You're listening to Mountain View Church Audio, Christ-centered teaching from the Wilderness City, Whitehorse, UConn. Here's this week's message. And I will be reading our passage of scripture today. If you want to turn, we're going to read Job chapter 9, verses 13 through 24. We'll read that together, and then we'll study it. Then we'll see, okay, what can we learn from this passage? So this is Job speaking, and he starts by saying this. God will not turn back his anger. Beneath him bowed the helpers of Rahab. How then can I answer him, choosing my words with him? Though I am in the right, I cannot answer him. I must appeal for mercy to my accuser.
If I summoned him and he answered me, I would not believe that he was listening to my voice. For he crushes me with a tempest and multiplies my wounds without cause. He will not let me get my breath, but fills me with bitterness. If it is a contest of strength, behold, he is mighty. If it is a matter of justice, who can summon him? Though I am in the right, my own mouth would condemn me. Though I am blameless, he would prove me perverse. I am blameless. I regard not myself. I loathe my life. It is all one. Therefore, I say, he destroys both the blameless and the wicked. When disaster brings sudden death, he mocks at the calamity of the innocent.
The earth is given into the hand of the wicked. He covers the faces of its judges. If it is not he, who then is it? Over the last few weeks, we have heard a lot about Job. In our first week, we studied how the Bible presented him. We saw that he was an upright man who was blameless, who feared God, turned away from evil, and we unpacked, okay, who is this guy? We got a good idea of who he is. Last week, we looked at what one of his three friends had to say about him. And Job is in a bad situation. His friends come to counsel him. And we learn about their perspective about Job. But so far, we haven't heard from Job himself, and that's what we're doing today.
Job is in a bad place. Quick refresher, he's lost everything. His 10 children have died in a terrible accident. He's lost his wealth, and he's also lost his health, and he's trying to make sense of what's happening to him. And he's followed God his whole life, and he just doesn't have the answers.
And he's in a bad place. And so his friends show up and they answer the question of why is Job suffering with a very extreme answer. His three friends show up and they all agree that secretly Job is an evil man. And their whole point, the three agree, that Job is suffering because you reap what you sow. They all agree that if you're having trouble in this life, God is punishing you for something. And therefore, because Job is suffering, the only conclusion that anyone could realistically draw is that secretly Job is evil and he's been sinning against God. We took a deep dive into that and we found out that was the wrong answer. Those friends were incorrect.
And so Job, Job provides another extreme answer, but his extreme answer is on the opposite end of the spectrum. Job's extreme answer can be summed up in this sentence. God is to blame for my pain. It's a powerful statement, but as Job is working through the pain that he's feeling and dealing with the anguish and grief of loss, the answer he comes to is that God is to blame. And we might look at that and be detached from it and go like, wow, that's a pretty extreme thing for Job to say. But we can't forget the kind of pain that he's in. Job is in more pain than many of us can even realize. Job's lost not one or two, but ten children.
For anyone who's lost anyone, you can only picture what that would be like, finding out that they're all gone in a moment. And not only that, he doesn't have the comfort of his wealth to fall back on. And not only that, but he's sick, so he can't even run away from the physical pain that's being dumped on him. Job is in the worst shape that a person can be. And out of that, he looks around for answers, and the conclusion he comes to is that God is to blame for my pain. And before we judge him too harshly, I would ask that we all just try to put ourselves in his shoes and say, would we do a much better job of dealing with our pain than Job? And I'm not sure we would. And last week, I was really hard on the friends. I came down pretty hard on them because God comes down very hard on the friends.
They're wrong. And their wrong answers not only totally obscure who God is, but their wrong answers also hurt their friend. So in the end, God comes and rebukes them. And I was hard on the friends trying to echo that. But we have to acknowledge that part of the reason the friends were so cruel was because they had lost their patience with this guy. We unpacked chapter 22. Job has already said a lot of stuff by the time chapter 22 comes. This passage we're looking at today is in chapter 9. So at the point that Eliphaz speaks and is like, Job, you're evil. Job has already said all sorts of stuff about God and about his own situation. And the friends have had it with him. They're like, no, you are not as good as you think you are.
And it might, again, be easy to detach ourselves from the situation and say, wow, those friends were terrible, but I'd also ask us to do some self-reflection and consider whether or not we would still be patient with our friend if our friend was saying the same things about God that Job says. And Job follows the same pattern. What we're going to unpack today, Job's argument, his point, follows the same pattern as his friends. Job's going to start by challenging what his friends have to say. He's going to then move on to throw some accusations out there. And lastly, he's going to pronounce judgment based on his challenge and his accusations that he's thrown out. And so we'll start with the challenge that he presents to his friends, because it's important to note here, he's not challenging God. He's challenging his friends and their opinion. They've come, and Eliphaz starts by not so sneakily saying, well, Job,
when do the innocent really suffer? He starts very manipulatively and tries to convince Job that maybe Job needs to look a little bit deeper to find the source of his pain. And Job knows what they're doing. And so he knows what their perspective is, and he's challenging that perspective. He says, okay, it's easy for you guys to say that, but from where I'm standing, it's not as clear as what you want to believe. And so he now presents his own challenge to his friends. And we'll look at that starting at verse 13 through 15. He says, God will not turn back his anger.
Beneath him vowed the helpers of Rahab. How then can I answer him, choosing my words with him? Though I am in the right, I cannot answer him. I must appeal for mercy to my accuser. That's his big challenge. Okay, so he's making two major assumptions. Just like Eliphaz did when he was speaking, Job's making assumptions in the challenge that he presents. And the two assumptions are pretty clear. First of all, all of this is happening. And the situation that I'm faced with is only occurring because God is angry. That's his primary belief about a situation. God is angry. And he follows that up with another assumption. I am in the right. I'm innocent.
And these two things work together to create a kind of logical train of thought for Job. He says, I know that I've done nothing to deserve punishment. Again, that's what the friend said. You're being punished. He says, no, I'm not. I know I've done nothing to deserve punishment. Therefore, if I've done nothing wrong, this is not punishment. God wouldn't do that. The only other conclusion is that God is angry.
The only conclusion left is that God is angry. And that's why he goes forward into verse 15. He says, though I'm in the right, I cannot answer him. I must appeal for mercy to my accuser. He's painting, he's not saying what he means here, but he's painting God as being capricious, as being cruel. Maybe God's having a bad day. And Job has just found himself on the wrong side of that. And the best he can hope for is that God will just stop. Like maybe if I cry uncle, it'll all end and I can have my life that. Maybe God will be merciful with me because I haven't done anything to deserve this.
So what is he implying here? I think it's pretty clear. If we read in between the lines, he says God is angry, I am innocent, and we can fill in the blank. He's already setting the stage to blame God for all of the situation that he's in and put God in the wrong, which is incredible, but it's what he's doing, and he doesn't stop there. We go to verse 16, and he says this. He says, if I summoned him and he answered me, I would not believe that he was listening to my voice, for he crushes me with a tempest and multiplies my wounds without cause. He will not let me get my breath, but fills me with bitterness.
The big accusation in here is that God's not listening and God doesn't care about me. He's already concluded. You can tell from the way he presents the challenge. He's already concluded that everything is God's fault anyway. And so building off of that challenge is now the accusation. Look, I can't understand how a God who is making me feel all these things would ever listen to me. I've lost everything. I'm in this situation. The very creator of the universe who's placed me here and is doing this to me is definitely not listening to me. He believes that his prayers could never be heard.
Even if he could be certain that he could summon God and that God would be present because he's not even sure if God is there, but even if he was absolutely certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that God was there and he was crying out to God, God, help me. Stop. Stop all of this stuff because I can't handle it anymore. His accusation is that God doesn't care and he's not listening. And what's his proof? Because that's a big accusation to throw at God. That's a big accusation. What's his proof? Well, he explains. The thought process continues on. He says God is not listening. And then in the next verse, for he crushes me with a tempest and multiplies my wounds without cause.
Ironically, Job's proof of his accusation that God's not listening is another accusation. Because again, no one's told him this is all God's fault. He has figured that out on his own, or he's made that assumption. And so his proof that God's not listening, well, God's the one who's hurting me. And it's not just that God's accidentally hurt me, like when you step on somebody's toe. No, he multiplies my wounds without cause. He's doing this. He's hurting me for no reason. What a powerful thing to say.
What an incredible thing to say is you're wrestling through your pain and maybe you've been there Maybe you've looked at your situation and acknowledged that God's sovereign over everything and if I'm going through this Who else am I supposed to look at who else am I supposed to blame this on if it's not the God who's in charge of the whole universe We can we can judge it harshly, but at the end of the day. It's not that hard to see how Joe got there And this idea, right, that God's not listening, he doesn't care about me, he's hurting me for no reason, this attitude upsets Job's friends in a big way, right? Again, they're motivated by love. Again, they believe they're doing the right thing. Their theology is bad. And they're trying to get Job to see, no, no, no, Job, there's nothing wrong with God, Job. It's you. It can't be God because God is perfect. So it's you. This is all your fault. And so you've got Job on one extreme saying, I'm innocent. I'm perfect. I've never done anything wrong. And then you've got the friends on the other side of the spectrum going way too far on their side saying that, no, you definitely are evil. And you've got these two flawed theologies colliding.
And nobody's got the right answer, but they just keep doubling down on what they believe and getting more and more emotionally invested into the argument until it all breaks down. And they can't even speak to each other properly anymore. You reap what you sow versus God is wounding me without cause. Two terrible ideas. And then finally, with these accusations in hand, Job does what is practically unthinkable for anybody who's a devoted follower of Jesus or a devoted follower of God. He takes his accusations and he goes straight to God with them and he condemns God.
And I know that's a powerful statement to make. It's even hard to say that. I'm explaining what someone else has done, and it still makes me uncomfortable, but that's what Job is doing here. He is condemning God for the perceived slights against himself. Verses 23 and 24, he says this. When disaster brings sudden death, he, he being God, God mocks at the calamity of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked. He covers the faces of its judges. If it is not he, who then is it? You don't need somebody like me who's studying the Bible and trying to teach it to tell you what that means. It's pretty clear. It's very clear what Job is saying here.
It's a pretty dark moment. To put it in other words, he's saying that when you suffer, when you get that phone call that changes your life and then you can never go back from what the person said, God's in heaven laughing at you. And he thinks it's funny. And he finds amusement. That is an incredibly terrible thing to say about God. And yet pain is driven to over here.
And he doesn't stop there. It's not like, oh, God finds amusement. He mocks at the suffering and the death of the innocent. He goes further. He says, beyond that, look, okay, the earth is given into the hands of the wicked. He covers the faces of his judges. So he's acknowledging that there's structures of justice in the world that we should rely on and depend on for a safe place to live. And he's saying that God is interfering with all of that. If God would just get out of the way and leave our world alone, we'd run it properly. Because if it's not him, if it's not he, who then is it? If it's not God who's interfering with the proper way that life should play out, who else am I supposed to blame? What do we make of Job?
What do we think about this guy? Maybe it's time for us to condemn him and write him off. To say, you know, like, he blew it. You can't say those things or think those things about God. You cannot. You're done, Job. His main flaw, his big mistake in all of this is he thought, from where he sat, with his limited perspective, he could use his senses and his logic to understand everything that was happening. And he leveraged everything he had to make sense of his situation. But he was wrong in believing that he had enough information to actually come up with the right answer. From where he sat,
he could see no other explanation. And in a very honest and sincere way, he shares that with his friends. And if it was you standing before your friend and your friend saying things about the God that you love and follow, like this, what would you say? Would you be the super patient Christian who doesn't get anything wrong? Would you be the perfect person? Or maybe you would get frustrated like Job's friends and you'd say things that you don't mean and that you shouldn't say. Maybe that would be you. But rather than asking the question of what would you do or what do we make of Job or what do we think about all this, the real question we need to ask is what does God do with Job?
Like, what's God's response to all this? Because he's the one in the crossfire. He's the king of the universe. He's the one who created all things and subjected all things under himself. So he's the one who's most invested in this. It's actually not for us to speculate, but rather it's for us to just say, okay, God, so all this has been thrown at you. What's your move? What do you do?
But before we get there, I just want to address something, because people have a lot of ideas about the book of Job, and one of the things that I've experienced is that people really want to downplay the severity of what Job says here and what Job thinks here. There's this idea, because at the start of the book of Job, there's this, you know, he loses everything, and then there's a phrase in there that said, and in all this, Job did not curse God with his lips or sin. But that draws a line in the sand. See, people think that applies to the entirety of Job's life. It doesn't. Job loses everything. Everything falls apart. And we're going to cover kind of why that happened next week in detail. Everything falls apart. And in the worst of the worst, when he ends up in a pile of ashes, scraping pus out of his wounds with broken pottery, in all of that, Job did not curse God or sin with his lips. That's true. But I hate to spoil next week's sermon, but the end result of God's response is that Job repents.
Job repents of what he's done. Job is clearly sinning against God here. We can't minimize that. As much as we want to and as much as we want to make Job this almost Jesus figure and say, oh, there is a perfect way to deal with suffering. That's not the point. Because Job's way of suffering was not perfect. In fact, Job's process through suffering was imperfect and entirely understandable and almost to be expected.
Because Job's Suffering is not a polished Netflix series that you can tune into and tune out of when you want. It's not this well-produced story about a guy who had it all and then lost it and then gets it all back and everything's pretty nice. It's ugly. It's raw. It's real. And suffering and pain is really ugly. And if you've ever been through it, you know what that's like. You just don't want anybody to look at it. And when we look at Job sitting there sick, not only would he be a sight to behold, but he was violently ill. His body was rotting. The whole situation would take your breath away with the horror of it all. And this is Job's situation. So for us to go,
Oh, well, no, we can't have Job make a mistake in all of this. Are you kidding? Of course he blew it. Because if we minimize what Job was going through and what Job did, then we completely miss out on the beauty of God's response. By minimizing the behavior of Job, we minimize God's response, and we actually lose a lot of the message. Some of you might even still be challenged by the idea that Job really did condemn God. You're not really ready to accept that that's what Job did, but God responds to Job at the end of the book. And we're going to just take one little phrase out of there. We're going to let it kind of sit on us, and we'll see that actually, in fact,
Even if we have a hard time accepting that Job condemned God, God sees it that way. So we go to chapter 40, verse 8. And among many other things that God has to say to Job, he says this. Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be in the right? So God's under no illusion that Job has done anything but condemn him. And what he's really saying here, what God is really saying here is something pretty profound. He's saying to Job, look, is the conclusion you've come to the only answer?
on earth or in heaven, is it the only answer for the reason that you're suffering? Your conclusion, it's the only way to explain this, Job? Is my cruelty the only answer to your pain, Job? Or could it be that maybe there's a third option? Is my cruelty the only answer to your suffering? Of course not. There is a third answer. And Job failed. In the midst of his pain and suffering and everything falling apart in his life, Job failed to answer the question, why is this happening to me properly? He came up with a bad answer.
And we could end there. We could actually end the sermon there, and you could go home and just say, like, oh, okay, so when I go through hard times in my life, I don't get to say, you know, this is all God's fault. God's being mean to me. We could end there, and maybe you would have even learned something. But that's not really today's lesson. The fact that Job was wrong to say these things is not today's lesson. Today's lesson is far more powerful than that. Today's lesson is that God did not abandon Job. God didn't abandon him.
We might have abandoned Job. We might have been, if we were in real time watching all this, we might have been astounded to find out that God would actually speak to Job after he did this. Whatever our perspective about God and Job is, we might have looked at this and said, okay, once you start going in this direction, Job, you're done. You don't get to talk about the God of the universe that way. He'll punish you. He's done with you. You're not worthy to say things like that about God. But God doesn't abandon Job. And there's something really incredible about that because what Job did was wrong.
Job repents because he has to turn from the great sin with which he sinned against God, which is saying all these horrible things about him, questioning his goodness, questioning his justice, questioning the way that he rules the universe he created, which we as human beings, as created creatures, we don't get to do that. Yet Job does it. Job makes all these mistakes, but God understands us. God understands human beings very well, and he's not surprised or shocked by our less than perfect capacity to deal with suffering. It's actually pretty normal when your life is falling apart to do things that you regret. It's pretty normal when you're filled with pain and grief to say things and do things that you probably shouldn't do.
Pain drives us in places that we shouldn't be going. And we go there. And then after, when the pain subsides and we're able to figure out our life and make sense of it again, we look back at that moment and we go, how could I have ever said that? Why did I do that? Why did I treat this person that way? And God understands something that, I mean, most of us have already figured out by now, if you've been alive for any real amount of time. Pain causes us to do some weird things, but one of the things pain seems to always do when it's bad enough is cause us to lash out at the people that we love. Pain drives it. When we are so full of pain and there's nowhere else for it to go, it spills out onto the people that are right beside us.
And Job loved God. He had loved him his whole life. Everything Job understood about the world was filtered through the lens of his faith. The blessings he had received, his family, his hope, his health, everything was filtered through the lens of his faith in God. And in a moment, everything fell apart. So it's not really hard to see how he would let that pain spill out over the person he was closest to. Because at this point, Job had actually run out of people to love.
So he lost his 10 children. We're going to let that marinate for a minute in our minds. What is that like? He held them all the day they were born. He named them. He watched them grow. He watched them take their first steps. He watched them say their first words. And then one day he woke up and he realized, I'll never be able to talk to them again. They're gone forever. And whatever love you have for your family, you can understand what he's going through. And the connection he has to those people is now gone. He doesn't get to love those people face to face anymore. He just gets to love their memory.
But not only that, he also has to deal with the way that his wife treats him. And we didn't get to talk about her very much because we really do have limited time. This is a big book. But the last thing that she says to Job before she leaves is excruciatingly painful. And it perfectly exemplifies this point that when we're filled with pain, we hurt the people closest to us. The last thing Job's wife says to him, chapter 2, verse 9.
Then his wife said to him, do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die. So that's her response. Filled with her own pain, it spills out over the one that she's closest to. Curse God and die. And then she leaves. And we don't know. Maybe she sat on the sidelines while Job was talking with his friends. Maybe she went home to her family. We have no idea. So Job's lost his kids.
He's lost his wife, at least for the time being. She's emotionally distant from him. And then his three friends show up, and their great solution to his pain is to blame him for it all. Say, you did this. If you don't like it, you should have pulled up when you had a chance. So look around in Job's life. Just survey the landscape. Who's left to love, if not God? Who's around for Job to commune with? Who's really listening to him anymore? And then in his pain, he says, I don't think God's even listening to me. I am truly alone. There's no one left. Job was alone, very alone. He turned his pain on God, and he blamed him. And God took all of it, all the accusations.
He took all the course words and he watched this conversation play out. And in the end, God's move was to not turn his back on Job and leave him in his misery, but to speak to him, to show up in his life. God did not turn his back on Job. And ironically, Job says, if I could summon him, if I knew he was there, I wouldn't believe he was listening to me. And in this whole litany, God eventually reveals he never left. He was there the whole time. He was listening to every word Job spoke and every thought that went through his head, God was aware of. God had never in any moment of Job's life truly abandoned him.
And Job's in his situation. And it's bad. And he's looking. And maybe some of you have been through this. I've been through this as a young Christian with not a firm faith, trying to make sense of the world. And I lost something that was really special to me. And I know what it's like to be Job. I trusted you. And I believe that you had my good in mind. And you took everything from me. And all the dreams that I had are now gone. And the picture of my life moving forward, you've completely destroyed it. And I have nothing left. I have nothing left. You've taken it all from me. And it was in that moment that Job learned.
And I learned, and I hope it doesn't come to it for you, but it was in that moment when Job had nothing left but God, he realized that God was all he needed. And I don't know what that looks like in your life, and I hope it doesn't come to that place. I hope you can just take my word for it, that a life of faith is not measured by a moment of failure. A life of faith is measured by the object of your faith. We don't follow a God who turns his back on people who behave like people. And when people hurt, and when people fail, and when people suffer, and they don't know what to do with it, God is not up in heaven turning his back on people, waiting until they figure it out until he'll show up again.
I would never follow that God. I couldn't. And he would have let me go a long time ago. But he didn't leave Job in his misery. He doesn't leave us in our misery. The other thing that we have to consider, too, is like, Job has so much less information than we do. Like, when we're having a hard time, we can open the Bible. We can read through what God has done. We have the Old and New Testaments. We have the Gospel accounts. We have the eyewitness accounts of the Son of God coming into the world and dying to reconcile us back to God. We have all of that. And what does Job have?
In Job's day and age, the atonement hadn't happened. Jesus hadn't laid his life down for people yet. In Job's day and age, there's no gospel narratives. And even the idea that God would become flesh, that God would send his own son into the world to save it and to redeem it, that idea was so alien to everyone. It's one of the large reasons why the Jews eventually rejected Jesus, because they couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that God would become a man, and that he would come, and he wouldn't just come and teach us stuff, but he'd die for us. That idea was so foreign to everybody in Job's time, including Job.
And so even us trying to put ourselves in Job's shoes, we can't figure out the perspective he had in a genuine way. But I guess I want to leave you with this. How much more proof of God's love do we have than Job did? We have access to stuff that would have changed Job's life if he could have just sat down and read. If he had a church that he could go to. If he had followers of Jesus to sit with him.
And in all the pain that he had, ultimately what Job was looking for was proof of God's love. Like, at the heart of it, that's what Job really wanted. Does God really love me? Does God really care about me? Because I sure care about God. And I love him. And I followed him. And I've done all the things that I'm supposed to do. And I'm not sure if it got me anything. Because in this moment, I don't think God loves me at all. And Job was looking for proof. And I ask you, how much more proof of his love, of God's love, do we have than Job?
We actually have places to look, and I'll leave you with three places, places that we always need to be reminded because maybe you're going through a season of life where feeling and really grasping God's love is just so foreign to you. And it's hard to figure out how you could be going through what you're going through and still be under the care of a God who loves you. Job looked around, and he didn't have much to look at. He had his friends who were sneering at him angrily. He was watching his wife walk away. He was watching the whole life he had built up burned to the ground. Where he looked, he didn't have much evidence of God's love in his life. But if you want proof that God cares about you and loves you and will never abandon you, there are three places that you can look.
First of all, you look at the cross. We preach the cross over and over and over again because the cross is where the Son of God died so that we could be reconciled back to God. Jesus gave his life. He really, really, really, really did love you to do that because our sin separates us from God. There's no way we can fix this problem of sin on our own. And it took the most valuable resource in the universe to fix this problem, the blood of Jesus to fix the problem. And so if you're questioning God's love for you, he had no more precious thing he could part with than his own son.
We have no reason to question God's love. Even though we have moments of suffering in our life, we have no reason to question God's love for us because God's love drove Jesus to the cross. He didn't go to the cross out of guilt and obligation because he felt like he had to because he was scared of what his dad might say if he didn't. He loved us. So the first place you always look when you're questioning God's love is you just look to the cross. Christianity is the only religion, the only worldview that says God loved you enough to sacrifice for you. But you don't stop there because a dead God means almost nothing to our faith. Once we're done looking at the cross, we look to the empty tomb.
Right where the very power the present power in this world that's breaking your heart and causing you pain sin was destroyed forever When Jesus rose from the grave he beat sin He beat death and that issue is the sole issue of all of your pain and suffering and Jesus conquered it So we can preach a gospel that is unconditionally hopeful It's not like we're hoping for the best and who knows what's gonna happen. The gospel is unconditionally hopeful The victory has already occurred when Jesus came to life and exited that tomb It means the story is over and we're just in the last stages of watching it play out So you look to the cross you look to the empty tomb Because that's proof. That's real proof. And then the last place you look is you look to heaven, where Jesus has ascended, and he was witnessed by many people doing this, where he ascended to heaven to prepare a place for you. Because it's not, even though God's forgiveness of us is already far more than we can ever imagine receiving, he prepares a beautiful place for us that we can dwell with him for eternity. You've got the cross, you've got the empty tomb, and you've got our Father's kingdom in heaven, where you don't just get to stay a while and sit on the couch, but you actually get a room and that becomes your home.
So those are three directions that Job just couldn't seem to fixate on, for obvious reasons that we do. And now we're at a place, we're on our third week of studying the series, trying to get to the heart of the question, why is Job suffering? I guess I blew it again, because I still didn't answer the question. Why is Job suffering? And maybe you're here because you really want an answer to that question. Because that question, it's like, maybe if that question's answered, everything in life will fall into place and everything will be okay. But what I hope, in the preaching that we're doing, in our study of this book, I hope that the answer to that question is becoming less important than who is God, the question of who is God.
Because there's a lot of different reasons for suffering, and we don't end up getting a lot of certainty about them. But we do actually get to be entirely certain about who God is, despite our circumstances. And Job found that out. When everything had fallen apart, and God doesn't turn his back on him, but rather reveals himself to him. And don't get me wrong, God had a lot of really intense things to say to Job. It wasn't all sunshine and roses for Job. But God didn't abandon him. And Job found out how much more profound and helpful the question of who his God is than why am I suffering? Because why am I suffering?
It might not be the question that actually matters. The answer to that might not be the thing that gets you through your pain. But the answer to the question of who is God while I'm in pain, that's actually it. That answer, which will never change, is an answer that can give you hope and a reason to face the day tomorrow. Next week we're going to talk about Job's response to all this. And we'll see that for Job, God's response to him, though it was really harsh, changed everything. Changed his outlook on life. And it didn't erase all the pain that he felt.
but it changed how he experienced his suffering. And he realized that sometimes it's not God's plan that he's going to deliver us from suffering, but that he'll deliver us through it, and that through God and through his love for us and through what he says to us, we can actually get through things that would otherwise be absolutely impossible if we were to try to face them on our own. And with that, we're going to pray. Heavenly Father, I want to thank you, God, that you are here, that you love us, that you're present, that you're active, that you don't give up on the world, even though we all in our own way reject you, we question you. Sometimes we would never have the courage to do it with our mouths, so we do it with our hearts. And I'm thankful, God, that...
You measure our faith not by our performance but by the perfection of your son. That through placing our faith in your son Jesus, when you look at us, you see him. You see his perfection and it covers us. And we don't stop being who we are. You don't erase us to save us. But you save us and then you perfect us. And we're in the growing pains of all that and all of us are really messy and we're having, in a lot of cases, a hard time growing into the people that you want us to be. But we trust that you won't leave us, you won't forsake us. And for those of us in the room, for those that are just really going through some stuff right now, I pray that this one truth would just saturate their soul that you haven't abandoned them. And I pray that that would give them hope.
And I pray that we would be a people who live our daily lives out of that hope. So that as we interact with people who have all sorts of questions about why the world is such a bad place, we would have good answers for them. That we wouldn't have to pretend the world is perfect to share the gospel, but rather show how the gospel fixes the broken world that we're in. I pray that if there's anyone in this room who's got questions about you, God, they'd be quick to ask them whether they're going to ask Christians that they know or they're just going to come to you in prayer. I pray that they wouldn't be afraid to ask you questions. God, you'd supply answers through people and through your word and just through the experience of life.
God, please bless our church. We also ask a special blessing on our board leadership who are out working through a bunch of stuff for the good of our church that's difficult but helpful. We just ask a special blessing on them, that Holy Spirit, you would guide them and help them make really good decisions for our next year as a church today. And we pray all of this in Jesus' name. And I want to thank you so much for being here. Again, if you're new, please let us know how we did. And also, yeah, give us, if you're comfortable and you'd like to, you can give us your information and we'll reach out to you. We don't want our church to just be a place where you hear a guy say some stuff and then you go home, but rather a community, a family that you get to step into and connect with. And so, yeah, please do not hesitate to do that. And also, we don't want you to just flood out the doors. Like, the next service doesn't start until 11. We've got, it looks like, 40 minutes. We went a little bit short today. So there's coffee at the back. Help yourself to coffee, grab a tea. And we have some discussion questions and a prayer focus. So if you break off into some little groups, there's just some stuff for you guys to talk about.
And maybe a really important thing, because we all need to be reminded, maybe an important thing that you can talk about right now is just, you know, as a question, where in your life can you look right now to see evidence of God's love? Because sometimes it's right there, we just don't see it, because we're looking at all the other stuff. It's important to remind ourselves, and it's important to share that with others. And then I would ask that you would pray, because I know I'm really hammering on it, but it's true. There are people in this church who are just hurting, that don't know how things are going to get better, and I ask that you would pray for them. Or people in your life, maybe they're not connected with our church, but you just know them well enough to know that they're having a hard go. I ask that you would pray for them, and just...
pray for their faith, pray that they would find hope to believe that God is really with them, because it's true. Again, thank you so much for being here. Next week, we're going to have communion, and we're going to close our study on Job, and hopefully, we'll come to a good conclusion about why this has happened to Job. Thanks so much, and have a good week.