is truth and does it matter?

MORALITY
Does it matter how we live? A Christian view of morality.

THE CHURCH
God's vision for his family, the Church. A call to the churches of the new millennium.

PURPOSE
How can I find a great purpose for living?

IDENTITY
Who am I; Finding my true identity as a human being and as a child of God.

SELF-ESTEEM
How can I feel good about my self? The Christian basis for proper sel-esteem.

LIFE AFTER DEATHChristianity's Hope & Challenge.

THE CROSS
Why did Jesus Die? What the Bible says about the Cross.

Grace
The importance of grace in the New Testament.

A purpose that enable's us to face life's greatest difficulties.

"Despair is suffering without meaning"
Victor Frankl

Jesus never indicated to his followers that they would find a life committed to him free of problems. Rather the opposite. At his last meal with his disciples before his crucifixion, he said to them: "They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God...In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world" (John 16:2, 33). However, to have a great purpose in life and to know where you are going, can make all the difference when it comes to taking life's knockbacks. Though an unbeliever, the German philosopher Nietzsche said, "If a man has a why for his life he can bear with almost any how."

The New Testament has a good deal to say about suffering and what God can achieve in our lives through it when we are committed to serving him. He can use it for developing character and maturity (Romans 5:3; James 1:2-4), deepening our faith (1 Peter 1:6, 7), creating bonds with others who suffer and so enhancing our ministry to them (2 Corinthians 1:3-7), and increasing our dependence on God and our experience of his grace and strength (2 Corinthians 12:7-10). One thing is certain. For one who is committed to Christ and seeking his purpose for their life, suffering is never without meaning. As Victor Frankl put it, "Despair is suffering without meaning". God's purpose is to make us worthy of his kingdom (2 Thessalonians 1:5) and he sometimes uses suffering to achieve it. I may not understand what God is doing but he knows, and a committed believer can trust him for that.*

Secondly, when the fundamental goal of one's life is to live for the glory of God, then bitterness, a sense of unfairness, despair and other negative emotions that often accompany suffering are easier to cope with. The focus is elsewhere and not on the suffering itself. It was such a goal in life that enabled 16-year-old Caroline Atkinson, daughter of New Zealand Baptist pastor Maurice Atkinson and his wife Miriam, to face the prospect of suffering and early death. Though she did not experience her wish for healing in this life, her victorious spirit shines through the last entry she wrote in her diary on May 15th, 1992, the day before an operation for her brain tumour from which she died two days later.

Well, according to medical science I am never going to grow old. I have a year in the least to live. I have brain surgery tomorrow to remove as much of a malignant tumour as possible, but God has promised me he is in charge and he is the one who can heal me. I believe it may be gone when they go to remove it, Amen! Or perhaps his purpose is different and I have to go through more to continue his plans. I have a purpose. I am not going to die. God is in control.

I would love to catch sight of the Glory of God only to return to lead my friends to the Lord. Oh! If only, please God let me.

Lead my paths and help me to live and honour you in everything I do and bring glory to your name. Please help me have the peace I now do in you to pull me through. For that I may honour you and bring others to get to know you. Let that be my purpose. Yes please, O God, take my life.

You are the potter, I am the clay. Mould me. Make me. This is what I pray.

YOU ALONE ARE MIGHTY AND POWERFUL.

"In view of our supreme purpose, the present difficulties and disappointments seem trivial"
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Thirdly, the certainty of a glorious future when there will be no more suffering enables one who is committed to Christ's purpose for his or her life to see suffering and trials in proper perspective.**Dietrich Bonhoeffer, later to be executed by the Nazis for his resistance to Hitler, wrote in his prison diary, "In view of our supreme purpose, the present difficulties and disappointments seem trivial". Paul, who endured stoning, eight floggings, three shipwrecks, imprisonments, ill health, hunger and thirst, and goodness knows what else, in his letter to the church at Rome put it like this: "I am sure that what we are suffering now cannot compare with the glory that will be shown us" (Romans 8:18). To the Corinthians, he wrote: "These little troubles are getting us ready for an eternal glory that will make our troubles seem like nothing" (2 Corinthians 4:17). A. W. Tozer, author of several very helpful books on the Christian life, summed it up well:

The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of 10,000 temporal problems, for he sees at once that these have to do with matters which, at the most, cannot concern him for very long.

Fourthly, because it is through the infinite sufferings of Christ that believers have entered into newness of life and the experience of that great love, they may even choose to embrace suffering when it be for his sake, and count it a privilege to do so. One of my favourite stories is of Robert Stewart, shortly to go China with the China Inland Mission, at the Keswick Convention at Derwent Water in 1893. Another who was present for the convention was Temple Gairdner, himself to become a missionary to Egypt. Gairdner's biographer describes the scene as some from the convention were taking a break from the meetings to go boating on the lake:

[Suddenly] a tall, rather majestic figure, standing bareheaded at the prow of one of the boats, uttered an unforgettable call. His hands outstretched, his face with a shining in it that Gairdner never forgot, he cried to that company of happy youth, "Agonia is the measure of success. Christ suffered in agony, so must we. Christ died. So perhaps may we. Our life must be hard, cruel, wearisome, unknown. So was His."

Robert Stewart, with his wife and child, were among the seventy-nine missionaries and their children of the China Inland Mission who were killed a few years later during the Boxer Rebellion in that country.

The intrepid missionary, David Livingstone, who opened up central Africa for the gospel, made a similar choice. During one terrible journey of seven months, from November 1853 to June 1854, he had thirty-one attacks of intermittent fever, incredible hardships, constant wading through swollen streams, tedious delays and harassing exactions from hostile tribes. He wrote :

It is true that I suffered severely from fever, but my experience cannot be taken as a fair criterion in the matter. Compelled to sleep on the damp ground month after month, exposed to drenching showers and getting the lower extremes wetted two or three times every day, living on manioc roots and meal and exposed during many hours each day to the direct rays of the sun with the thermometer standing above ninety degrees in the shade—these constitute a more pitiful hygiene than any succeeding missionaries will have to endure.

"Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay"
David Livingstone

If you knew the satisfaction of performing a duty as well as the gratitude to God which the missionary must always feel in being chosen for so noble and sacred a calling, you would have no hesitation in embracing it. For my own part I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay.

Paul put it like this in writing to the Christians in Philippi: "For to you has been given the privilege not only of trusting Him but also of suffering for Him" (Philippians 1:29—The Living Bible translation). Some things are worth suffering for. The nineteenth century writer S. D. Gordon, who wrote several very helpful books on Christian living, wrote:

Let it once be fixed that a man's ambition is to fit into God's plan for him and he has a north star ever in sight to guide him steadily over any sea, however shoreless it seems. He has a compass that points true in the thickest fog and fiercest storm and regardless of magnetic rock.

* I look at this issue in some detail in the booklet If There Is a God, Why Is There So Much Suffering?

**I examine the grounds for this certainty in the booklet Can I Know for Sure I Am Going to Heaven?