Encounter the Truth

Jonathan Griffiths: Maybe you've experienced tragedy or pain that you just can't comprehend, you can't explain it, you can't get your head around it, and the only conclusion you feel you can reach is to say that God has failed to show his love to you. Perhaps you look out on a broken and an aching world and you feel compelled to question the love of God.

Steve Hiller: Welcome to Encounter the Truth with Jonathan Griffiths. Jonathan, I can think of a number of people who have expressed a sentiment like that. In fact, we may have some listening today who would say, "Yeah Jonathan, that's exactly where I am at. When I look at all the pain and tragedy in my life, when I look at all the evil in the world around us, how can we say that we have a loving God?"

Jonathan Griffiths: Well, I understand the question and I know many ask it. I expect a number listening to the program today may be asking that question or a variation of that question. And these are not easy things to process, to think through, and they're not easy things to answer.

But I would say again what I've said before, which is when we want to grapple with the love of God in a world of pain, the right place to begin is at the cross of Christ, where we see the God of love send his Son to enter into the pain of this broken and sinful world in order that he might redeem people from it and save us, not from the experience of pain in this present world, but from the judgment of sin that is to come, that we might experience bliss in eternity.

Those are not small things to consider, they're not easy things to process, but they do begin to answer the question of how a God of love can interact with a world of pain and of evil.

Steve Hiller: We're going to continue to look at this topic as we continue our message, "The Loving God." Here is Jonathan.

Jonathan Griffiths: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." I wonder if you know this loving God. I wonder if you know him personally. I wonder if you've received his love, the love that he poured out at Calvary.

If you haven't done that, let me say you can receive the love of God. You can receive it even today. You can know love as you've never known love before. You can know the love of God which welcomes you and accepts you, not glossing over all the wrong that you've done, not affirming you in your sin, oh no, but paying for it in full, addressing it completely. It is love that makes you pure and whole and lovely even to the God of love.

Maybe you've never really known true love. Maybe you've come from a very hard family situation. Maybe you've lived through a series of broken and damaged relationships of one kind or another. And maybe the deepest cry of your heart today is simply to know love, simply to be loved.

If that's the case, and it may be for a number here, the great message of the Bible, the simple message of the Bible is this: God loves you. He loves you deeply, he loves you extravagantly, he loves you so much that he gave for you the most precious thing he had, he gave his one and only Son, that you might be reconciled to him, redeemed and restored.

Maybe you've come here today questioning the love of God. Maybe you've experienced tragedy or pain that you just can't comprehend, you can't explain it, you can't get your head around it, and the only conclusion you feel you can reach is to say that God has failed to show his love to you in this situation.

Perhaps you look out on a broken and an aching world and you feel compelled to question the love of God. How can God be loving when the world is in such a mess? I can't answer all your questions and I can't pretend to address all your pain. I can't do that.

But in light of all that the Scriptures teach us, I can say this with certainty: all our questions of confusion and all our cries of pain may not be satisfied this side of heaven, they probably won't be, but they all fall silent at the foot of the cross. They fall silent at the foot of the cross where, to address our questions about the love of God and to respond to our agonizing cries of pain and of hopelessness, God demonstrated his love for us with matchless eloquence through the gift of his Son.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." God is love. God has shown us his love, and next, God is leading us in love.

We might imagine that if God really loves us, he will spare us all difficulty in this life. If he really loved me, I might reason, then he would end all my pain, he would ease my path through life. But we don't need to be Christians for very long at all to realize that God doesn't always choose to do this.

Sometimes he allows us to keep our problems. Sometimes he allows us to walk through deep valleys and to experience very painful trials. And to believe that God loves us, to understand that he loves us, we need to address this fact, we need to grapple with this reality, and we need to try and understand it.

To help us do that, I'd like to look together at the book of Hebrews and chapter 12, and we'll start looking at verse four in a moment. The people addressed in this book are evidently facing some hardships. The forces of sin in the world are pushing against them. Maybe they're facing some persecution. And the writer says this in verse four of chapter 12:

"In your struggle against sin," and I think this is against the forces of sin in the world, "In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons: My son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son. Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined, and everyone undergoes discipline, then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live? Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best, but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it."

That's a very rich and wonderful passage. We won't try and deal with all of it. Time is short, but I just want to think together really about verse six, which is itself quoted from Proverbs three. And this idea that the Lord disciplines those he loves. The loving father disciplines his children.

Imagine you were walking down the aisle at Costco or Loblaws or wherever and right there in the middle of the bakery aisle, there is a kid lying on the floor, kicking and screaming, shouting the place down, having a full-blown meltdown. Everyone's having to take their shopping cart around to another aisle to get by. People are trying to pretend that they haven't really noticed, but of course, they've noticed. It's a major scene.

You might go over initially and wonder if the child has been hurt, if some tragedy has befallen this child, and then you get a little bit closer and you realize that the kid is just trying to pressure his parent to buy something he wants, maybe the new drone that Costco's just got in or something like that. And you see that this parent is just about to cave out of exhaustion and frustration and embarrassment, and you sense this isn't the first time that this has happened.

Now, of course, all kids have bad days, and none of us parents would want to be judgmental. We know how hard parenting can be. But in a scene like that, I think it's legitimate to ask how well has that child been disciplined? And if the child hasn't been disciplined, then there is a natural second question to ask: how well has that child been loved?

Discipline is a mark of love. I think that we all understand that loving parenting involves some discipline. Not harsh or reactive discipline, but careful training of the child, teaching them right from wrong, showing them acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior, carefully shaping their character. That's what discipline is about. It's training.

Now, what Hebrews shows us here is that our heavenly Father does the very same thing for us, his children. And he uses the circumstances of our lives as tools to train us. Verse seven, notice it again with me: "Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined, and everyone undergoes discipline, then you are illegitimate children, not true sons."

What's the point here? What is the great surprise of the text? Well, I think it's simply this: our hardships are actually signs of the love of God our Father. Isn't that surprising? As the Lord allows us to face trials and difficulties, as he leads us through them, he is training us up in godliness and in holiness. He is shaping our character. And actually, if he never allowed us to walk through trial, if we had lives of just pure ease, we could rightly question his love.

Just think about that for a moment. Let that sink in. It is the exact opposite of what we might naturally assume. Whenever we face difficulty, we are tempted to question the love of God. Something bad happens to us and our instinct is very quickly, "Does God really love me? How could he let this happen to me?" Maybe actually that's precisely the dynamic you're grappling with right now. This is what you're working through.

It can be our instinct, but actually, Hebrews tells us trials are a mark of God's fatherly love, however surprising that may be. And surprisingly, paradoxically, the absence of hardship in our lives would be signs of parental indulgence, of careless parenting, even of neglect.

Look at where all this is heading for us. If we submit to the Father and we trust him, verse 10: "Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best, but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful," and it is painful. "Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it."

I wonder how and where our loving Father might be leading you through trial and hardship for the sake of your training today. For the sake of discipline, for the sake of that ultimate harvest of righteousness and peace. I wonder where he's calling you to trust him, to walk with him, even to submit to him. God is love.

Steve Hiller: You're listening to Encounter the Truth with Jonathan Griffiths, and we're going to pause the message right here, but we'll get back to the message in a moment. This message is part of a series called "Who Is Like Our God?" And if you've missed any part of today's broadcast or previous broadcasts in the series, come and listen online. Our website address is encounterthetruth.org. You can stream the program or download an MP3 for free.

You can also listen on the go if you have the Encounter the Truth app. It's free and you'll find it at your favorite app store. Simply look for Encounter the Truth. Another great way to stay connected with Jonathan's teaching. Let's get back to the message. Again, here is Jonathan.

Jonathan Griffiths: God is love. God has shown us his love. God is leading us in love. And finally, as we finish, God is calling us to love. I've been learning a little about the history of prohibition in the United States just recently, and it's all quite fascinating. You may know that during the period of prohibition, organized crime flourished to a remarkable degree in some of the big cities in the US. Perhaps the most famous of the crime bosses of that time was Al Capone of Chicago.

The interesting thing about Capone is that for those on the right side of him, he was seen, he was viewed as the heart and soul of generosity. He handed out money to his friends like it was going out of style. His friends received riches, even while his enemies were unceremoniously gunned down.

Even the darker elements of the world around us know something about showing kindness and love to friends and to family. But the very same people who can show pretty lavish kindness and some degree of love, the very same people know how to show hatred to their enemies. That's fallen humanity. That's just the world in which we live.

But the Lord is markedly different in all of this. He shows love even to his enemies through the gift of his Son. And as children of the heavenly Father, you and I are called to be distinctive in this matter too. Listen to what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5 and verse 43. It's a familiar passage:

"You have heard that it was said, Love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."

Jesus calls us to a standard of love that is set, not by the tax collectors, not by the pagans, not by the culture all around us. He calls us to live by a standard that is set by the character of God himself. We're to love not only our friends, which is easy enough, but also our enemies. And we are to do it not simply because they are lovable, but because we know the God of love. If we belong to him through Jesus, we've experienced his love and he is our Father and he calls us to be like him.

I wonder if you have any enemies today. I hope you don't. Maybe you do. And if you do, let me ask you how well are you loving your enemies at the present time? That's a hard question. That's a really searching question. Where is that situation in your family, among your work contacts, within your neighborhood? Where is that situation of conflict or hurt or tension or sheer hostility where your instinct is to hate, but your call from the Father above, from the Father of love, is instead to love them?

What would it look like this week to take real practical concrete steps to love your enemies, to love that person? What words could you write? What words could you speak? What actions could you take? What kindness could you show? The God of love calls us to love our enemies.

But in a more special and a more specific way, he calls us to love one another, to love our brothers and our sisters in Christ. That's actually the great burden of the central section of 1 John, part of which we read earlier. I'd be grateful if you could turn back there with me as we close our time together in just a few moments here. We can't dig into this in any detail, but I want to point it out for us, and perhaps you could go home and read the section more fully yourself.

When we were first married and living in England and first assembling some things for our house, we bought a couple of lots of antique silverware from some kind of jumble sales. They looked nice. We didn't know if they were genuine or not, and the people selling them didn't really know either. So we got them home and I went about figuring out how you identify the real thing, genuine silver, from the fake stuff.

I discovered pretty quickly that if you were going to buy silver, if you were going to invest in silver, you needed to learn something about the hallmarks that silversmiths put on their wares. It happens that in England, all the marks are quite intricate and actually interesting. There's a rich history to it all.

Leopards' heads, I discovered, mark genuine silver. The outline of a lion marks purity. And then there are different stamps for each of the silversmiths and a different symbol for each year of production. I discovered along the way that American silver was much more predictable and less interesting. American silver is sometimes just marked with the word "silver" stamped on it. I make no cultural comment.

As you can tell, I got quite into this and Gemma was mightily relieved when I got bored of it and moved on to the next thing. But in any case, for valuable items like that, you need to know the mark of genuineness if you want to invest. You need to know the hallmark.

Now, here in 1 John, John is interested in highlighting the hallmark of a true Christian. What is it that marks off and identifies a true believer, the real deal, the genuine article? Well, the hallmark is love. Love for other believers. That's it. That's the bottom line. And John goes way out of his way to drive home the point. He repeats it actually again and again.

We won't go through the whole discussion, but just notice with me 1 John 3 and verse 11: "This is the message you heard from the beginning: we should love one another." Down to verse 14: "We know that we have passed from death to life because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death."

Down to verse 16: "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need and has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue, but with actions and in truth."

Down to chapter 4 and verse 7: "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." And on and on it goes.

But here is the basic point of the discussion; it's unmissable. The hallmark of the true Christian is love for other Christians. In fact, John goes so far as to say that only Christians truly know how to love. A person who loves truly in a godlike way is a believer, and the one who does not love is not converted. That's what John is saying.

I read verses seven and eight the other day, having not studied 1 John for some time, and I almost tripped over those verses. Can that really be so? Can John really mean that? But there it is in black and white.

And so I need to ask this question. I need to ask myself, I need to ask all of you, I need to ask us as a church family: are we marked, characterized, stamped, and sealed by love? Are we distinguished from the world around us by our godlike love for one another?

The truth is, if we're being honest, there are situations and occasions and specific relationships in which we've shown love. And there are other cases and situations and relationships where we have failed to love as we ought to love. Where is God calling you? Where is he challenging you even today to love a brother or sister in Christ even as he has loved us?

This is a practical thing. It's not just saying "I love you." It is acting in love to meet the needs of another. It is stepping out of our way to show kindness, to offer companionship, to extend forgiveness, to overlook a wrong, to meet a need, to supply what is lacking, to give time or resources where our brother or sister needs that from us. It is costly. It can be inconvenient.

As the God of love, this is what our Father has modeled for us so richly. It's what he's shown us through the gift of his Son and at the cross of Calvary. It's what he continues to show us as he leads us each day. And it's what he calls us to, each one of us.

Steve Hiller: That is Jonathan Griffiths wrapping up our message, "The Loving God," part of our series called "Who Is Like Our God?" where we're taking a look at God's characteristics and attributes. And if you've missed any of the broadcasts in the series, you can always come and listen online. Just stop by encounterthetruth.org. That's encounterthetruth.org.

Encounter the Truth does depend on your generosity to keep this program on this station. So thank you for giving to and supporting this ministry. And as you give a gift of any amount this month, we want to send you a book called Worthy: Living in Light of the Gospel. Jonathan, I understand you appreciate this book so much you've actually used this in your home church.

Jonathan Griffiths: Yeah, we've just finished working through this book as an elder study for our leaders within the church. And we found it to be so rich and helpful. It was just good for our hearts and for our personal discipleship because the call of this book is to live in a manner worthy of the gospel.

And if we know and love the Lord Jesus Christ, we want to do that. And we need to be encouraged and helped and reminded to do that all the time. And this rich but very accessible and pretty brief study is a tremendous encouragement in doing that very thing. We were helped by it and we were grateful for it ourselves.

Steve Hiller: Well, we'd love to send you a copy of this book, Worthy: Living in Light of the Gospel, as our way of saying thank you for your financial support. You can give online at encounterthetruth.org or over the phone when you call 833-99-TRUTH. That's 833-998-7884. Or again, the website is encounterthetruth.org. For Jonathan Griffiths, I'm Steve Hiller. Thanks for listening and I hope you'll join us next time.