When Trouble Comes

Carmel Presbyterian Church Podcast

Text: “…but we boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (Romans 5:3-4)

Some years ago, Dr. Howard Edington, who for a number of years was the minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Orlando, Florida, published a sermon he entitled, “When the Waters Are Deep”. The sermon was preached just after the tragic death of his son, John David, a young man twenty two years old, who was killed in an automobile accident.

Dr. Edington recalls that it was a rainy evening on December 21 when he and his wife were asleep in their home late at night. Suddenly, they were awakened by a telephone call. When they answered the phone, a voice on the other end said, “There are two Orlando policemen at your door, please let them into your house.”

Dr. Edington and his wife went down the stairs and when they opened the door, there were two policemen standing at the door, delivering the worst news that any parent could ever hear. “There has been a terrible automobile accident,” one of the policemen said, “and your son did not survive.”

I.

Most of us, if asked, would say that our greatest desire in life would be to live without the devastating effects of the kind of pain that comes with the loss of a child or some other tragic event. These are not the things that any of us seek. Most of us pray that our lives will not be touched with this kind of pain and adversity: a debilitating illness, the death of a loved one, the struggle with a wayward child, the pangs of divorce, or a failure in

In fact, we view these things as intruders to be resisted, removed if possible, and if not removed, endured.

II.

That is one of the most difficult aspects of the Bible. It does not always share our negative reaction to adversity, disappointment, and sometimes – yes, even tragedy.

Take, for example, this passage from Paul’s Letter to the church at Rome. After spelling out the great news of the gospel (Romans 1-4), the Apostle Paul goes on in Chapter 5 with one of the most remarkable syllogisms in the New Testament:

“We rejoice,” he says, “in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us (Romans 5:4-5).

Adversity or trouble, then, far from being a mere nuisance or cruelty, is one of the constituent elements in every great life. Note how the Bible speaks of hardship and adversity. It is a ‘refiner’s fire’. It separates the pure metal from the alloy. It is ‘tribulation’; that is to say, it is the process of separating the pure wheat from the chaff.

So, what do we say when trouble comes?

III.

For one thing, suffering or adversity has the remarkable power to call out in people a strength they did not know they possessed. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, who for many years was the pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City, once wrote a small book entitled The Meaning of Prayer. One of the things that makes this book so powerful is that it came out of a personal experience of Dr. Fosdick’s own life. As a young man, he was enrolled in Union Seminary in New York City, where he was studying to be a minister. Dr. Fosdick was a brilliant and intense man, who often suffered from depression. One night in the midst of a struggle with this terrible disease, Dr. Fosdick took a knife and slit both of his wrists. He was rushed to the hospital where he struggled for six months to regain his health. It was during this time that he wrote this book The Meaning of Prayer. But for Fosdick it was no mere academic matter. It was a matter of life or death. For he came to the realization that either there was some power greater than himself that could save him, or he knew that he would never survive.

Now, please do not misunderstand me. I am not trying to glorify trouble and heartbreak. Like, I do not wish these things for me or for those I love. But I am saying that without words like “trouble”, “adversity”, ‘suffering”, and ‘grief”, there would never be words like “courage”, “patience”, ‘self-sacrifice”, or “triumph”. The person who has never known hardship will never know strength. The one who has never known calamity cannot understand courage. We may not like that kind of world, but it is the kind of world in which we live.

I am not saying that trouble alone brings out the best in us. I am saying that if we have anything remotely approaching the Spirit of Christ, it is possible to find gratitude and grace even in the midst of trouble.

Trouble itself is neutral. It can do almost anything to a person. It can make that person bitter and hard. It can plunge life into despair and wreck a person’s faith. But there are others, thank God, who find themselves in some difficult spot only to realize that it was not simply the end of an old life, but the beginning of something new.

IV.

There is something else about trouble that can make a person more sympathetic and compassionate, and thereby, more useful. One of the greatest social reformers of the Nineteenth Century was the English novelist Charles Dickens. Through his novels he helped bring about an awareness of some of the most brutal aspects of English life: the debtors’ prisons, the harsh reality of child labor, and the inhumane conditions in which so many poor people lived. But he not only described them, he attacked them as well. You see, Charles Dickens, like every great writer, wrote out of his own experiences.

When Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities or Nicholas Nickleby he was not just writing out of his own imagination. He was writing out of his own experience. Micawber was his father. As a young boy, Dickens had visited his father in debtors’ prison and had seen firsthand his father crushed by shame and crippled by poverty. When Dickens was ten years old, he worked long hours in a factory, pasting labels on bottles. He had experienced the terrible pedagogy of the schools in London. Then, he rose above his adversity, transmuted – almost by magic – its lead into gold. In adversity, he found deep insight, profound understanding, keen sympathy and widespread knowledge. That is trouble finely used.

V.

Then, too, trouble properly understood, can relieve us of some very dangerous illusions. In particular it can deliver us from the delusion that life is fair.

One of the things I enjoy about The New York Times is the Sunday Book Section. Generally, if I have time, I look over the books that are on the best seller list for fiction and nonfiction. One of the books that was on the list of best sellers longer than almost any book in the history of the Times was by a psychiatrist by the name of Scott Peck, who wrote a book entitled The Road Less Travelled. Peck began that book with the sentence “Life is difficult”. Then he goes on to speak about human suffering, discipline, and a host of other subjects. When asked once what about his book was so compelling, he replied, “It is a book about growing up.”

I never cease to be amazed by so many people who are so perplexed about the fact that life is not always fair. Where have they been? Was life fair to Jesus, when he set his face to go to Jerusalem? What do you think he was expecting to find there? Justice?

Or, what about the prophets before him? What about Jeremiah, that man of sorrow, who cursed the day he was born, who found the message of God like fire in his mouth, who pleaded to God about the injustice of life only to hear God say,

Jeremiah, if you have raced with foot runners and they have wearied you, how will you compete with horses? And if in a safe land, you fall down, what will you do in the ‘jungle of the Jordan’? (Jeremiah 12:5)

Suppose every time we did something good in life, someone would reward us with a corresponding amount of happiness? That would be a nice quid pro quo. Do good – get paid. Drop in so much right behavior and take out so much pleasure. Where then would our heroes be? Where would be the people who did not count gain for themselves but saw something greater at stake than their own happiness and reward?

VI.

Then, too, trouble nobly used can open up within us deep resources of spiritual power that can strengthen the life of faith. That is what the Apostle Paul means when he asserts that ‘suffering leads to endurance, endurance to character and character to hope.”

One of the most famous ministers of the Church of Scotland was a man by the name of Arthur John Gossip who preached a sermon in Aberdeen that was entitled “When Life Tumbles In, What Then?” He preached the sermon a week after his wife died suddenly and without any warning. In that sermon he speaks of the terrible sorrow and loss that was thrust upon him.

Gossip says, “I do not understand this life of ours. But still less can I comprehend how people in trouble and loss and bereavement can fling away peevishly from the Christian faith. In God’s name, fling to what? Have we not lost enough without losing that too?”

Gossip goes on to state, “I do not think we need to be afraid of life. Our hearts are very frail, and there are places where the road is very steep and very lonely. We have a wonderful God. And as Paul puts it, “What can separate us from his love? Not death, he says immediately, pushing aside at once the most obvious of all impossibilities.”

“No, not death. For, standing in the roaring of the Jordan, cold to the heart with its dreadful chill, and very conscious of the terror of its rushing. I too, like Hopeful, can call back to you who one day in your turn will have to cross it and say, ‘Be of good cheer, my brother, for I feel the bottom and it is sound.’”

We are living in a difficult time today, when there is great division in Washington, D.C. and we live in the uncertainty of what will happen to our nation in these next weeks.

There are also many in our midst who find themselves in the chill of the Jordan River, facing great loss, disease and some even death itself.

So to all, there is this word — there is a bottom and it is sound.

For suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. And hope does not disappoint us.

Amen.

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