Peter Witkowski Discipleship, Evangelism, Pain & Suffering

Bedside Evangelism: Yes or No?

bedside-evangelismSharing the gospel with those about to wade through the river of death can seem daunting and at times inappropriate and unkind. The Clinical Pastoral Education movement ardently discourages ministers from discussing the cross, Jesus, and eternal life with those in the middle of a medical crisis. The group believes pastors should offer comfort through listening and through sharing encouraging thoughts that restate the patients’ beliefs, concerns, and desires.

While this pastoral trend towards therapeutic listening has a certain appeal because it keeps ministers from unnecessarily stepping on the toes of suffering and seems to picture God’s love, it actually hides the love of God from those who need it most.

Illnesses, car accidents, and natural disasters exist because of the fall. They are manifestations of evil. Christians should always seek to rescue, help, and comfort people who acutely feel the effects of the broken world. But sorrow and suffering are not random evils. They are often used by God to accomplish his divine will.

God afflicts the wicked with suffering because he desires their salvation. In 1 Samuel 5-6, the Philistines come to grips with this reality. They had defeated the Israelites and captured the Ark of the Lord. As the begin to celebrate this great victory, God pummels them with divine wrath. Their god, Dagon,  is smashed to pieces. Their people develop tumors and begin to drop like flies. Mice overrun their fields. Because of their great anguish the Philistines realize that the God of Israel is the most powerful God.

C.S. Lewis, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, wrote,

The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victims suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt

When life goes well, people are prone to ignore God. As Jeremiah 22:21 reminds us, “I spoke to you in your prosperity but you said, ‘I will not listen.” Pain gets the attention of the modern man and woman just as it got the attention of the ancient Philistines. But pain does not save. As Thomas Watson noted,

If pain and trouble were sufficient to repentance, then the dammed in hell should be most, for they are most in anguish.

Pain only knocks people off of their demigod thorns, revealing that someone else rules the universe. But pain does not fully reveal who that ruler is and how one can enjoy a peaceful relationship with God. The Philistines returned the Ark and escaped their pain. But they did not follow their cows into Israel and become followers of the one true God. The Philistines never found salvation.

Pastors have the amazing opportunity to supply the prophetic voice that the Philistines lacked. When a minister learns that a sinner is dying or hears that a less than faithful church member is approaching death, he should come to their bedside equipped with the gospel. The pastor should share the truth that Jesus has died to save sinners. As the Puritan Pastor Richard Baxter noted,

Even the stoutest of sinners will hear us on their death-bed, though they scorned us before.

The pastor should seize the bedside moment and share Christ with the dying, risking social scorn and a few bruised toes.

Is not the salvation of the wicked worth a little angst in the pastor’s souls? Did not Christ offer paradise to the thief on the cross? Can the faithful minister do any less?

Admittedly, pastors can abuse the suffering. The pastor can wrongfully offer salvation in exchange for physical blessing and peace. The sick and weak can be prone to do anything to get relief. The Philistines made golden tumors and mice. Pastors must offer Christ crucified and not some twisted gospel of self-interest where people come to God in order to get favors from him. God does not want to be treated as a genie bound to do the will of human flesh. God wants the sinner to repent and follow Him with his or her whole heart. Anything less is not real salvation and will not last. Watson rightfully notes,

A passionate resolution…raised in a storm will die in the calm.

Salvation ultimately has to be a work of God. And God often uses suffering to draw men and women to faith. Pastors should not hide the gospel when at the bedside of the dying. Rather as Baxter said, “it is time for us, while there is hope, to help him if we can.”

Pastor…Minister are you ready to help?

Peter Witkowski Pain & Suffering

Do You Know How to Suffer Well?

sufferingThe Christian life is a life a suffering. One Russian pastor who suffered much under the old Soviet Regime remarked to Nik Ripken, the author of The Insanity of God:

Persecution is like the sun coming up in the east. It happens all the time. It’s the way things are. There is nothing unusual or unexpected about it. Persecution for our faith has always been – and probably always will be – a normal part of life. 

But such glum sentiments hit many American Christians like a punch in the gut. We are seeking to find our best and most satisfying life now through Christ. We are following Christ in part so that we can have nice kids, a stable career, fun vacations, and the occasional spiritual high that comes via a powerful sermon, a great choir special, or a short-term mission trip. We are not embracing Christ because we want something hard and messy. We want our best life now.

The Normalcy  Suffering and Persecution

But despite our thoughts, the Scriptures actually affirm the Russian pastor’s understanding of suffering. Jesus repeatedly tells us to take up our cross and follow him.

 Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. – Matthew 16:24

While such denial obviously consists of the spiritual realities associated with battling the flesh, they also have physical consequences as well. Jesus says:

And you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved…if they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household. – Matthew 10: 22, 25b.

To identify with Christ, to call Christ our savior, and to follow Christ, we must be willing to suffer persecution. We must be willing to first fight against our flesh, to battle our desires, and to deprive our sinful hearts. And, we must be willing to endure snide comments from our mother-in-law, embrace a pink-slip from out boss, and to suffer death at the hands of our neighbors. Those who embrace Christ and who refuse to abandon the gospel when the world labels them foolish, hateful, and bigoted will suffer.

Paul makes this point clear in 2 Timothy 1 and 2. Verse 1:8 famously says,

Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but share in the suffering for the gospel by the power of God

In 2 Timothy 2:3 Paul revisits the subject writing, “Share in the suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.”

Christians who are unashamed of the gospel are those who share in suffering. Suffering and persecution happen all the time. They are like the sun coming up.

rome-2350633_1920The question quite naturally becomes, “How do we do this?” How do we suffer well? How do we avoid  seeing suffering and falling away from the gospel like Phygelus and Hermogenes did and stand firm like Onesiphorus (2 Tim 1:15-18)? How to we prepare for and then suffer well?

Paul gives us three analogies or three pictures of the Christian life that help us prepare for and survive suffering.

1. Avoid Civilian Pursuits

First Paul tell us to avoid civilian pursuits and to keep our focus on Christ. “No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him (2 Tm 2:4).” We must not allow God’s good gifts to dominate our lives. We must not peruse a spouse to the point where we become entrapped in sexual sin and cease to live for Christ. We must not pursue our kids athletic of theatrical skills to the point we seldom attend church and we regularly neglect our and our children’s spiritual life. We never or seldom read the Scriptures, prayer and serve with others in the church because we are always at the field or at the auditorium. We must not become so devoted to our job and financial success that we neglect family worship and praying with our spouse. We must not allow civilian pleasures, the cares of the world to undo our faith.

We must live to please God. We must live to glorify Christ with our speak, our eating, our drinking our everything ( 1Cor. 10:31). As James McDonald said,

Our decisions do not boil down to meaningless preferences about food, drink, and other minutiae; they boil down to giving glory to God.

We must bend our kids’ sport’s careers to the gospel, we must bend our work schedule to the gospel, and we must bend all of our ambitions to the gospel. We must live as soldiers devoted to their heavenly Lord. And when push comes to shove, baseball, careers, and the world must be shoved aside for the gospel. If we shove the Gospel aside for the world, we will only despair and spiritual ruin. If we hope to be ready for suffering and if we hope to suffer well today, we must live as soldiers who sacrifice all civilian pursuits for Christ.

2. Compete According To The Rules

Second, we must compete according to the rules. Paul writes, “An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules (2 Tim 2:4).” Brother and sisters we must abide by God’s revealed Words. We must obey the Scriptures if we hope to finish well. The Russians were recently kicked out of the Olympics because they repeatedly used illegal drugs to give their athletes and unfair advantage. And instead of winning more medals and accruing fame and fortune, the Russians were kicked out the competition and won dishonor and condemnation.

If we attempted to live the Christian life by breaking the Word of God, we too will awake to find our lives filled with dishonor and condemnation. If we lie about the health of our church budget to attract deceive people into giving more gifts, if we refuse to report sexual abuse in an attempt to further the gospel, and if we promote non-Christians to assume positions of leadership in our church to gain fame in the community, we will end in ruin. If we hope to survive persecution, if we hope to find spiritual hope in the midst of cancer, and if we hope to find the power to continue loving our unlovable great grandmother whose in hospice, we must compete according to the Word. We must obey God. We cannot expect to experience spiritual blessing while breaking his reveal Word. We must compete according to the rules.

3. Labor Faithfully

Thirdly, we must labor faithfully. The last word picture Paul employs is that of a farmer.  “It is the hard-working farmer who ought to have the first share of the crops (2 Tim 2:6).” Farming is not going to get you notice. Farmers who daily work their farms planting crops, tending to their animals, and working on tractors do not get reality T.V. shows. The world does not stop and notice the farmer who painstakingly plants field after field with soybeans. No, the world is attracted to mid-twenty somethings who wear tank-tops and short skirts while the get into bar fights on the beach and to powerful men and women who gain power through quips, brides, and flashes speeches.

Paul mentions farmers for exactly this reason. The Christian life is hard and often unnoted. The persistent hardships of caring for young children, of counseling teenagers, of taking senior adults to the doctor rarely earn the praise of others. No one asks us to write a book about the many unseen things that we do. But this unseen things are the crux of our spiritual life. The faithfulness that comes from loving unlovable kids, that comes from bearing with unbearable teenagers, and that comes from helping unhelpful seniors is what makes us into the Christians we are today and into those who can suffer well in the future. The boring, plod-along things of life are precisely the things God uses to shape are form us. God is in the mundane. God cares greatly about our interactions with our children, the grocery clerk, and out next door neighbor.  The mundane things of our lives are vitally important to our spiritual formation. Embrace those thing through the power of Christ. And as we live out the gospel in the little things, we prepare our hearts for future hardships and sufferings.

If we do work out our live faithfully in the little unnoticed things of life, we will reap. We will not get the leftovers. We get the first fruits. We get salvation; we get heaven; and, we get eternity with Christ!

Final Thoughts

Suffering, persecution, and hardship are not exciting words. But until Christ comes or until we go to him, they will be constants in the Christian’s vocabulary. Are you ready for the sun to come up in the East?

Peter Witkowski Apologetics, Pain & Suffering

Did Prayer Fail?

prayWhy pray? Why go to church? Why worship God?

These questions have been dramatically tossed out before our culture. When Devin Kelly slaughtered twenty-seven people ranging in age from an unborn baby of eight months to a seventy-seven year old man, he directly challenged the value of Christianity.  When men, women, and children our gunned down in the very act of praying and worshiping, culture cannot help but surmise that following Christ is a pointless practice. And now some would extend that sentiment and claim that religion is dangerous.

Most members of secular culture tolerate some religious observances. The finger pointed up to heaven as the baseball player rounds the bases and the kneel by the quarterback who just crossed the goal line are deemed acceptable. Admittedly some do get a little queasy when encountering these displays of religious devotion. But most Americans view religion to be nothing more than the Marxian opioid that enables people to slug through the difficulties of life. Our secular friends do not inhale our religious fumes but they are happy for us to partake.

Much of that indifferent, societal good will vanished on Sunday, November 7.  The worship of Christ resulted in the death of twenty-seven people. Instead of working hard to create laws that would have protected them and others from a mass shooting, the men, women, and children were worshiping God at church. Even worse, several national politicians worship this God.

According to many in celebrities and politicians, the prayers of the church members and other Christians failed. The day began with friendly smiles ended in the tears of sorrow. Hence our culture asks us, “Why pray?” The rhetorical questions implies we should not pray. God is distant, asleep, or at the very least inept. The time for prayer is gone according to the great thinkers of the twitter universe. The time for meaningful human action has arrived. Society needs to dispense with the opioids of religion and take real action.

While many in America challenge the relevance of praying, they do so from a secular worldview. They challenge prayer because they believe religion is nothing more than a social drug. They deny the reality of heaven and hell. Many Americans are modern day epicureans, seeking to find meaning in pleasure and experience. They believe that joy consists of doing as much of what you want when you want it for tomorrow we die.

They may employee the occasional prayer to God when they encounter an illness or a bumpy airplane ride. But to them, prayer is nothing more than one of many life-lines that can be used to escape or lessen tragedy. And if it fails to help you achieve your goals it should be abandoned.

But this is not the end goal of the Christian worldview. The goal of the Christian, to borrow from the shorter catechism, is, “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” The goal of the Christian is to commune and to be with God. Christians do not discover life through accumulating wealth, through mastering education, or through experiencing unique events. They discover life by experiencing God through his word and prayer by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Did Devin Kelly’s murderous actions separate his victims for the love of God? Did he destroy the Christian worldview? Did prayer fail?

Did Prayer Fail?

No.  Death is not the end of life. Death is when real life begins for the Christian. Death is not the ultimate sign of resignation and failure. For the believer, death is the conduit through which he or she accesses unfiltered communion with God. Paul wrote in Philippians 2:23 that, “My desire is to depart and be with Christ for that is far better.” Being with Christ means we experience no more pain, sorrow, or frustration. And it means we commune with God perfectly. We will no longer experience quiet times interrupted by day dreams. We will no longer fall asleep while praying. We will no longer leave a worship service perturbed, confused, and unloved. We will have a perfect relationship with God. The men, women, and children who died that day did not experience futility or failure. Their prayers did not go unanswered. They were answered in the most real and meaningful way possible. They came to worship God in part and ended the day worshiping him in full. To be with Christ is far better than anything in this world.

Why We Hurt?

While death was gain for the 27 people who died a few days ago, death is not gain for their families and for the people left behind. Paul also deals with the reality of loss. He notes in Philippians 2:24 “But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.” Paul knows that death breaks human relationships. Death brings harm and discouragement to those who are left behind. Thankfully, God’s grace and mercy covers and sustains the broken-hearted. But the pain and sorrow associated with death is poignantly real, seeping into the depths of our hearts.  Christ had to die to overcome death. And he did. And all who follow him will not be conquered by death. Rather they join Christ and conquer death through the power that raised Christ from the dead. All who appeal to God through prayer confessing their sins will not be disappointed. They may not get their best life now on this earth. But they get something far better. They get what God promised them, life with him.

Did prayer fail on November 7, 2017? Absolutely not.

Will you keep praying?

31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be[i] against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? 33 Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. 34 Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.[j] 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 36 As it is written,

“For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. – Romans 8:31-37