Session 3: The Hurting Heart

that our discussion time was a little shorter. I would have loved to have more time to hear everything you all were saying. Our group was really rich. All right, so I am going to pray for us. I think. Thank you, Sarah. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for the joy that there is in meeting new people who love you. It creates instant family, and that's possible because of the blood of your precious Son. We are so thankful. that we stand in his grace. So I pray that you would help these women to listen. I know this is, there's a lot that there, that might be in their minds. I pray that they'll continue to just put aside distractions, child care and chores and housework and their to-do list. I know each of these ladies has so much that they're putting on hold for a few minutes to think about you and your word. And I pray that you would honor their sacrifice and their commitment to you by giving them yourself. Help me to be clear and help me to communicate well as I rely on your Holy Spirit. And I do this in Jesus' precious name, amen. All right, we're on the home stretch. So we've done some necessary work as we've talked about our hearts, our hearts that want to help. We know that God uses trials to encourage us to rely on him and not ourselves. We know that our sufficiency to help others in trials comes from God and not from us. Now we're going to talk about the basics of approaching someone who is hurting. How do you actually start? What do you do? And I know from your discussion groups that many of you are already great at this, so I hope it's not going to be too much of a review. Here's our main idea to answer this question about how do we start. When you minister to someone who's hurting, start with three things. Listening, giving hope, and praying. Listening, giving hope, and praying. The specific trial and hardship that your friend is facing will be the context of her sanctification. In other words, the detour is the road. We often think like this, if I can just get past this trial, I can get back to the real Christian life. But what we think of as a detour is actually the road of our sanctification that the Lord has us on. Trials give direction to discipleship. They point you toward the place that you need to start working. So they point us to the path when we regularly and deliberately and personally seek to help someone grow in Christlikeness. In order to find that direction, so if trials really do give direction to your discipleship, in order to find that direction you have to start by listening. So, when you meet someone who's hurting, the first thing to do is to listen. So, I've been experiencing a tiny trial that has helped me really deepen my passion for good listening. In January, I broke out in this kind of odd rash on my legs and arms and collarbone area. It was really red and really itchy. I saw a dermatologist and then I saw a functional medicine doctor. Nothing really helped. The rash started getting worse. I changed all my personal care products, everything that I was putting on my body and in my body. Laundry, all that stuff. I went on an elimination diet to see if it was related to food. Nothing was working. Two months later, I was still struggling and I was getting a little desperate. I wasn't sleeping because the itching was so crazy. And I was kind of fighting some anxiety because I couldn't figure out what was going on. And my daily life was affected by all the itching. It just doesn't sound very dramatic, but it was really hard. I was going through it. So I went to see an allergist. I thought maybe this is some sort of weird allergic reaction. I sat down with the allergist and I said two sentences about how the rash started. And she immediately cut me off and said she knew exactly what was wrong. I didn't tell her what I had tried, when it got worse, or how bad it was. She didn't ask what medicines I was on or any other health issues. She jumped to a conclusion based on an assumption. And her assumption was actually wrong. She misdiagnosed me because she didn't listen. I felt pretty hurt, honestly, and misunderstood, and a little hopeless because I had been to several other doctors. And I thought, she's going to help me. I didn't feel like she cared. I kind of felt like a nuisance, and she just needed to check me off her list. She's probably a really good doctor, and I do think she does care. But her lack of listening really affected the way I related to her as a person and to her recommendation for my condition. Have you ever had an experience like that? You're hurting, and you go to someone who you think can help, but they don't listen to you, and you end up more hopeless and feeling more alone. Even if they have good advice, it's hard to accept it and process their counsel unless they have listened to you first. So here's how one author describes listening. To listen to someone, to really listen to them, is to break out of the prison of self-reference where we all tend to live. It's to get out of yourself, to leave self behind. It's to hear what another person says and resist the impulse to map it onto your own experiences. is to shift your focus from self to another, to step into their reality, to bear their life with them. Fundamentally, it is to love. Christians should be famous for their listening. There are so many contexts when this is needed. We are discussing mainly discipleship relationships where an older, godlier woman has agreed to regularly and personally and deliberately disciple a younger woman. But it also applies, these are kind of some of the examples that I thought of. When your husband or your children want to talk, but the kitchen is a disaster. I so want to multitask. I'm like, I can do both of this. I'm listening and I'm washing dishes. And my husband's like, no, you're not. Or when your friend or your mom or your sister calls you just as you sit down, you've gotten the kids to bed and the kitchen is clean and you've got a book. And then the phone rings. Somebody's had that experience. Or when you're finally moving toward your car after church and you feel like you've already had about five really significant conversations and one more person stops you and they want to share a problem. It's like, Oh, okay, and you kind of got to regroup and start listening. Listening cultivates trust and it communicates such tenderness. You can show the love of Christ to others simply by stopping and truly listening. Another counselor put it this way, for some reason, human beings tolerate stress and pressure much more easily if at least one other person knows that they are enduring it. I think that's true. So this step of listening well is I draw from the passages we've been looking at in 2 Corinthians 1. So let's turn back there, back to 2 Corinthians 1. And this is going to be really familiar. We covered some of this territory last night. Verse 8, Paul says, For I don't want you to be unaware, brothers, of my affliction that I experienced, that I was so utterly burdened beyond my strength that I despaired of life itself." So we looked at it from Paul's perspective last night, that he shared it. He was fighting self-reliance by sharing his struggles. Now we're going to look at it from the perspective of the Corinthians. Paul wanted the Corinthians to know about his affliction. So this means he wanted the Corinthians to hear it, and we know that many of these letters were read to the whole church. So they were literally listening to what Paul was sharing about his affliction. So their first response to Paul's suffering was to listen to him, to know what happened to Paul and how he felt about it. He wanted them to know what his internal experience was like of this suffering. So deep, empathetic, compassionate listening is a gift. You are literally giving a gift to the woman that you listen to well. You're giving your time, you're giving your attention and your care, and it's really easy to underestimate how important this is, but you are doing the first work of discipleship when you listen well. So Proverbs 20, verse five. great, great verse to help us think about this. The purpose in a man's heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out. It takes skill to draw out what is happening in someone else's heart. And typically that happens through good questions where you're listening and pulling through their heart to what they're really wanting and cherishing. You're here today because you want to grow in that skill. And you are growing in your ability to draw out the purposes of someone's heart as you learn what Paul did with the Corinthians. Proverbs 18, 13, and this is a classic biblical counseling text. It's foolish and shameful to try to give an answer before you hear the situation, especially when someone is hurting. So remember my allergist. She was actually being foolish, according to the Bible, because she didn't listen well. Listening well when you disciple someone is just as important as a doctor listening to her patient and asking lots of good questions. So we know that listening, it's kind of self-evident, so important, it's essential, but what gives us the motivation to do it? Why should we listen well? Well, listening with love is a way that we embody the incarnational ministry of Christ himself. Jesus was Emmanuel. He was God with us. He came to be with us, to be one of us, and to experience what we experience. As we follow Christ, we humbly enter the world of our hurting friend by listening to them. Hebrews 4, 14 through 16 says that Jesus is our high priest who can sympathize with our weaknesses. He has been tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. So we can draw near to his throne of grace with confidence to find mercy and grace to help us in our time of need. This is an invitation to come into God's throne room because Jesus himself has paved the way for us to be there. He sympathizes with our weakness. He doesn't call his throne a throne of judgment here, although that's, part of his character and nature. He calls it a throne of grace. So he is ready to give us grace and mercy to help in our time of need. Our compassionate God actually commands us to pour out our hearts to him. Psalm 62 verse 8 says, trust in him at all times, O people, pour out your heart before him. God is a refuge for us. I encourage my counselees to do this. I said, get alone and obey God's commandment to pour out your heart to him. So the person of Christ that God came into our world to experience what we experience and the command of God himself gives us the motivation that we need. We are to be willing to hear and know this particular person in this specific trial before we speak. We put aside distractions as much as possible, including our phones. That's always the first thing that I want to put down when I'm listening to someone. We look deeply into their eyes. We stop other activities to concentrate on them. We aren't in a hurry. We are filled with love and compassion and we are praying for God's help while we listen. So I'm gonna share some of the ways, some ideas that help me listen when others come to me for biblical counseling. I wanna listen in a way that helps the other person tell their story. So I want things to slow down. Often, people are used to being listened to in kind of bite-sized snaps, snapshots, little tiny nuggets. So I wanna actually, we can slow down, we've got time. I wanna hear the whole story. And that means how you were feeling about it, what happened, the characters and the details of the story. I also really want to get to their heart level. All true biblical change travels through the heart. So we could talk about what they did and how they responded, but it points to what was actually going on in their heart. And one of the ways, these are some of the questions that I like to ask. What were you wanting? And I'll even say, if you had a magic wand and you could wave it over this situation, what would change? What would it look like? Paint a picture for me. Let me see what it would look like. And that's actually going to reveal to you, they're going to say, oh, this would happen. And my husband would come home with a bouquet of flowers, and dinner would be made, and there would be no laundry, and the children would be in bed. or the knight in shining armor would ride up with a bouquet of flowers and sweep me off my feet. So I get a picture of something that they're cherishing in their heart by asking that question. What are they wanting? What do they love? Now the flip side of that is what are they afraid of? What's their biggest fear? And I often ask, especially when someone's suffering, there might be a lot of lesser fears, but what's their biggest fear? What are they most afraid will happen? And this is a concept that's been really helpful to me, just to think about a coin that has heads and tails. The heads could be what you love and tails is what you fear. It's the same coin, it's just the flip side. If I love my husband's attention and approval and affection, I will fear the loss of that and that will drive, the fear will drive a lot of dysfunction and the love will also drive dysfunction when I'm turning my attention toward my husband and away from God himself. I might ask them, well, how are you making sense of this? Like, what conclusions are you coming to in your mind? What pieces are you putting together? And they may say, well, obviously, God's not good. Or they probably don't say it in quite as many words, but that might be some of the underlying conclusions that they're reaching. I'll also ask them, how are you responding to other people? What are your reactions to those who are closest with you, to your roommates, to your husband, your kids, your co-workers? Where are you seeking comfort and refuge? Is it at the gym? At the bottom of an ice cream bowl? Sleep? What are you turning to for refuge, or is it God and his word, which is what we ultimately want? So as we listen, we want to ask really good questions, and we want to resist some words and phrases that damage good listening. Here are a few examples, and I'd love to hear more about some of the things that you've heard that really hindered the listening process. Me too, or that happened to me once. So I'm saying that those two things can really hinder good listening. We may desire to communicate that we understand what they're going through. We really want to be compassionate. But listening well means we avoid, at least at first, kind of inserting our experience really quickly when we hear someone else's story. It means we don't talk about ourselves or what happened to us once. We don't compare our experience to theirs. We might ask, what is this like for you? Or what's the hardest part of what's happening? Another one would be a kind of a stiff, keep a stiff upper lip mentality or pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Again, we probably don't use that exact terminology. But the idea may be present there. I have a friend who remembers when she was little, her mom would tell this to her all the time. No matter what her ailment or sickness was, her mom would say, that happened to me once, honey, and you'll be just fine. And she would send her on out the door to school or to music lessons. Her mom's solution was basically stoicism. Emotions are not helpful. You don't need compassion. You just need to fulfill your responsibilities. Just do what you're supposed to do. Well, stoicism is not biblical. I'm really glad it's not. It would be very difficult for me. I'd be, yeah, it'd be very hard. The Bible does not promote a stiff upper lip mentality. God has glorious purposes for our emotions. In fact, I think our emotions tell us two key things that are vital. They tell us what we believe and what we value. And it's really important, we don't give emotions the run of the show, but they are necessary components to reveal our hearts to us. They tell us what we value and what we believe. Here's one more phrase that I think damages listening. It could be worse. When we say this, we compare our friend's suffering to all the evil and pain that is possible in the world. But you know what? God doesn't ever do that with us. We don't ever see in His Word Him talking to the children of Israel when they're in exile and saying, it could be worse. You could be over there in that other nation and you could be dead. He never does that. So I love that, I'm just so thankful that he doesn't use that kind of logic on us. So instead of using kind of a comparison or just pull yourself up by your bootstraps or that happened to me once too, we wanna engage with the hurting heart by listening and asking more of those questions that draw out details. We want to seek to be affected by their pain and to try to put ourselves in their shoes as much as possible. Okay, after you listen, the next thing you wanna do to love someone who's suffering is to give them hope. Why is hope so important? I'd love to hear your answer. Maybe I will in the discussion time. Isn't it just kind of a nice add-on? I mean, it's like it's nice to have hope, but it's not necessary. My contention is that hope is absolutely vital. No one keeps pursuing Christ in a trial without hope, and no one changes without hope. I remember over and over in my biblical counseling classes, no one changes without hope, and I think that's very true. So what does hope mean biblically? Our world uses the phrase very casually, I hope you have a great day, I hope things get better, I hope everything turns out well for you. But biblical hope is not positive thinking or kind of some wishful, warm wishes. It's a promise from God's Word that will come true. This is the actual definition of biblical hope. It's a certainty that has not yet come to pass. The only issue is timing. It will happen. It's a reality that hasn't occurred. The Bible links faith and hope in fascinating ways. Hebrews 11 1 says that faith is being sure of the things we hope for. We are totally sure that the things we can't see now are real and true. In fact, we believe that God is more real than anything we can see with our physical eyes. So genuine hope comes from God's word and is centered on the gospel. The circumstance of your friend's trial may not change, but the hurting heart can experience God's peace and comfort. As a believer, you are no longer under the crushing weight of God's wrath and judgment. You no longer face life alone. Jesus has taken your sins on himself and given you his righteousness. So real hope, hope that's strong enough to build your life on, comes from God's Word. Listen to Romans 15, 4. For whatever was written in former times was written for our instruction, which we know that. that through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope. God gives the scriptures to us and helps us to endure so that we will have hope. We'll know that we have staked our lives on something utterly trustworthy. And we see that theme in 2 Corinthians 1, 10, where Paul said he set his hope on God, that God would deliver him. Paul says he came to know God, to actually fellowship with God because of his sufferings. So the hurting heart can know that God is present and is working and they can even give glory to God no matter what their circumstances are. So I'm going to talk about a couple of passages of scripture that I use often in biblical counseling that I think will be helpful to you as you seek to help other women who are struggling. Now, one advantage that I have as I counsel is that someone has sought me out for truth from God's Word. They're expecting to hear spiritual stuff when they come to see me. And they're inviting me to talk to them about how the Bible makes sense of their suffering, which gives me a lot of freedom to kind of launch in. Now, the person you are discipling may not be asking quite so clearly. So you may approach sharing a verse like this by saying, there's a passage that has really given me a lot of hope and comfort when I'm struggling. Can I share it with you? And ask the question, and they're probably going to say yes. And here I want to insert a brief aside to those who are being discipled. Invite the woman who is discipling you to share her thoughts. She may be hesitant to share all that she's thinking because she doesn't want to offend or hurt. But if you ask her, what are you thinking? What am I missing? What Bible verses are coming to your mind as I share? I want you to tell me what you see and what you hear and how to change. You're going to be such a joy to disciple. That just creates such an atmosphere of harmony when you can do that. Okay, so the side is closed. Now we're going to talk about this first verse in 1 Corinthians 10. And turn over there with me, and I'm hoping that this is already super familiar to you, and I'm just going to talk a little bit about how I use it when I counsel. 1 Corinthians 10 is all about the example of the children of Israel. Paul wants us to learn from what they did wrong. This is so refreshing. Paul's saying, you don't have to learn the hard way. You don't have to go through the junk to do the right thing. I love that. That gives me so much hope and encouragement. And I think these are the verses that show that. Verse 6 of chapter 10 says, now these things took place as examples for us. that we might not desire evil as they did. And then verse 11 reiterates the point. Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction on whom the end of the ages has come. You can almost hear Paul begging, please learn from the children of Israel. Don't do what they did. Don't let your heart turn away from God and desire evil when you're in the wilderness of suffering. So the Israelites sinned greatly when they were in trials. And Paul is saying, please don't repeat their rebellion. So as I read this next verse, I want you to think about a trial that you're in and listen to God speak to you through this verse, verse 13. No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape that you may be able to endure it. Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. The word temptation in this verse can also be translated trial or pressure. So I'm going to read it again with that addition. No trial or pressure has overtaken you that is not common to all, but God is faithful and he will not let you be pressured or tried beyond your ability, but with the pressure or trial, he will also provide the way of escape that you may be able to stand up under it. Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. This verse tells us quite a few very important truths. It tells us that the temptations we face when we're under trials and pressures are not unique to us. We're not the only ones that have gone through it. And isn't it refreshing when you share a deep pressure and someone says, me too, in the best possible way? Just go, I have struggled in that way too. We aren't uniquely sinful. That could be a relief to a lot of women who go, I don't think anybody else can be as sinful as I am. And we can say, yeah, yeah, it's true. We are. And our problems are ones that others have faced. And God will be faithful to you in the midst of the pressure. It's a promise. Now, this verse does not contain a promise to remove the temptation or the trial. We know that because the way of escape is a way to endure it. But God is faithful to help us so that we don't have to give in to the temptation to sin. One of my biblical counseling friends, she's been counseling for decades, and she will tell women, I don't know if I'd quite phrase it like this, but it's memorable. She would say, especially to women in marriages that are very difficult, she says, your husband may be a failure before God, but you don't have to be. And it kind of gets everybody's attention, because she says, your husband's sin and disobedience, rebellion, lack of interest in spiritual things, or just even him not being a Christian, will be a trial to you. But it doesn't have to mean you disobey God. It doesn't hinder you from being everything that God has called you to be and to do. That's hopeful. Hard, but hopeful. So God is faithful to help us not lash out in anger or cower in fear or withdraw in despair when we suffer, which is what we are tempted to do when the pressure of life squeezes us. It puts the thumb down on our hearts and what's really inside our hearts comes out. Trials and pressure reveal our hearts and show us whether we worship and desire God above all, or whether we run after idols. I have a, again, one of my professors using an example, and I won't do it, he actually did it. He unscrewed the top of a water bottle, and he just knocked it with his fist pretty hard, and of course water went everywhere. I was glad I wasn't in range. And he said, why did water come out of the bottle? We were all like, because you hit it. And he said, okay, let me ask the question a different way. There was causation. This is what caused the water to come out. Why did water come out? And we were like, because water was what is inside the bottle. And he said, that's exactly right. This is a picture of our heart. When somebody knocks you, when the pressure of life comes up against you, it's the occasion that reveals your heart. It doesn't create what's in the bottle. It just shows up what's in there. So there's one other example that I love, just to think about our trials are the occasion that reveal what's already in our heart. It does not create what's in there. In Georgia, we have a lot of lawns with recessed sprinkler systems. I really know very little about sprinkler systems, so just go with me on this. The sprinkler heads are recessed into the lawn so that you can mow your lawn really easily. But when the water gets turned on, the pressure fills the hoses in the line and it forces those little sprinkler heads to come up out of the ground. You don't see them when there's no pressure. They're completely hidden, and you might think in your life, I don't have any pressure, and I've got no problem with idols. Everything's great in my heart. And then that pressure gets turned on, and suddenly all these things start popping up. And you think, where was all that? And this is God's grace that's revealing what was in there all along. And you needed the kind of the heat, the pressure of the trial to reveal it. So this is God's grace to us, even though it is painful. We see how this worked out in Paul's life. He suffered tremendously. And we have been talking about, he actually says he despaired of life itself, he was suffering so much, but he didn't sin in the middle of the trial. He clung to God. He trusted God and pursued God's purposes and not his own relief. So here's another way Paul gave hope to the Corinthians, and this is another example of the way you can give hope in the midst of discipleship. He looked for evidence of the Holy Spirit at work and he highlighted it. He drew attention to it. Even when he had to rebuke the Corinthians for their sin, he encouraged them. So let me just read 1 Corinthians 6, 9 through 11. Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither the sexually immoral, nor the idolaters, nor drunkards, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor revilers, nor swindlers who inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." Paul was really devastatingly honest with them about their sin, but he drew attention to how God was working. As a way to give hope to the women that you disciple, I encourage you to look for the smallest glimmer of the Holy Spirit's presence and action and draw attention to it. It may be that they drag themselves out of bed to come to the discipleship meeting. They may complain the whole time, but you can say, look, you actually got out of bed and came. That is the Holy Spirit working. It may be that the hurting person knows that sin is being revealed in her heart, and you can encourage her that she sees the battle. Sometimes I feel like I'm losing the battle, but I have a friend who says, you know you're in one. You may not feel very successful right now, but you know you're in one. So you can remind her, you have not succumbed to this totally. You are fighting. And she's aware of the pull of sin in the midst of her suffering. So look for things that are supernatural and then praise God for what you see to them. You cannot encourage too much. The woman who disciples me at Mount Vernon is unfailingly encouraging. I'm sure she has off days, but I haven't seen it yet. She never doubts that God is at work in my life and will complete what he started. She has a big biblical view of God and she's full of faith that He will change me and help me. She does not try to solve all of my problems. And I would encourage you if you are in the discipleship for the long haul, if your focus is on problem solving, it will be tempting to lose energy and heart very quickly. So she doesn't do that. She points me to Christ and then we look at God's word. I can do that every day even if I can't solve all your problems and that gives me hope that I've got something to offer you and share with you. So she reminds me of who God is, that he is trustworthy and good and powerful and she reminds me that he's working and that I am coming to know him better through my trials. So, again, your job is not to fix the problem that the woman who's your discipling is experiencing. Our job is to listen, respond with compassion, and give our hurting friend hope that God is with him in the trial and that he can be absolutely trusted. Okay, we are really in the homestretch right now. This is the third thing that you need to do. As you minister to the hurting heart, you are ready to listen, you're ready to give hope, and finally be ready to pray. Pray has kind of been part of each one of our talks because it's so crucial. Be ready to pray with your friend and for her. And again, we can remember what Paul talked about in 2 Corinthians 1. He said, We help others when we pray, we bring God glory when we pray, and we grow in humility when we pray. This step really naturally follows hope. If we hope in God, if we have confidence that God hears us and loves us, and that he's constantly at work for our good and for his precious purposes, we want to pray. And I want to tell you about an experience I had where prayer was really the key feature of my counseling. This was the second year of summer classes for graduate school, and I received a phone call from an acquaintance of ours. I didn't know her very well, and I really didn't know where she stood with the Lord. I don't think at all. She was a single mom, and she had older teenage kids, and she had been alone for several years. She was hesitant about relationships with guys because she had suffered a lot of abuse in her past. But she was dating a guy that she was really serious about and it was one of the few men that she saw kind of a future with when she called. She had just found out that this boyfriend had been killed in a car accident and she was devastated. She told me the details and how she found out and what she was struggling with and how she was going to try to cope and I listened and I cried with her and I asked if I could pray with her. She was very happy to have me do that and we prayed and I kind of didn't know if I'd hear from her again but she called me the very next day and she told me that she was pregnant. I was fairly stunned. We prayed together again, we cried together. She was feeling so alone. She was really kind of beyond herself at this point. Her whole life was going to change and she was pregnant with a man's baby that would never be a part of their life. She called me the next day and I was a bit shell shocked, but what she told me next really floored me. She said that she had found out that the man that she was dating was married to another woman and they had children together and a settled life. No one knew about their relationship. She couldn't go to the funeral. She was grieving utterly alone, and she didn't want to talk about it with any of her friends because she was so ashamed that this man she had been dating, she didn't really know him. We cried and prayed again together. When we talked the next day, she said something I'll never forget. She said, I just can't get any peace with any of this. I just can't get any peace. And up until that point, my counsel to her was mainly through my prayers. She was eager for me to pray, and I poured out my heart to the Lord for her with her on the phone. We prayed Psalms together. I would just read Psalms and pray them back to the Lord. We talked about God's promises to his children. And I wasn't making a lot of really deep connections, like, I'm not sure you're his children, but I would say this is God's promises to those who are his children. But at that moment, I had to tell her where real peace comes from. I gently told her that she would not have any peace or make any sense of her suffering until she had peace with God. We pray with and for others who are suffering, even with unbelievers, because we want them to know that God is real, that God is gracious and merciful, and that God has all power. I wanted my friend to realize that her biggest problem was not her suffering. even though it was horrible. Her biggest problem was her sin. The one true God, the creator of everything, is a just judge, and God designed my friend and all of us to worship Him and to love Him with our whole being. But we have rejected His authority and His instruction. We despise him and create our own little kingdoms with ourselves on the throne. So suffering burns up the illusion that we are in control and that we're powerful. Suffering shows us what sin does. Sin destroys. and suffering forces us to taste the bitterness of sin. By God's grace, suffering can bring us to the point of seeing our most desperate need. Our most desperate need is to be reconciled with our holy creator God. We need a savior who bears our sin and lays down his perfect life as a sacrifice for his people. My friend was right. She couldn't get any peace with her suffering until she had peace with God. And that peace only comes through Jesus Christ, His perfect life, His sin-bearing death, and His triumphant resurrection. It is because of Jesus that we can have peace with God. So suffering can't make sense to unbelievers. Their thinking is distorted by sin, and there's no hope. They have no hope of trusting a sovereign God in the midst of their pain. But believers have an utterly different perspective on suffering. It's transformative. That's something that no other world religion and that no one else who is an unbeliever can ever claim. They can never say, my suffering is transforming me. Christians can. It changes us. It has purpose. When we ask why, why must I suffer like this? God says, you can trust me. You must trust me. And when we cry out to him in prayer, we are expressing that trust. So John Calvin says that prayer is the chief exercise of faith. Prayer is the primary way that true faith expresses itself. You are turning away from yourself and your own resources to God and His resources. We are not sufficient to think of anything as coming from ourselves. We know that our sufficiency is from God, and so we pray. We beg for help and grace and forgiveness and wisdom. One of the significant features of suffering is our need for wisdom. So we're praying, we see all this suffering, and we know we need desperate wisdom. And prayer is the way we ask God for that wisdom. Pastor James, the half-brother of Jesus, talks about prayer in trials in James 1, so turn with me there. And I'm going to read verses 2 through 4, James chapter 1. Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds. For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. Isn't that a wonderful promise? God is so generous. Every good gift comes from Him and He commands us to ask for the very thing we most need in a trial. Maybe not the most thing. We do need a lot of wisdom. We need other things too. These verses remind us that God uses trials to produce steadfast faith in us. So that's the transformative part. That's another purpose of God's. We haven't talked about it a lot this weekend, but suffering is transformative. It's producing something in us. It's producing steadfast faith and endurance. And it's also highlighting that one of our key needs in trials is wisdom. God invites us to ask him and reminds us that he is generous to give what we need and he doesn't reproach us. But I need to keep reading because I have counseled with many women that didn't get any comfort from this passage because of the next few verses. Look at verses six through eight. But let him ask in faith with no doubting. For the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord. He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. Have you ever felt like a double-minded woman? Unstable in all your ways? I know I have. And our double-mindedness seems to jerk this promise right out of our hands when we need it the most. James says we are to ask in faith. We are to pray, dwelling on the riches of God's character and faithfulness. Even before I ask God for the wisdom that I know I need, I like to remind myself of who God is before I start making any request. I want to fill my mind with truth about God's character and nature so that when I begin to pray, I am totally confident that God will give me the wisdom I need. It's settled. He will give it. I don't know when or how, but it will come. So I think about verses like Job 42 too. Job is saying to God, I know that you can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. I think about Psalm 147, verse five, great is our Lord and abundant in power. His understanding is beyond measure. I think about Isaiah 54 10, for the mountains may depart and the hills be removed but my steadfast love shall not depart from you and my covenant of peace shall not be removed says the Lord who has compassion on you. I also want to point out, so I want to fill my mind with truth about God's nature and character so that my faith just swells and I ask God for wisdom and I'm not like a double-minded man at that moment. Praise the Lord, I know that's His work because I'm dwelling on truth. But I also want to point out a connection later in the book in James. James 1.8 talks about this man who's double-minded. If you turn over to James 4.4, James is calling out people who have one foot in the world and one foot in the church. He calls them adulterous people. You can't have your mind divided by love of the world and love of God. God is jealous over us, which is the point of verse 5. Then comes verse 6. So I'll read verse four. Okay, here's verse six. Therefore it says, God opposes the proud, but he gives grace to the humble. Submit yourselves, therefore, to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Same word. you can repent of being double-minded and then go right back to asking God for the wisdom that you need. Isn't that marvelous? God never leaves us to deal with our sin or our trials alone. We can repent of being double-minded and pray for the faith we need as we dwell on his promises and then ask and believe that God will give us the wisdom that we need. Jerry Bridges puts it this way, we keep ourselves from sinning against God by not allowing distrustful and hard thoughts about him to sway our minds. We say, God, I don't understand, but I trust you. So when we pray, we are confessing our neediness to the Lord and proclaiming our trust in His care and help. And when you make this confession in front of the person that you're discipling, you are reminding them of where their true source of comfort and hope is. Our pastor says that prayer is spiritual humility. When you say to the woman that you are helping, I don't know what to tell you right now. Let's pray and ask God for wisdom. You are modeling humility and trust in the Lord. You are showing that he is the one with the grace and the help and the power. And you are not distracted by your own weaknesses or the feeling that you aren't doing it right. You simply are asking God to intervene and he will. All right, so we've talked about how to help someone who is hurting. We listen deeply, we give biblical hope, and we pray with them and for them. It's crucial to know that God's sovereignty is the container that all this takes place in. Charles Spurgeon said, the sovereignty of God is the pillow upon which the child of God rests his head at night, giving perfect peace. I pray that you have perfect peace as you trust our God of all comfort to sovereignly overrule all your efforts for His purposes. He brings suffering in our lives to make us rely on Him, and then He makes us sufficient to bring the hope of the new covenant to others, and He gives us clear ways to start helping when others are struggling by listening, giving hope, and praying. You can engage in this very messy process of discipleship because God is guiding all things for His glory. Let me pray for us. Father, we want to say with Paul that we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. If we hope in that, we will never be disappointed. Lord, give us the spiritual wisdom and vision that we need to see your glory as bigger and better than anything else in our lives. Lord, I'm praying for a miracle when I pray that for these women. I know that there is intense suffering for each of them in some way and that it takes a work of your Holy Spirit to help us cherish your purposes, to cherish the manifestation of your character more than our own comfort or relief from our suffering. I pray that you would equip us, continue to help us to grow in skill and wisdom from your word so that we would listen and give hope and pray with others and that we would know how to bring the truths of your word to bear on the lives of the women we serve. We know that we serve in the strength that you supply, so help us to rely and lean more and more deeply. putting our full weight onto you as we seek to obey you in all things. Thank you so much for these precious women. Thank you for their kindness to me, their attentiveness. Thank you for their passion for you, the way that they are already doing so many of the things that we've talked about. I pray that you would continue to give them endurance and energy and joy as they obey you. I pray all these things in Jesus name. Amen. We've got discussion groups.