How Can God Allow All This Suffering? - Dan Paterson

Hey guys, Pastor James Murray here, and I want to welcome you to the Abide Sydney podcast. This whole podcast is designed to help you on the journey of discipleship, and our mission is to make disciples of the people of Sydney. But maybe you're not from Sydney. We hope this blesses you. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this podcast. Thank you very much. Please take a seat. I am tremendously privileged to be here. I'm normally locked away in Brisbane, and it's a weird thing, actually, at this time of the year to be allowed south of the border. So thank you for just providing a little bit of momentary grace and a bit of a parlay in one apiece at the moment, right? I'm actually Victorian, so hopefully that lets me either off that hook and maybe onto a bigger hook with you. I'm into AFL more so than rugby, so now I'm on the biggest hook you can imagine. All right, let's start digging up. Dig up, Dan. My day job. My day job is as a theologian, which means I have the enormous privilege of, since I came to faith, studying scripture at an academic level, being able to teach at seminary, but wrestling with the biggest questions that we have about God. And my background is a pastor, and then the last 10 years of taking those questions on the road to meet with young people where they are, in schools and universities, as well as online making video content, my just heartbeat is to wrestle with the biggest doubts and questions and objections people have so that they can hear the good news of Jesus, and so that they can wrestle through the fog that keeps them from seeing the beauty of the cross and they can put their faith in Jesus. And so that's really what we've been doing. I'm the theologian. But my night job, just because sometimes the Bible says, "Much study wearieth the soul," to which every university student goes, "Amen." I'm also a snake catcher. We live in a beautiful suburb up in Brisbane, which is cradled in sort of mountain range called The Gap, and it is a nature corridor full of serpents. And so I study scripture. I make videos and speak in schools and unis by my day job, and then at night, I make secret call outs to help relocate serpents out of people's houses. I run Eden Snake Catchers, a fitting name, and it's where our tagline is, "Making gardens safer." And you might think, "How does theology and snake catching fit together?" Well, anyone who's read Genesis 3 realizes it's not a good idea to have a snake in your garden. And so that's kind of how my worlds sort of collide in that respect, but it's in this space of dealing with the doubts that we have from scripture and the seedbed right back there in Genesis 3 of the doubt that pervades all of scripture is, "Can I really believe that God is there? Is Christianity true? And can I really believe that God cares? Can I trust Him?" These are the two questions that underlie every other question that we do, and we do open Q&As a couple hundred times a year. Every question that comes is asking one of those two things: "Rationally, can I believe that this is true? And with my heart? Can I put my trust in God with all of my life for here and in the world to come?" And so I just want to leave you with something. We're going to dig into a big question today, but we have this heart to bless. Our ministry is supported by donors that allow us to go and do our evangelistic work, and we want to make everything free. And so for years, we've been making video content that, although will answer the biggest question today that was my stumbling block to belief in God, we have hundreds of videos that allow you to read. And so we're going to take a look at all of the questions that people might raise, and you'll go, "I'm a Christian, and I want you to come to church." And they say, "Yeah, but what about?" And they bring up those difficult stories from the Bible, which maybe make it hard to believe that God is good. Or they bring up science and dinosaurs and how that fits with the Bible story. Or they bring up questions around judgment. Can I really believe that God is good when the Bible talks about final judgment and resurrection and eternal death? How do I make sense of these sorts of statements about hell? So we have video content online. You can find on all of that. This is the one good thing to come out of COVID, you'll find on your chair, a QR code. And if you scan that QR code, you'll see a link tree that gives you access to all of our ministry resources. And on there, if you just go to the YouTube channel and hit subscribe, we've got, like I said, hundreds of videos, one, two minute response videos to TikTok doubts of people who have left the faith or skeptical scholars or science communicators or popular comedians. When they raise objections, I just respond in a really gentle way, helping to deal with the thinking. My favorite is the five to 20 minute response. So I do a lot of 20 minute videos that really do tackle the biggest questions that you probably have right now. And then I interview scholars, experts, philosophers and scientists and historians and Bible scholars, helping to wrestle with all the big kind of questions that people are asking online. And so please, avail yourself of that. Today too, I did manage to bring a few copies of a book that I put together with a friend of mine. We were both pastors and we love so many different books, but everyone just kept saying, Hey, what book should I give my friend? They've got doubts and questions about God. They've got doubts and questions about Christianity, and I don't know what would be the best resource for them. And we thought, you know what? We wanted to write a book that brought together an explanation of the Bible, actually shares what Christians believe from Genesis to Revelation in a way that connects with their big questions. And then that addresses many of the doubts that will come up as they're reading the story. But what about? And so the second section really digs into those doubts, first the story, then questioning the story. If that's helpful to you, it gives Christians language to talk about their faith and understand it, or it's actually meant to be a non-cringy thing. You can actually handle it. You can actually hand to a friend without being too worried about their reaction. And so that might be a help to you as well. But let's dive into what I want to cover today, which is probably the biggest question that you will encounter across your life. And it's been the most enduring objection to Christianity. It's known as the problem of evil. Why would a good God let bad things happen? Now, I was actually raised going along to church. I was born in Carlton Hospital, hence Carlton Blue supporter. That means I'm an expert in suffering, right? If you know anything about AFL, you're like, oh man, that poor guy, right? But when I was five, we moved up to Brisbane and I've lived there ever since. And we would make the annual pilgrimage at Christmas to go down and visit relatives. And this is back in the day where we were poor. So you're driving in a Tarago van 20 hours without the benefits of modern technology. If you've grown up with screens, we didn't have any of that, no iPods or iPads or anything like that. We just had I spy for like 20 hours. That is Dante's life. That's seventh level of hell, I'm pretty sure. But one year when I was nine, we were driving back and actually traveling through New South Wales and the Blue Mountains. And it was a day where we were blanketed in thick fog and driving along a single lane highway. And without seeing it at the last moment, a semi-trailer pulled out in front of my dad from a side road. And so he slammed into the back corner of the truck. My mum was sitting in the back, in the passenger seat, the left-hand side of the car. She head butted the back corner of that truck. It was like 70, 75 K an hour. She was hit from behind. We had a car fridge sitting on the middle bench that just flew forward and hit her in the back of the head. And so incredible head trauma and her legs were pinned and crushed in the wreckage. And I just remember this image of the car coming to a still and seeing my mum, her face smashed and bloodied and her body slumped over just eerily still. Now she survived the accident. They had to cut her out, emergency services with the jaws of life, airlift her to Sydney, where they've removed her. They removed a third of her skull and emergency craniotomy so her brain could swell without dying from intracranial pressure. And after the surgery, the doctor spoke with my dad and said, the damage is extensive. If she survives the next 24 hours, it's likely the person that you know is gone. Now my childhood was shattered by that experience. I went from having a mum to having to look after my mum with our roles inverted. So for my late childhood and teenage years. Caring for her, she had to learn to do a lot of things again and battle with the new disabilities that her brain injury brought with them. Needless to say, being raised and told that God loves you and God has a wonderful plan for your life. That statement doesn't easily survive an experience like that. And it's safe to say that my childlike belief in God was torpedoed by that roadside. Now my mum, because of her condition, couldn't really handle crowds and so she didn't really go to church much in the aftermath of the accident. And so it was very easy for me not to run away from God in an angry, aggressive atheist phase, but just as a teenager to take backward steps and move away from the God thing. Because I stumbled on as I'm looking at the world and just seeing all of the pain and the suffering, not just from my experience, but the war and the famine and the brutality and the death and disease that seems to pervade our planet, I'm meant to believe that this is the creation of an all powerful. All loving God, this just doesn't look like the kind of world that God would make. And I stumbled in my own experience. I wouldn't have been able to articulate it, but upon this ancient objection that even predates Jesus going all the way back to a Greek philosopher Epicurus, he raised an argument against belief in God or God's known as the problem of evil. And he said, wait, if you want to believe that God exists, you've got a problem. Because if God is all powerful, omnipotent. He could. He could stop bad things from happening. And if God is all loving, omnibenevolent, he should want to stop bad things from happening. But the world is full of bad things. So either God is not all powerful or he's not all loving. Maybe he doesn't even exist. This is an argument that was sharpened by David Hume, a Scottish philosopher and skeptic against Christianity particularly. But when you see a meme like that pop up online and when you've got your own experiences of and suffering and disappointments with what's happening in the world. easy to run away from belief in God. Now, what I didn't realize at the time is if you run away from belief in God, if you eject God from the way that you make sense of the world, that may get rid of Epicurus' version of the problem of evil, because it's raised as a logical contradiction within belief in Christianity. But you bump into an entirely new problem of evil. How, if there's no God, can you call evil, evil? Rather than just a changing opinion across time and place and culture, what we think is good and evil, if it's just up to human opinion rather than some objective moral feature, well, that just changes across time. Evil is just your personal preference, conditioned socially. There's nothing truly evil. And how do you account for the wrongness of suffering? If nature has always been baptized in death, if that's the means, the means of us getting here as generation upon generation of pain and suffering and survival of the fittest, then why do we feel like suffering is wrong? Why do we feel like death is wrong? C.S. Lewis, famous Christian author, a great apologist of the 20th century in his lectures post-war, the mere Christianity book, he was an atheist well into his adult life. And the problem of evil was his big argument against God, among other things. And he used to think, yeah, look at the pain and suffering of death. Surely an all-powerful and all-loving God cannot exist. But then he began to get this question. Wait a second. I'm angry at God because of the brokenness of the world. But why do I think the world is broken? If I'm an atheist, this is exactly how things ought to be. Always this way. The system from A to Z is suffering and death. So why then do I find myself part of that system in such revolt against it? How do I explain this deep intuition that this is not the way that things should be? That intuition actually doesn't fit the atheist story. And what I want to share this morning is how in me as a teenager leaving school and starting to ask some bigger questions about life, I'd seen how fragile it is. I'd seen that you're not promised tomorrow. And so I wanted to make sure that whatever I poured my life into mattered. Whether it's success or the good life, I didn't want to look back from my deathbed feeling like I'd wasted it. So what am I here for? Is there a better way? And in that moment, a friend challenged me maybe to explore whether or not the Christian story has any answers. Does it make better sense of the world that we inhabit and the suffering that we experience? Is there an answer to Epicurus' challenge? And that's what I began to wrestle with. Getting rid of God, there was still suffering. There was just no hope. Does the Christian story offer more? Now there's three scenes as I was reading through the Bible that I've seen actually is right at the beginning of the Bible in the book of Genesis where I learned, you know what, actually the Bible does give some answers to Epicurus' challenge. Some reasons why a good God might at least for a time allow bad things to happen. And it was in this description which actually makes sense of my internal protest. This something is wrong because the Bible doesn't begin with a bad world. No, it begins with a world that God created for good. In Genesis, there's these chaotic waters in the heavens. God created the heavens and the earth in the beginning and there are these chaotic waters and God begins from these dark waters of an unformed creation to bring order and then lights and then life and to declare every step of his ordering and his shaping of the environment as good. And then he creates us human beings in his image. Now God could have, when he created the world, made what I would call a sterile universe, right? A universe where everyone wants to do exactly what he wants them to do all of the time. Where we're puppets, automatons, robots, programmed simply to obey his every commands. But God wanted to create a world of meaning and beauty and love. And for us to be capable of love, you can't have a deep and meaningful relationship with a robot. It's another human, someone who can have a relationship, say yes and personality and mind and intellect who can give themselves freely. That's what love is. I've been married 16 years. If you want to know suffering, my wife is an amazing example. She would say being with me because of my humor is eternal punishment, right? It's as good as it gets. But imagine if rather than trying to woo her over, to freely say marriage vows on the day at the altar, where it just dragged her in front of a judge and at gunpoint forced her to say those words. Are any of the women in this room going to have warm butterfly feelings in their stomach as though Shakespearean poetry is playing out in your midst? No, because that act of coercion and me forcing her to say those words removes the beauty of their meaning. No, love is something that has to be freely given. And so because God is the headwaters of love, father, son, and spirit, loving each member of the flow of that love being creation itself, God imbues human beings, his image bearers with free will. The freedom not only to say yes in love of God, but also to say no. And the story describes that God creates a world of meaning where what we do matters. We shape and affect our environment and the relationships around us. And this world that God created for good, where there was harmony in Eden between us and God and us and each other and us and creation was something that became damaged by evil, by us using that very same freedom that made love possible instead to choose evil. You see, God weaves a moral fabric into reality. We're familiar with the natural laws that we study through science, but there is a moral law that God has woven into reality too. The Bible calls it God's wisdom. And if we go with God's wisdom, with the grain of how he's made us to live, that goes well for us. That's the promise of Proverbs. But if we go against the grain of God's wisdom, well, there are all kinds of psychosocial splinters. It hurts us. And what the Bible describes is that when Adam and Eve tried to break God's moral law, we became broken by it. And this is the source of why we feel alienated from God, why we feel like we hide from one another and why we're no longer experienced harmony with our environment. Exiled from the paradise of Eden, now we're susceptible to suffering and sickness and death and decay. The curse on creation in a way that was never intended for human beings. And I'm reading Genesis 1, 2, and 3, and I'm realizing, you know what the Bible is saying? I should feel like something is wrong. This is not the way that God made the world. We now live in the shadow of Genesis 3, the shadow of what happened with the fall. And it hurts that the Bible describes Genesis 1 and 2 and then Revelation 21 and 2 as God's will done on earth as in heaven. But everything else from Genesis 3 to Revelation 21 and 2 is not the way that God made the world. We now live in the shadow of Genesis 3, Revelation 20, the world that we inhabit now is fallen, not as God wants it. That's a window. Free will is just one of the explanations as to why a good God might allow bad things to happen, at least for a time, because love is worth it. The possibility for a meaningful existence. And this is just one of about a dozen examples that Christian thinkers bring up from the Bible as to why God might let bad things happen. Let me share another one. Let's say I was to lock the door tonight. And for the next 12 hours, you're stuck in here with me. Sorry about that. But I will give you a chance to vote on one of two options. We could either watch 12 hours, full volume back to back of episodes of the Teletubbies. Or we could watch the extended edition of the Lord of the Rings. And we take a vote to see which one of these two options you would choose. Now, there's no absentia. You have to vote. I'm going to suspect that at least the majority of people in this room are going to choose option two in the world of Tolkien, the Middle Earth. Now, parents in the room will scratch off their ears before they vote number one like this. But there's a reason. But it's interesting that in the Teletubbies world, there is no darkness. There is no suffering. There is no tears. No evil. No death. So why do we choose option two? A world where all of these things are baked into the story. Because we realize actually the better stories, the stories that animate us, the stories that inspire us, are stories where there is character development. Where suffering is the very forge from which virtue is formed. A world where courage is possible. Where character, who we are, our deepest features, our friendships are made. Where there is a mission. Where there is the victory of good over evil, of light over darkness. Where there are tears, but they're tears that are wiped away by a greater joy. And this is the whole explanation that philosophers offer of a soul-making theodicy. That God would prefer a world, a story, where we as human beings are created into these glorious creatures, rather than just these empty bouncing pods with annoying sounding voices. He's writing a greater story in the victory of light over darkness. Now, these are again, just two then of a dozen different explanations that Christian philosophers have offered drawn from the Christian story. And if you want to dig deep into this, you can go and check out a two and a half hour video on our YouTube, where I interview two Oxford philosophers on every problem to the answer to the problem of evil. It's a nerd fest. But if that's where your head is, I want to know what answers the Bible gives to the intellectual problems. Go there. But as I kept reading through the Bible, I realised that while the Bible offers some answers, it doesn't give us all the answers. Because I came across a second story, Job. And if you're new to Christianity, Job, it's a wild story. It's one of the ancient stories of Jewish wisdom in the Bible. And it describes this guy and that's his name, Job, right? He's always employed. But he's living what we would consider in our mind, often a blessed life. Job's doing his best to love God and love neighbour as best as he can. And his life is going really great. He's super wealthy. All of his riches wrapped up in livestock, big herds of camels and sheep and donkeys. He's got a great family, 10 adult kids who love him. He's got a wife. He's got his health. Everything seems to be going great in his life. And then in a series of unfortunate events, everything is robbed away. His kids, all 10 of them are killed. When a house that they're celebrating in collapses upon them, crushes them to death, and they're entombed in the rubble. And as he's sitting there mourning the loss of his family, and I can't imagine the grief, his servants start running in from the fields to say, all of your wealth is gone. Either enemy raiding tribes have stolen away your herds, or they've been destroyed by natural disaster. You're broke. And then as he's sitting there trying to wrestle with the loss of everything, all of a sudden his skin breaks out with these oozing sores. Hidden skin disease, and he's just scratching there at himself. And this pitiful creature of a man now, at the very moment he needs comfort from his wife, instead, she turns on him. She says, why don't you curse God and die? So it's pretty much safe to say his life falls apart. And the story, it says he has a group of friends that come and in his grief, they sit with him in the dust. And for seven days, no one says anything. And that's actually the best thing they do in the entire story. If you want to know what should you do to someone who's suffering, just the ministry of your presence. What does God do? Emmanuel, God with us. But like so many of us, they try to make sense of why he's suffering, and they open their mouth. And they actually had a really popular way of thinking, maybe you're captive to this as well. It's like a baptized or Christian version of karma. They call it the principle of divine recompense. You get what you deserve. Because God is in control of the universe. And because God is just, surely if you do good, you get good. And if you do bad, you get bad. They're looking at Job's life and all the suffering he's enduring. And they think, what on earth did you do to tick God off so badly? They accused him. But Job works in reverse. He looks at his own life and he thinks, I can't see what I did to make God so angry. I know I'm not perfect, but my suffering then makes me question, is God just? Or is God in control of the universe? And they accuse, and he defends. And eventually after 36 chapters of this ongoing conversation, eventually Job says, I'm done with you. And I demand an audience with heaven. And God comes down. Now I'm reading this story, chapter 38, God comes down. I'm thinking, finally, I'm going to get God's answer at how he responds to our suffering. Why didn't God stop that from happening to my family and upending our story? And rather than God coming with passion or an embrace to comfort him instead, God has him stand up in front of his friends. And this is what God says, who is this who darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Stand up and dress like a man and I will question you. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Surely you know. Where were you when I stretched out the heavens? Surely you have understanding. And God berates him with a series of 64 questions about cosmology, and about meteorology, and about zoology, all the subjects Job didn't study at university. And he gets the end of this line of questioning and Job gets a big fat zero out of 64 on God's questions. And I remember being so confused by this story. How can this be God's answer? I was told that he loves us, that he has compassion. What kind of cruel, mean creator would respond to Job's suffering in this way? And what I found even more mind-boggling as I'm reading this is it seemed to work on Job. He said, Blew my mind. Dumbest story ever. Now, if you ever struggle to make sense of the Bible, I resonate with that. When I was first reading through the Bible, there was so much that just didn't make sense to me. And in fact, one thing I found really encouraging is near the end of the Bible, the apostle Peter is writing about what the apostle Paul has said in 2 Peter 3. And he says that Paul writes some things in his letters which are difficult to understand. That's an inspired apostle of Jesus saying, even he finds some of the Bible tricky, right? And I didn't get this story in Job until many years later when I had kids. On the screen behind me is a photo of my oldest son, Josiah. He's now 11. He's a legend. But this photo was taken when he's 18 months old. And in fact, this photo was taken just seconds after he was told he would grow up to look like me. Now, when he's this age, I had to take him to the doctor's surgery. My wife is not a blood and needles person. And so that was my job. Whenever he needed immunizations, daddy takes him in. And I'm sitting in our family doctor. She's been with us for years. She's wonderful. And she says, Dan, I'm sorry to say at this point in his schedule, we actually have to give him two needles. And with toddlers, you don't get a second stab at it. Pardon the pun. So we actually inject them simultaneously. Can I get you to sit Josiah on your lap and basically lull him into a false sense of security while she and a registered nurse take a syringe each and inject him? My little boy's sitting on my lap and he's staring up at me feeling entirely safe. Not a care in the world. And as I'm holding his arms, one, two, three, and his little body just winces with pain and his eyes fill up with tears. And I'll never forget the look on his face, just this unmistakable expression. Of betrayal. Because in his mind, he knows that I love him. I play with him. I hug him. I read to him. I put him to bed. I feed him. I clothe him. I bathe him. I take him on little man ventures. I even buy him baby chinos. This kid knows that I love him. And he knows his daddy is powerful. I go to the gym. I work out a little bit. I do all the heavy lifting around the house. I'm the one that brings the groceries in from the car. Takes the laundry basket upstairs, has to take the bins out to the curb. Every man in here is going, hey, this is a bit of a pattern. He's looking at this small female doctor, small female nurse. He's looking at them. He's looking at me and he's thinking, you could take him. In his little mind, he cannot understand why he's all powerful and his all loving daddy is sitting there while he suffers. And it dawned on me in that moment, man, I do not have the ability to explain to him everything I know. Just as a 30-year-old layman, I'm not a medico, but I understand viral and bacterial immunology and how you have the necessity of getting a small exposure so you build antibodies to build off greater dangers down the future. I had great reasons for allowing this momentary suffering in his life. But could I explain them to him with the limitations of his cognitive development and his vocabulary being like, yes, no, more and ice cream? Like, no, there's no way he could understand what I know. And if that's true of me as a 30-year-old dad to my 18-month-old boy, imagine the gap between us as finite earthly kids locked in space and time with our limited, fallen perspective, and then an infinite and always God who doesn't just know every fact in the universe right now. And what the Bible says that he can count the number of hairs on our head. And you're looking at me and going, that's not a miracle. Because the Bible says, Doug just doesn't know the facts right now, but he can look through the corridors of time. Being the all-wise God, he knows the ends from the beginnings. And now everything that happens now will echo through in a cause and effect consequential web. Only God's in a position to know if he has good reasons for letting us go through what we experience right now, for not intervening, for not answering every prayer, for allowing pain and suffering in this momentary life. And I realized, I just don't know what God knows. In Isaiah chapter 55, it says, As high as the heavens are above the earth, so far are my thoughts above your thoughts, and my ways above your ways, declares the Lord. God is bigger than we are. And so while the Bible says, yes, there's some really good answers to the problem of evil, why a good God might let bad things happen, as finite creatures, we shouldn't expect to have all the answers. I don't know why God lets certain things happen. Why he doesn't answer every prayer. And that really then is a question of trust. And what did Job say? Now that my eyes have seen you. it was seeing who God is that changed his heart and as I'm reading through the story in the Bible I finally came from Genesis to Job then to the Gospels with Jesus and Jesus makes these outrageous claims where he says if you've seen me you've seen the Father I and the Father are one the writers of the New Testament speak of him as the image of the invisible God or the exact representation of his nature that if you want to know what God is like Jesus is the window into heaven and how Jesus responds to our pain and our suffering is a window into how God feels not us trying to reason upwards from the darkness of our experience but a light from heaven to reveal what is true and as I'm reading through the Gospels I'm seeing Jesus respond and I see that Jesus weeps in John 11 as he goes to visit the grieving sisters Mary and Martha and I see that Jesus weeps in John 11 as he goes to visit the grieving sisters Mary and Martha it's not just that he left heaven to show us what he's like it's that he showed the full extent of his love Jesus said he loved us to the end and if you said the smallest window into the suffering that he endured to be betrayed and abandoned to be falsely accused and mocked to have the scars of creation a crown of thorns placed upon his brow to have the scarlet robe the symbol of his life mockingly placed upon his shoulders to be flayed to within an inch of his life to carry the weight of our sin in the heavy cross up to Calvary then to have spikes driven through the nerve clusters in his wrists and his feet to agonisingly asphyxiate to pour out his life unto death why to satisfy the cost of our sin how do you know that God loves you he suffered for you he suffers with us he knows your pain and as the one that has passed through death into eternal life he's gone through the darkest valley of this life he promised us to be a good shepherd that can carry you through it as well what's so amazing about the death of Jesus is it looks like the most indiscriminate and awful suffering the holiest man that ever lived the only one that doesn't deserve any suffering suffered in the most excruciating way and we might look on the darkness of Good Friday and say why and yet it was precisely through the darkness of Good Friday and the suffering of Jesus that God was opening a doorway of salvation to whosoever believes and if God can take the suffering of Christ and use that to serve eternal purposes for good what can you do with our suffering Richard Dawkins would say that if you're an atheist this universe is exactly the same exactly what you would expect blind, indifferent and that your suffering has no rhyme or reason it's just bad cosmic luck the Christian story says this is not the world God intended but it's a world that God is redeeming and He can even use the bad things to serve a meaningful purpose in His end game to take the evils and the pains that we endure and to weave them into our story so that in the grace and the healing that we experience in His presence our scars become the very means by which we extend hope to others Romans 8.28 says for those who love God and are called according to His purposes He works together all things for good and so here's the end game you get to choose when you face suffering in this life and it will come are you going to run away from Jesus you'll still suffer you've just taken away the meaning and the hope and the presence of God and His people to walk with you through it or will you run towards Jesus instead the one who weeps with you and validates your protest the one who says come to me and pray and see my power in this life either to heal or to show grace that is sufficient in your weakness to be the one who offers you this profound hope and to be the one who shows you that you are loved in the moment of your greatest doubts and suffering that the cross towers and screams over those doubts God so loved the world He so loved you in this way and if we have to suffer in this life I would much rather suffer with Jesus than suffer without Him so I just want to invite you at the moment maybe just close your eyes I know this is such a big area because we all have our own areas of suffering it's just a moment to consider can I knowing that God is as big as He is trust Him to focus on Jesus the window into the heart of heaven the eternal God written into our human story to show us exactly who He is and an opportunity for us to maybe step back and stop seeking and stop praying and be overcome with doubts instead now to run towards God and to put our hope and our faith in him. God, would you meet us here? Would you heal hearts that have been overcome with pain and doubt? Would you break in supernaturally to allow that incredible transformation of our open wounds to become grace-filled scars that you send us out into the world just like you did Jesus? Well, we hope this podcast has inspired you on your journey of discipleship to Jesus. If you want to know more about our church, just go to abide.sydney. We'd love to get to know you. If not, you're from another place, hey, why don't you share this with someone else? And hopefully it helps them as they continue to follow Jesus. Have a great week.