Chasing the Son

Breaking Down, Building Up

Suggested Streaming: New Wine by Hillsong Worship

“Senseless” suffering – or what we perceive as senseless – is heartbreaking. The suffering we cannot reconcile, does not make sense, and from which there is no perceptible relief or end in sight. The timeless challenge, “why do bad things happen to good people?” reminds us of our ceaseless need to somehow justify suffering. But maybe it is not the cause that justifies the means, but the outcome. Maybe it is not a question of whether we deserve to suffer (because if we’re honest, the truth is we do), but a question of what change does our heart require? The process of changing, after all, is always hard. This morning’s song brings that truth to bear in a poetic metaphor of pressing – crushing – grapes in order to make new wine. So often the process of creating something wonderful is, itself, anything but.

As we approach our own suffering and the suffering we see all around us, perhaps the question is not what did we do to deserve this, but rather, how will God use this? The Bible is brimming with stories and parables of destructive, painful, heart-wrenching suffering that inspired real change – changes that were absolutely essential for those individuals (or in some cases, all of mankind) to thrive. In the Old Testament, we find accounts of people who fit our more comfortable interpretation of how suffering ought to be administered – through a system of justice that demands one to reap what he has sown. Certainly, the story of Noah and the flood is evidence of this, of the ways in which God was forced by humanity’s sinful nature to destroy the world in order to redeem it (Genesis 5:1 – 9:29). Another shining and familiar example is the suffering and exile of the Jews who repeatedly disobeyed their Lord until finally being made to wander in the wilderness, being denied entry to the Promised Land which would be given to their descendants (Numbers 14). These stories seem to pass the comfortable, if arbitrary, “fairness” test we subconsciously cling to, although it is the very same test we readily abandon in evaluating our own sinful natures.

Fortunately, we do not live in an Old Testament world in which a generation must be culled for its posterity to be redeemed. We live in the comfort, mercy, and undeserved grace of the New Covenant. With Jesus seated at the right hand of the Father, we know that the price for our sin has already been paid in full. Jesus promised that in this life we will experience trouble, suffering, and pain (John 16:33), but we can endure that pain knowing it is not redemptive, but restorative, not punitive, but purifying.

In John chapter 15, Jesus describes the pain we endure as being akin to the branches of a vine as it is pruned. Branches that bear no fruit must be cut away and discarded, but even the branches that do bear fruit require pruning. Even good vines need to be cut, their branches scarred, in order for the branches to thrive and abide more completely within the vine. This purifying grace is foretold by the prophet Malachi, who spoke of the Lord as the “refiner’s fire” – a fire that is kindled and carefully controlled to bring out the best and most precious beauty of gold and silver without consuming or tarnishing them (Malachi 3:2-3).

We have all endured suffering – from the kind that mildly frustrates our minds to the kind that irreparably shatters our hearts – but through it all, we can take comfort in knowing that we are like silver refined in the flames of pain and trials, like branches pruned by the sharp blades of loss and heartache, like grapes crushed into fine new wine. And trusting in the careful hand of the refiner, the gardener, the vintner, our Father, we know that what is built back up will be more perfect, more mature, and much stronger than what was broken down.

A Prayer

Heavenly Father, it comes easily and naturally for me to thank you in prosperity and comfort, but today, I thank you equally – or even more so – for the trials, challenges, and losses you have set before me. I thank you for the ways you have grown and rebuilt me, and for the ways in which you continue to refine my heart. Help me to see you at work in my pain and suffering, and the pain and suffering all around me; and even when I can’t see you clearly within those struggles, strengthen my faith to know that you are there and that you will use this for my good. Amen.