Audio Transcript
Many people believe joy must wait until suffering ends, but the Bible tells a different story. In this episode, we look at Paul, the saints, and God’s surprising promise to us that joy can exist even inside an aching heart. Today on Ask Pastor John: don’t wait for the pain to stop.
The question is from an anonymous woman: “Pastor John, hi. I am writing to you from Indonesia. Your ministry has been a huge blessing to me for the last seven years. After waiting ten years for a child, my husband and I were overjoyed when I became pregnant late last year. But at the same time, I discovered a lump in my breast. At eleven weeks, our joy turned to sorrow when we learned our baby no longer had a heartbeat, and I had to undergo a D&C procedure. Just one week after losing our long-awaited child, we received the devastating news that the lump was stage-2 breast cancer. I have just had surgery and am now facing this new battle, and my heart is overwhelmed. I often wake up in the morning consumed by anxiety. My questions for you are: How can I possibly have a heart full of joy and peace during such profound loss and fear? How can I continue to believe that God is good, and that I will see brighter days again?”
Perhaps I could share a couple of means by which God has kept me from the paralyzing discouragement or bitterness over various disappointments, afflictions, and sufferings in my own life over the past eighty years. One is that he has taught me — from experience and from the Bible — that the presence of great sorrow and great grief in my heart does not mean that there cannot be great joy and peace at the same time, in the same aching heart. That seems strange, contradictory, and paradoxical, but it has been so important to learn.
Holding Joy and Sorrow
I got the impression in listening to our friend’s question that maybe she has not yet learned this wonderful truth. I don’t know, but maybe not. She said she doesn’t see how joy and peace can be in her heart during such profound grief and loss. It seems like she has the sense that as long as she feels profound loss, sorrow, and grief, joy and peace have to wait. They can’t be there in her heart.
I want to encourage her and others not to back themselves into a corner of hopelessness. If we persuade ourselves that grief and sorrow and loss must cease before we can have joy and peace again, we will be trapped in a life of hopelessness or hypocrisy — hopelessness because there’s always going to be sorrow, or hypocrisy because we’re constantly trying to deny it.
The fact is, the more we serve others like Jesus, the more pain we will have to bear — either our own or others’ pain. In this fallen world, there is no escaping sorrow and affliction. Through many afflictions we must enter the kingdom (Acts 14:22).
“You don’t have to wait until the season of sorrow is over in order to know the sweetness of joy.”
One great lesson to learn is that you don’t have to wait for the absence of grief and pain in order to know the presence of joy. We must learn this. It is a deep and wonderful discovery. It has rescued me many times. I saw it in my twenties, in Romans 9:2, where Paul said, “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.” I was just blown away by that word unceasing. Are you kidding me? You’re the great apostle of joy. You have unceasing anguish in your heart? Because his kinsmen are cut off from Christ and cursed (Romans 9:3).
This is the same Paul who said, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” (Philippians 4:4). Always. He not only said it but did it:
In all our affliction, I am overflowing with joy. (2 Corinthians 7:4)
[We are] sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. (2 Corinthians 6:10)
His anguish over lost loved ones never goes away, and his afflictions are relentless. There are always reasons for sorrow. We will always have reasons for sorrow in this world, or we’re loveless. And instead of thinking, “This means I must wait for joy,” he says, “No, I don’t have to wait. I’m not going to wait. I’m going to crowd joy into my broken heart and make it exist alongside my sorrow.”
What a crucial lesson to learn. And I thank God for it. I would encourage everybody to just settle it: You don’t have to wait until the season of sorrow is over in order to know the sweetness of joy at the same time.
Fellow Suffering Servants
Here’s the other lesson I’ve learned in trying to keep from being overwhelmed with disappointments, losses, and afflictions. For many years, I have considered the example of other Christians to be essential to my survival. Some of these have been living examples, but most have died, and I read about them in the Bible or in biographies.
For example, for 27 years I focused on one dead person each year and read a couple biographies and then wrote my own little biography of each one and gave a lecture on it at our pastor’s conference. And then we published them in 27 Servants of Sovereign Joy. You know what I was looking for in those years, in those lives, those biographies? How did they endure? That’s what I was looking for.
How did they endure the hardships and losses of life? John Owen lost eleven children — that’s more than Job — and never broke. He wrote beautiful books on how to be spiritually minded in such situations and how to have sweet fellowship with Jesus.
William Carey saw twelve years of his life’s work burned up in a fire, not to be recovered. And he knelt down in the ashes and rededicated himself to start over again. You read that, and you just want to say, “Yes, Lord, please make me that kind of person.”
William Tyndale was hunted down, driven out of his homeland, put in prison, and killed. Near the end, in the cold prison cell, he asked for warmer clothes and a Hebrew dictionary — a Hebrew dictionary, bless his heart, so he could keep pressing on with his work of translating the Bible just before they killed him.
How did they do it? They didn’t become bitter. They didn’t lose their joy, and they overflowed in love for Christ and his people.
But my point here is not to say how they did it — you need to read it for yourself — but to say that this was a lifeline for me to read story after story, in the Bible and in biographies, of men and women who suffered far more than I have and did not give up but maintained a life of peace, love, joy, and usefulness.
I still do this. Downstairs right now, as I’m talking to you, beside my chair is a little paperback by Dick McLellan titled Warriors of Ethiopia: The Extraordinary Story of How the Gospel Came to a Remote Region of Africa. Each chapter is about a different faithful, suffering evangelist. I read about one chapter more or less each evening (because they’re very short) simply to remind myself of the incredible sufferings of indigenous missionaries and evangelists in Ethiopia and around the world who have paid ultimate prices to get the gospel out.
These are people who had virtually none of my advantages or my comforts or my protections or my healthcare. They endured beatings, sleepless nights, dangers, torture, and martyrdom because they loved Jesus Christ and his wonderful news of the forgiveness of sins — or, better, because they knew they were loved by him.
My point is this: The sheer fact that there are people like this in the world today, and that there have always been people like this, has been one means that God has used over five-plus decades of ministry to keep me enduring and rejoicing alongside my sorrows — not instead of them, but at the same time.
Joy in Endurance
So, I would say very gently to our struggling friend who has lost her child and is dealing with cancer, let the example of Paul in the New Testament and thousands of ordinary saints through the centuries give you a fresh confidence. With God’s enabling grace, you can endure this season of your life. In fact, God will help you discover the secret that you don’t even have to wait for this season to be over. He will help you drink the cup of sorrow and, at the same time, feel the sunshine of his love and his sustaining grace and his promise to bring you through.
