Hello friends, welcome to In Bolden. I'm Chris Shatter, an ordinary Christian living with and learning about an extraordinary God. We have a few roads from what's to choose when we go through our difficult seasons. We can beg the Lord to go back to familiar and comfortable.
We can rush our minds to the other side of the trial, either imagining an outcome far worse or far better than we hope or fear. Or we can learn a bit from Jesus' brethren, let this perseverance finish its work so we can be mature and complete. In other words, we can live in this God-given moment right now, seeking his blessings, seeking his voice, and seeking the lessons to be learned. During the last few months, I've taken a deep dive into the study of Elijah with my Bible study girls.
And as usual, God used all of my life to teach me about standing firm in my faith and stepping forward in trust. And as I prayed to God to reveal my next vlog series, I kept hearing the phrase, lessons from Kureth. You see, Elijah had to spend a lot of time alone, facing his own trials before he was ready for the big show. In that time, some of which was in the area called Kureth Ravine, he had to choose to either trust God's eternal plan for him or not.
And although my Kureth didn't last as long as Elijah's or even as long as Jesus was in the wilderness, I learned some valuable lessons while communing with the Holy Spirit. In these next few weeks, I'd like to share some of these with you. To hopefully realign our lives to be Christian lives, lived out for all the world to see. For our friends and neighbors and coworkers to be spurred to ask why we seem different.
Friends, we can't keep wandering through the wilderness of this earthly world, living up to its standards. It's time to take our hard-earned lessons from those seasons and put them to work for the glory of God. I hope you enjoy this. We start out today's lesson from Kureth with a verse from Luke 2438.
And he said to them, why are you troubled and why do doubts rise in your minds? During the time in my own land of Kureth, a place where I was separated from my home, my regular way of life, and exposed to great sadness. I so needed to rely on the vast promises of God. Yet each day I battled the wise of it all.
Why did the cancer doctor see and recognize the increased cancer markers in my beloved mother-in-law's blood tests? Why did each visit to the emergency room end without answers? But more importantly, why would this woman, a shining light for God, an inspiring gift to everyone around her, a woman as her pastor reflected at her funeral with a beautiful aura surrounding her? Why would she be stricken with cancer and taken so soon?
Why, God, oh, why? How often have we lamented that question in our lives? Why? Why are we suffering financially?
Why is my child rebelling? Why is my marriage on the rocks? Why did I suffer that abuse? And it seems as Christians we are expected to be able to answer those questions.
I believe many of us avoid speaking the gospel to our friends, family, neighbors out of fear of being asked those wise of life. In fact, as a young college student who was approached one day on my campus by two religious folks, I too asked the big why. Why is there suffering? You see, I believed in God, but I didn't really know anything about him.
And unfortunately, neither of those two young proselytizers did either. I recently heard the statement, quote, if we view the world as a Christian, it all makes sense, unquote. And on the surface, that's a real head-scratcher since this world seems so upside down, especially now. Broken families, broken lives, so much pain and death abound.
But let's take a step back, way back, to Genesis 3. To Adam, he said, because you listen to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, you must not eat from it. Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. And that's just a taste of what man's rebellion rots in the beginning. Creation, us, is currently at odds with God. And just as cells divide and life moves on without our intervention, our world around us is no longer under our full dominion.
So yes, there's floods and fire and famine and even cancer. And it has absolutely nothing to do with whether we are a good person or not. In addition to this result of the fall, we became separated from God, always seemingly looking for ways to buck his system. And we face the consequences for our actions, both individually and collectively.
Exodus 5, 1 through 2 says, Well, we all know how that went for Pharaoh. But what was Moses' first reaction after Pharaoh knuckled down and made the Israelites work even harder? Why? Why, oh God.
He asked God, why did he have to make things worse? And why did Moses have to be the brunt of it? And what did Moses have to do with it? Well, he said, I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to do it. He asked God, why did he have to make things worse? And why did Moses have to be the brunt of everything? From a Christian point of view, we should say, there's consequences in this world when anyone chooses to not submit, whether you choose to believe in God or not.
Now, that's not karma. It's simply a cause and effect of acting outside God's desires for us. And while we may cry out why in the moment, whether in situations of our own making or like cancer, of those in which we have no power, we need to remember the what. What is God doing in me or even in the world?
What is God expecting of me as a believer? What is the promise I can hold on to right now? You know, the early Israelites, they had a decent excuse. They didn't know God as well as we do now.
They didn't have all the stories of how he has rescued and protected his people. They didn't have Jesus's brother, James, telling them there will be trials and in them they need to seek the lessons of God. They didn't have Jesus come to earth and die for their sins. They didn't have the book of Revelation, the end of the story.
But we do. 2 Corinthians 4, 16, 18 says, therefore do not lose heart, though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but what is unseen.
Since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. So each day I sat there besides Bev's bed as her body succumbed not to cancer, but to an infection. I battled the Y demon. You see, I wanted somebody punished.
I wanted someone to suffer like I was now suffering. And then I finally heard the whisper. She gets to come home to me and you need to see what I am teaching you. You see, even in her suffering on her deathbed, this Christian called Bev was a conduit for Jesus, a teacher and a comforter.
I finally realized it didn't matter the why. For one, there were really no answers that fully satisfied. At times like that, we just need to submit to God's sovereignty and say, I don't know what he does. And the only real answers that I continue to come back to were the what's.
What did I truly believe about God and what was he trying to teach me? Christian friend, if you earnestly believe the Bible, believe that God is the creator of the heavens and the earth and all its inhabitants. You believe he is sovereign and he is sent to the sun to die for our sins. If you believe that there is a place greater than Eden awaiting us, then you can understand why Bev wasn't worried.
Why she could make us all laugh at her darkest hour. Why in the middle of a conversation she looked over in my shoulder, waved, and with a childlike voice exclaimed in joy. Hi, Jesus. John 14-2 says, my father's house has many rooms.
If that were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? You see, I didn't need to know the answers to my worldly questions, and I definitely didn't need retribution. I needed to remember that Jesus hates death because it's a sign of our broken world. And he is right now preparing a room more beautiful than I can imagine for even need.
When he comes back, we will all be raised up to live forever in a beautiful place that has no suffering, no death, no pain, no war, no hate, no fear. And that is just what I needed to learn. Are you asking why in your difficult time when you should be asking what? What is the Lord teaching you or asking you right now?
I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Embolden Podcast. Be sure to follow along so you don't miss any episode, and check out my blog at Embolden.net.