Listening to: Fairport Convention: Leige and Leif
I'm finally reading Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change by Paul Tripp. It is living up to all the hype I have heard. Highly recommended.
These are my notes on Chapter 8 (Building Relationships by Identifying with Suffering) and the third element of four which Tripp identifies a part of a "Loving Ministry Relationship":
- Enter the person's world
- Incarnate the love of Christ
- Identify with suffering
- Accept with agenda [for their change]
Suffering is common
We are all sinners who suffer. This is something we have in common with everyone. Yet we often respond to sufferers by distancing ourselves from them. We presume that their suffering is something we won't experience, and struggle to relate to them. As a result our ministry often boils down to platitudes, promises of prayer, and gestures.
The bible on suffering:
- God is sovereign over suffering
- God is good
- God has a purpose for our suffering
- The bible explains the ultimate reasons for our suffering
- Fallen world
- our flesh
- other's sin
- the Devil
- God's good purpose
- Suffering is real and evil is wrong.
Sufferers usually feel alone, isolated and alienated from others and from God.
If we have suffered to the extent that we know these feelings then:
- This means we can identify with sufferers.
- We are called minister to those in pain.
Christ suffered as our brother. The title "brother" implies:
- We are in the same family.
- We are in a similar position in the family
- We share similar life experiences
This captures our relationship to sufferers. We do not stand above them, as gurus, or those who have arrived. Instead we stand alongside them.
This posture is essential because it recognises that:
- "God sends people my way, not only so they will change, but so I will too."
- "We are not what people need. Our purpose is to connect them to a living, active, redeeming Christ. He gives them what they need...I stand alongside you and point you to the Father.
- It helps to give our stories power, because as we are honest about our failings and sufferings, it shows the relevance of our experiences of God's grace.
Christ was "made perfect" through his suffering. Just as Christ's suffering had a purpose, so our suffering has a purpose. Analogous to Christ, we are sanctified and grow through suffering. We share this with our brothers and sisters who suffer, and it:
- Makes truth we speak concrete, carrying them out of the abstract into the familiar.
- Encourages us to be humble and honest.
- Makes our personal story more about God than me.
- Makes our life a window through which people see the glory of Christ.
- Results in worship of Christ
Model of Christian compassion (vv.3-7):
Purposeful suffering --> experience of God's comfort --> ability to comfort others --> community of hope.
- God is the source of compassion. Therefore:
- God is the comfort we offer people (not 'it will all work out' etc)
- As God's children we should be marked by his compassion
- The comfort we have received in past suffering is to be passed on in ministry, not hoarded.
- Suffering is how we share in Christ, and so experience his comfort. It is a sign we are in Christ.
- Our suffering belongs to God, and we must put Christ on centre stage as we suffer. "When we feel like dying, he calls us to greater death".
- Purpose of suffering is to fill us with hope.
Method of Christian compassion (vv.8-11):
Practical steps for telling your stories of how God used your sufferings to encourage others:
- Tell a completed story
- It must be old enough to have reached it's ending in how God helped you (not "misery loves company")
- Be honest in describing your struggles and failures
- Be discerning and purposeful
- Limit details.
- Focus on God
- Make God the key actor in the drama
- Tell your story with humility about your continuing need for grace.
- Make it clear that you are not what God needs - God is
- Make the goal of the story worship.
In Exclusion & Embrace, Miroslav Volf talks about God giving us a new past - another story, even another's story that i can tell of my sufferings. There's a related clip of of him preaching that here. It's quite reminiscent of Bonhoeffer's who am i?
ReplyDeletehere's an extract:
Am I really what others say about me?
Or am I only what I know of myself?
Restless, yearning and sick,
like a bird in its cage,
struggling for the breath of life,
as though someone were choking my throat;
hungering for colors, for flowers,
for the songs of birds,
thirsting for kind words and human closeness,
shaking with anger at capricious tyranny and the pettiest slurs,
bedeviled by anxiety, awaiting great events that might never occur,
fearfully powerless and worried for friends far away,
weary and empty in prayer, in thinking and doing,
weak, and ready to take leave of it all.
Who am I? This man or that other?
Am I then this man today and tomorrow another?
Am I both all at once? An impostor to others,
but to me little more than a whining, despicable weakling?
Does what is in me compare to a vanquished army,
that flees in disorder before a battle already won?
Who am I? They mock me these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, you know me, O God. You know I am yours.
Wow! Miroslav Volf in the Crystal Cathedral. I never thought I'd see myself watching that. Thanks for that Chris.
ReplyDeletePerhaps, Tripp doesn't sufficiently show that my story, is also simultaneously Christ's story (see here).
The danger tends to be that we either preach ideas, principles and even the bible story in abstraction from us so it is not made concrete for the sufferer. It just seems like pius platitudes OR we preach ourselves and our story apart from Christ.
I found Tripp particularly helpful in two ways:
1. Showing our real shared identity with those who suffering. Too often we feel we have nothing to say, and back off.
2. Pointing out the very real danger of promoting ourselves as what people need, and creating an unhealthy dependance.
It was very practical advice, which seemed to me very wise.
Both Tripp and Volf could give more narrative colour to the 'other story' we tell. I think we can drift too quickly to vague comments about God's love, God's forgiveness, God's comfort, and even our adoption. All precious truths to us sufferers. Instead we should seek to anchor the story in OUR lives and our personal stories as we counsel others, but also JESUS CHRIST'S life and story. We have to see our suffering and our hope as really real. Unreality is one of the biggest problems I face in serving others in my speech.
I think Romans 6 is brilliant on this two story perspective.