Chapter Fifteen: Thinking,
Thanking, Loving
Of all the sufferers in the Bible,
Paul would have to be among those who suffered most. Laboring and toiling without sleep,
constantly moving, experiencing cold and nakedness, hunger and thirst, three
times beaten with rods, stoned once, three times shipwrecked including an
entire night and day on the open sea, and five times flogged with 39 lashes. How did he handle it all?
He told the Corinthians that we
learn not to rely on ourselves, but on God.
He told the Phillipians not to be anxious, to present God with our
requests with thanksgiving, to think about what is true, noble, right, pure,
lovely and admirable, and that he learned to be content whatever the
circumstances. In these the peace of God
will guard our hearts and minds. What is
this peace? First, it is an inner calm
and equilibrium that does not come naturally, but which we must learn. Next, it is not an absence of fear, but the
presence of God. Today, in order to
overcome anxiety or fear, the purveyors of peace talk about controlling your
thoughts and removing negative ones. But
that is really only refusing to face the facts and will not provide lasting
peace. When things are not all right, it
is not positive thinking or willpower that carries us, it is the assurance of
the solid foundation that ultimately, everything will be alright. So how does one learn how to find this peace?
Experiencing the peace that passes
understanding begins with the discipline of thinking. When Paul says to think about what is true,
noble, right, etc., he is not referring to relaxation, visualization or
thought-control techniques such as can be found in any bookstore or self-help
website. These will never deal with the
big questions: Where did I come from?
Why am I here? What should I be
doing? Where am I going? But why don’t today’s resources tell you to
think deeply about life? Because Western
secular society operates without any answers to these questions. So the only answer that they can provide is
to not think about everything, but to relax and find experiences that give you
pleasure. Think about it! Christian peace comes not from thinking less,
but from thinking more. Paul uses the
word logizdomai, which means “to
reckon”, to tell us to reckon our present sufferings as not worth comparing to
the glory that shall be revealed.
Think about doctrine. But how will that help? Think.
Is Jesus the only Son of God? Did
he come to earth, die, rise and go to the right hand of God? Did he suffer so one day you won’t have to? If these are true, then that is all the
comfort you need. If not, then the only
happiness you will ever know is what you can get in the 70 or so years you may
have. If you lose your happiness to some
trouble, it is gone forever. So either
this is as good as it gets or Jesus is on the throne ruling all things. So if you need peace, start thinking. Think about who God is, what he has done, who
you are in Christ and the future he has prepared for you. Count it, add it up and let the glory of
gospel salvation sink in. Your bad
things will turn out for good, your good things cannot be taken away, and the
best is yet to come.
Next, Dr. Keller describes the
discipline of thanking. Paul says to
make our requests to God with thanksgiving.
Notice he does not say to ask God, then after you receive what you’ve
asked for to give thanks. We thank God
ahead of time because Paul is calling us to trust God. We will never be content until we acknowledge
that our lives are in his control and that he is wiser than we are. God says to us, “[When] a child of mine makes
a request, I always give that person what he or she would have asked for if
they knew everything I know.” Do you
believe that? To the degree you believe
that, you are going to have peace. And
if you don’t believe it, you won’t have the peace you could otherwise
have. Make your requests known with
thanksgiving.
Third is the discipline of
loving. We are not only to think the
right things, we are also to love the right things. Augustine was familiar with the problem of Greek philosophy. It was: how can you live a life of
contentment? For the Stoics, the problem
was because we love things too much. If
you love success, even when you achieve it, you will be anxious. If you love your family, you will worry about
it. You will always worry and be anxious
about what you love, and if something goes wrong, it will devastate you. The problem is loving things you cannot
control. (Does this sound a little bit
like Buddhism?) The answer was to love what
you can control – your own virtue. The
only thing that can make you content is the knowledge that you are being the
person you choose to be and want to be.
(Does this sound a little bit like what our current society says?) But can you control even your own
virtue? You are human, frail,
complex. Your own virtue can let you
down just as easily as anything else.
Augustine’s answer was that “only love of the immutable can bring
tranquility.” And the only thing that is
immutable is God. The problem is not that
we love things too much, it is that we love God too little. So the solution is to reorder our lives
beginning by loving God supremely.
“When something is taken from us,
our suffering is real and valid. But
often, inside, we are disproportionately cast down because the suffering is
shaking out of our grasp something that we allowed to become more than just a
good thing to us.” We may say, “Jesus is
Lord”, but functionally, we have gotten our self-worth from something
else. The answer to placing God at the
pinnacle of our love is to rediscover the gospel of free grace. Our hearts will tell us that God will not
save us because we are unworthy, but we must remember that salvation is for the
humble, those who admit they are not worthy.
When we suffer, we should examine
our lives to see if the suffering is unnecessarily intensified by anything we
have set our hearts and hopes upon too much.
We must reorder our lives.
Suffering often reveals that things we thought we could not live without
we really can live without when we trust God.
When we cultivate an existential grasp of his love for us, then, though
suffering will hurt, and often hurt deeply, it won’t devastate us because it
cannot touch our main thing – God, his love and salvation.
“How can we bring ourselves to love
God more? “God” can be just an
abstraction, even if you believe in him.
How can we feel more love for God?
Don’t try to work directly on your emotions. That won’t work. Instead, let your emotions flow naturally
from what you are looking at.” Horatio
Spafford lost all four of his daughters when their ship sank in the Atlantic as
they were travelling to England with their mother. On his way across the Atlantic to bring his
wife home he wrote a hymn – It Is Well with My Soul. “Here is what I want you to think about: why
would a man dealing with his grief, seeking the peace of God – the peace like a
river – spend the entire hymn on Jesus and his work of salvation? And why would he bring up the subject of his
own sin at such a time? He wrote:
My sin, oh,
though the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not
in part but the whole,
Is nailed
to the cross, and I bear it no more.
Praise
the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul.
What has that got to do with his
four little girls who are dead?
Everything! Do you know why? When things go wrong, one of the ways you
lose your peace is that you think maybe you are being punished. But look at the cross! . . .
Another thing you may think is that maybe God doesn’t care. But look at the cross! . . . In that hymn you
can watch a man thinking, thanking, and loving himself into the peace of
God. It worked for him under those
circumstances. It worked for Paul under
his circumstances. It will work for
you.”
Next time Chapter Sixteen: Hoping
Until then, don’t take my word for
it, read the book – don’t wait for the movie,
and have a little hope on me,
Roger
To learn more about Timothy Keller and his work at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, you can check out his personal website, his Facebook page or the church homepage.
Keller, Timothy (2013), Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering. Penguin Group. ISBN 978-0-525-95245-9
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