This morning I read a letter from Pastor Joel Ellis to a friend who is hurting and agonizing over many things. It is a truly excellent letter, filled with genuine compassion and what I believe to be very helpful insight. I think it is something everyone of us could benefit from reading and so pass it on to you with a prayer that it may be useful to you in your own walk with the Lord. You are loved, Pastor John  

Pastor Joel Ellis (of Reformation OPC, Apache Junction, AZ) writes:

Greetings in our Lord Jesus Christ! I hope you are having a very blessed week and experiencing the joy and peace that we have in Christ which transcends and triumphs over all of our pain, stress, trouble, and labor. I have attached an edited copy of a letter I recently sent to a friend with whom I correspond on a regular basis. He is not a member of our church and is unknown to any of our members. It is an appeal to trust God when circumstances, pain, and doubt makes it seem impossible to do so. I debated whether to share it, but knowing how often this kind of counsel is needed, I decided to do so. I hope it has value for some of you.

A Letter to a Friend

Every believer is like the father in Mark 9 whether he knows it or not. The father’s son is severely tormented by a demon with a self-destructive, suicidal agenda. The monster throws the boy into the fire and into the water in an effort to kill his host. The father probably hasn’t slept well a single night since the demon came into his son’s life.

We don’t know how old the boy was or how long the oppression had been going on, but at some point the father hears that Jesus of Nazareth has been casting out demons. He brings his son to where Jesus is reported to be, but he learns that Jesus has gone up on the mountain with three of his disciples. The father was probably disappointed, but the remaining nine disciples reassure him: “Don’t worry. We can handle this. Jesus gave us the power to cast out demons too, and we have done so successfully many times. We will help your son.” Evidently they tried, but they failed. The demon laughed at them. Their power was useless. They faced their greatest test yet, and they did not succeed. An argument broke out. The religious leaders jumped on the chance to call these men, and their master, Jesus, a fraud. A crowd grew, and the argument became louder, when suddenly Jesus returned. The Lord asked the father what was going on, and the father explained. The father wanted to believe that Jesus could help him, but he was wracked with grief, exhausted in every way that a person can be, and his faith had been badly shaken by the failure of the disciples. He asked Jesus, “If you can do anything, have mercy on us and help us.” Jesus replied, “If you can? Believe. All things are possible to him who believes.” The father answered in sincerity and brokenness, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

Which is it? Was that father an unbeliever who wanted to believe or a believer who struggled with unbelief? Yes. Every believer, to one degree or another, is that father and shares in the same experience.

I appreciate your honesty about your lack of faith. Maybe that is real and what you lack is a true, new birth. Not a religious decision, not a self-directed commitment, but a radical change of heart and life affected by the Holy Spirit. Maybe you have had that new birth but years of spiritual inattention, inconsistency, disobedience, and neglect have weakened your faith and led to this spiritual anguish and trial. Or maybe God has withdrawn a bit in order to teach you your weakness without him. He does that sometimes. Psalm 30 describes a time in David’s life when he thought everything was going well. God took a step back, and David landed on his face. “Be humble or be humbled.” That saying isn’t in the Bible, but the idea certainly is. God sometimes sends us sanctifying trouble to teach us to trust him.

I’m sorry about your friend… who took his own life. It is hard to wrap our minds around things like that. I won’t try to offer you any simplistic answers or platitudes. There aren’t any. Cancer is an evil. Pain is an undeniable reality. And the misery that leads to suicide doesn’t get better simply because we will it to be so. There is no point living in a fantasy, and that’s sometimes what well-meaning Christians do. They imagine all kinds of promises that God never made: “God wants you to have your best life now.” “This will work out, get better, turn out just fine.” How do you know? Today is bad, and tomorrow could be worse. God never promises to take away all of our pain and problems in this life. He never promised that the good guys would live to be old or die in honorable ways. Life is hard, and then you die. A lot of modern, American church-ianity doesn’t admit that and wants to pretend otherwise. But that is not a fair representation of the Bible. The Scriptures are very clear about the painful realities of our present, fallen world. The Bible doesn’t whitewash our pain and struggle. It doesn’t build castles in the clouds so that we can pretend it was other than what it is. The Scriptures deal in reality, and reality is cold, hard, and heavy.

You know this is wrong, on many levels. You know that good guys getting cancer and killing themselves is wrong. It’s not right. It’s unfair. Our hearts cry out for justice, but we don’t find it here. C. S. Lewis said that if you find in your heart a desire that cannot be satisfied in this world, it is evidence you were made for another. He’s right. The human heart carries desires that cannot be fulfilled here, and it’s because we were made for more.

You said you see around you “so many things daily that point to anything but an all powerful, benevolent, heavenly father,” but you perceive the evil and malevolence of those forces because your heart carries the fingerprints of a good and just God whose perfect righteousness enables you to perceive all of the injustice and wickedness in this world.

Do you suppose coyotes meditate upon the injustice of the world? Do you think hyenas are troubled by the moral implications of their social context? Evil and injustice don’t exist if there is no God. You would not be able to recognize what is wrong in the world if you did not have a category for good, justice, and truth.

… you need Jesus. I don’t say that because of what you wrote in the email. I say it to myself every day. I say it to my church every week. Literally, every Sunday we have a place in our worship where we corporately recite 1 Timothy 1:15: “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the foremost.”

That verse does not mean every person is supposed to believe his sins are more heinous than anyone else’s. That would obviously be untrue. It’s not a self-deprecating delusion that we are affirming in that verse. What the author is saying is this: “I am the first and the worst sinner I know, because I know my own sin in a way I know no one else’s.” I’m not a serial killer, rapist, or thief. I’m a “good person” by societal standards. But am I justified by this? No way. I know my heart. I know the pride, selfishness, lust, anger, resentment, laziness, and indifference that lurks in me. I am fighting against my flesh every day, and my greatest opponent is not the world or the Devil, it is myself. It’s not just the world that is broken; it is me. I am broken, broken by the sin outside and all around me, broken by the sin within me, the sin for which I am personally responsible.

Why do you care that another person got sick and killed himself? At least it wasn’t you. Tomorrow it may be you or me, but we’ll simply enjoy the ride until we’re not having fun anymore, and then…. If there is no God, there is no basis for grieving over a good man. We are just bags of biological material, stardust bumping into other particles of stardust, random in our appearance, purposeless in our existence, and destined to pass out of sentient experience. But you know that’s not true. You are grieving. You are questioning. You are wondering why, what’s the point, how can this happen? Stardust doesn’t ask these kinds of questions. Earthworms don’t write books exploring the purpose of life. Only the offspring of God do so.

There is a God, and his existence doesn’t depend on our belief in him or trust in him at all. He made man in his image and gave us life for the purposing of glorifying him and enjoying fellowship with him forever. But our first father, Adam, took that gift and corrupted it. We have received God’s good gifts and used them in pride and selfishness. We have rejected relationship with God and decided we wanted instead to be God. How is that working out for us? Have we been able to justify our existence? Have we found transcendent peace and joy by removing God from the equation?

The Bible describes the gospel as of “first importance” (1Cor. 15:3). This gospel is, literally, good news. It’s the only objectively and permanently good news you can count on: Christ died for sins, he was buried, and he rose the third day, so that whoever believes in him will not perish but will have everlasting life. Christ paid the penalty of our sins. He took the death we deserved, so that we might receive the gift of eternal life we do not deserve but are freely given in him. You are not saved by faith. Faith has no inherent power to save or worth to merit anything. You are saved, if you are saved at all, by Christ. It isn’t faith that saves us; it is the One in whom we have faith. It is not the

strength of your faith in him that saves you either; it is having faith in him. Even a small faith, even a weak faith—is there any other kind?–if it trusts in the Savior, is the instrument of divine justification and everlasting life.

Trust in him, my friend. Read the Psalms and cry out to him in prayer. Confess that this world is broken and that you, like the father in Mark 9, are an unbeliever who wants to believe, a believer who is struggling with unbelief, and one who knows the resolution cannot be found in yourself or this world. Pray that God will give you the grace of faith–it is a gift (Php. 1:29; Eph. 2:8-9)–and enable you to grow in your love for and trust in him.

Whatever you do, don’t give up. You are made by God and for God. Your life has meaning and purpose, and that purpose is not to be found in what you do but in who and whose you are. Don’t you lose sight of that. Be strong and courageous. I am here for you, to listen, to commiserate, to weep, to encourage, and to serve in anyway that I can.