Driven into waiting arms

“for the LORD reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.”
-Proverbs 3:12

You know, I was listening to a sermon series by Mark Driscoll a few months ago, and this particular sermon was on trials. Even though he set the sermon schedule a year in advance, he knew that particular was going to be rough. If a sermon on trials was coming up, it would undoubtedly be surrounded by trials. In the same way, my mother, who is a Bible study teacher, has vowed to never teach the Book of James again because of all the trials she went through while teaching about trials.

This is not God punishing people for teaching certain passages. Quite the contrary! This is God timing things so that when you face trial, you’re already reading the right passages. He’s timing it so you understand it when you go to teach it.

In my case, I had just started my little series on pain when the call came. There was a death in my wife’s family. We hurried down to her hometown over the weekend for the funeral. We only today got home.

Right now, my wife is on the phone, trying to comfort a family member. I really don’t know whether she’s going to help much or not. She is pointing to Jesus, because He is the only real comfort either of us knows. This family member will either hear the call to Christ, or think my wife is being terribly insensitive.

It has been a very painful half year for my wife, and there have been times when I have made the same plea to her. Turn to Jesus. It has been the sort of pain that could have broken her, sent her into wild depressions. It didn’t. She leaned on God for strength, and now she is passing on the message of the Cross to her family.

I’m proud of her. More than that, I’m happy for her.

Pain can either turn you to the right road or the wrong road. It can either make you see the folly in your life and cause you to change, or it can make you chase folly all the more. God calls out to us through pain. In pain He tells us that all is not okay, that it is not right.

Not that He is to blame for death. That’s ultimately our fault. If it had not been for sin, there would not have been death. But we sinned, and we earned death. Death is here because of us. But God can use it. God can use pain to try to reach us.

A good parent, this verse tells us, disciplines his children. This we should already know. Only the worst parents let their children grow up without boundaries, without discipline, and without consequences. We, like wayward children, have run after our own desires and lusts. Out of love, God allows pain to come into our lives. It is through trials that we become “perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:4).

Like wayward children, we have a choice as to how to respond to that pain. Do we recognize our own folly? Do we realize the futility of our pursuits? Do we come to realize what is really important? Or do we run farther into ourselves?

I don’t know how my wife’s family will respond to her pleas tonight. I am praying that this pain will not be wasted. I am praying that this pain will drive them into the arms of Jesus.