-People handle sickness differently. Kids seem to get sudden onset sickness, like running around playing like everything’s normal, then stop and projectile vomit. And then go straight back to running around. As you get older, the approach to sickness has to change because you don’t bounce back quite as quickly, and sometimes that’s a difficult lesson to learn! 

-During college, I remember learning this lesson through a difficult experience. I had perennial sinus infections (at least once a year, hence surgery last week), so my way of combatting the these infections was trying to load myself up with EmergenC, the little powder form of vitamin C, and I’d mix it with my Mountain Dew. I don’t do that anymore, but I still will sometimes take EmergenC (with water)

-In this week’s text, we see David’s response to sickness.

READ/PRAY

1. A Plea and a Prayer (Psalm 38)

-Helpful summary of this Psalm: “The Psalm opens with a prayer (1); continues in a long complaint (2-8); pauses to dart an eye to heaven (9); proceeds with a second tale of sorrow (10-14); interjects another word of hopeful address to God (15); a third time pours out a flood of griefs (16-20); and then closes as it opened, with renewed petitioning (21-22).” Spurgeon

-I’m going to spend our time in this Psalm looking at what David asks of God. The other parts are a continuation of how terribly David feels, and I want us to focus more on David’s prayers, and then look at some different responses to sickness.

-First thing to note is the first word David uses. When sickness comes, where do you look? 

-The impulse for believers should be to look to God! Acknowledge His oversight, His control, His plans.

-Do you trust in God’s direction in every area of your life? David doesn’t try to exonerate himself, doesn’t make excuses, but the consequences are heavy.

-Chatting with Micah this week about 3 different kinds of suffering: general fall, righteous suffering, being dumb. 

-God created the world good, without sickness or dying, everything working perfectly as God intended. But with the Fall, disobeying God’s law, comes death, destruction, chaos, and pain. Because of sin entering into the world, suddenly everything becomes difficult because of what scientists call “entropy” that things always fall into chaos and disorder, that’s a result of the Fall, it means life is going to be hard, it means your car will break down, your body won’t recover as fast as it did when you were a kid. 

-There’s also suffering that comes from being righteous and facing the influence of the devil, where Jesus tells us in this world we will have suffering and difficulty. 1 Peter says we should rejoice when we suffer for the sake of being righteous (in good standing with God). A subset of this is so that we can encourage others, 2 Cor. 1:4 “He comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any kind of affliction, through the comfort we ourselves receive from God.” Don’t miss that sometimes your suffering isn’t just for you! We need to remember that God sends us to others as well.

-Finally, sometimes suffering comes as a consequence to your own dumb decisions. Think of David who lost a son because of his adultery and murder, or Moses who missed out on the promised land because of his anger, or Peter whose impulsiveness during Jesus’ trial meant he betrayed his Savior. Your sin will find you out, either in this life, or the next.

-In this case, David is dealing with the consequences of his sin: look at the end of vs. 3 into 4.

-We live in a world that doesn’t have any space or understanding of the spiritual realities around us all the time. We look for purely naturalistic explanations for everything. We read passages in Scripture about demonic influence and use terms like epilepsy to describe it. When we talk about sickness, we often talk about germs and bacteria. And while that is right and true what we don’t often talk about is sickness being the consequence of spiritual decisions.

-As I say that, I want to be careful in the way we talk about this. Not all sickness is a consequence of a sinful decision, but I worry that we have gone SO far to the extreme that we have no room in our minds for sickness as a consequence of spiritual decisions we’ve made. Not health/prosperity gospel, but acknowledging the complex realities of being human where we’re impacted by biology AND theology! We have become so focused on the material world (taste, touch, see, smell) that I worry we too quickly neglect the spiritual world, the things that have eternal value. We’ll talk about that more in a bit, but don’t forget that in the meantime! 

-What does David ask God? To not be punished in anger. 

-Spurgeon: “I must be rebuked, for I am an erring child and You a careful Father, but do not throw too much anger into the tones of Your voice; deal gently although I have sinned grievously. The anger of others I can bear, but not Yours.” When we sin, there are consequences. David admits that, recognizes that reality, but he still asks God to be merciful and gracious to him.

–Heb. 10:31 “It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” Terrifying, living. God is completely unique among all the gods, the only one who’s alive, therefore He’s the only God who can punish sins committed against Him.

-Next: 9 Every desire is known to God. This is why God’s judgments are right and true, He can see down to every motive and desire of every human heart. 

-So why hide? If God knows everything we can’t hide from Him, so don’t! Confess yours sins to God, it’s not like it’s a surprise, and it’s not like He’s going to stop loving you because of it!

-Then 15 in the midst of recognizing the implications of his sinful choices where does David put his hope? In God. Friends, it’s far better to trust yourself to God’s judgment than the judgment of the world.

-Sin looks so enticing until you realize the implications of your sins. “If you understand what holiness is, you come to see that real happiness is on the far side of holiness, not the near side. Holiness gives us new desires and brings old desires into line with one another.” Keller

-Friends: sin always and only leads to death, either in this life or the next. We have to decide if we’re going to die to the sin in ourselves or die to Christ, but we will all face a death of some sort.

-And sometimes, but not always, the implications of our sin will be felt and experienced here and now, as David does. But I can guarantee even if you don’t see or feel like you’re facing any problems because of your sin here, you will face eternal realities due to not living according to God’s commands. 

-Last request 21-22 even though David is facing consequences from God, he realizes the only hope he has for salvation is by running to God. Being saved can’t come from anything or anyone else, even though we often act like it can.

-Why do you think food and drink are so enticing? Because we act like they can save us! Why are drugs so addicting? Because we act like they can solve our problems. Why do people cheat to get more money? Because we act like money can fix our deepest longings.

-Friends, David serves as a model here for how we should handle sickness and disease in our lives: run to God, He’s the only one who can truly save you!

-One of the people on my big hiking trip is an ER Dr, and he made the comment one night that we need to change the way we pray for medical issues. We often pray that God would guide the surgeon’s hand, as if the surgeon is the savior, when what we should be asking is God to intervene DESPITE the accident prone human working on us! (No offense to anyone who’s Dr) but doesn’t that put a different perspective on it? Ultimately the only hope we have for salvation here and in eternity is by running to God, putting our hope anywhere else is guaranteed to let us down.

-This Psalm is a glimpse of the physical implications of our sin, but there’s another important place in the Bible that shows not all sin is because of a specific sin, so I want to look at John 9.

• Whose Sin? (John 9)

-Ultimately all sickness is traced back to the Fall, but what about individual sickness? There are accounts in the OT of physical sickness being traced to a specific sin (Miriam, Moses’ sister), but does that happen today, when we’re under a new covenant that came after Jesus’ resurrection? Yes! This story looks at the way we view sickness, and how Jesus views sickness.

-John’s primary point in this whole book is to demonstrate that Jesus is the promised Messiah, which includes healing people. He does this by connecting Jesus’ teaching to His healings. Jesus’ message isn’t just a proposition or intellectual argument, it’s supposed to be connected to physical wholeness and flourishing as a human.

-Cara and I were talking about this a few weeks ago – Jesus desire is for us to be truly human, sin causes us to become sub-human, or less than human. So Christianity is the process of becoming what God truly intended us to be: fully human. Jesus was the only true human to ever live!

-Think about that! Part of the implication of that is there was no division in Jesus. He is the only person who didn’t talk better than He walked! He both talked the talk and walked the walk, and He’s called us to do the same, which is the process of slowly, day by day becoming more human.

-The reason I want to take a look at this passage is because it shows the way we tend to respond to suffering, which has been a problem for a really long time. His disciples see a blind man and ask who’s responsible for this man’s problem?

-I don’t know about you, but one thing I’ve discovered is true of me is when I’m facing something difficult, I tend to ask God “Why me!? What did I do to deserve this!?” But I’m very slow to give thanks to God when things are going well. Maybe you’re the same way. Maybe you forget all the good gifts God’s given you! The fact that you’re here today is a gift that we shouldn’t neglect or take for granted. That’s our response, but look at how Jesus answers that question:

-SO THAT God’s Work might be displayed. Friends, our view of sickness and suffering is often way too short-sighted. Part of the reason we get so off base when we suffer is because we are so focused on the immediate feelings we have, but feelings come and go based on a moment. I read a fascinating article this past week that looked at being spiritually sick. Often it’s easy to tell when your physically sick (something’s not working as it should), but how do we tell when we’re spiritually sick? Have you ever been spiritually sick? See, Jesus tells us that sickness is meant to serve as different purpose than we often admit, and even sickness and suffering are meant to be tools to bring true healing in our lives, to make us more like Jesus, to make us more human.

-There’s a beautiful picture of this in The Chosen. A couple caveats, and then the story. This is extra-biblical, we need to use our imagination to fill in some of the details of these stories, just like the writers of this show are doing. Doesn’t contradict Scripture, but isn’t explicit in the text. Same reason we get caught up in stories, they help shape our imagination in things are good, true, and beautiful. Also, don’t pray to Johnathan Roumie who plays Jesus in this show, he’s just an actor! Story: Jesus has just commissioned his disciples to go out 2 by 2 to start preaching the gospel and heal people, just like Jesus had done. One of the disciples (little James) has a limp (actor has scoliosis). Jesus has healed a number of people of all sorts of maladies, but not one of the 12 disciples, and he was just tasked with healing others. It’s a few minutes long, but I think it’s worth watching.

-Do you see the kindness of Jesus here? He doesn’t promise an easy life, He doesn’t promise healing, but He promises Himself. That doesn’t mean life will always make sense here, but it will make sense if we have a long-term perspective instead of worrying about the immediate feelings. 

-Friends, even sickness and debilitating disease is only for a moment compared to the glory of eternity that is coming. Can we be faithful and endure suffering now for the glory that’s coming in the future, or do we expect God to fix all our momentary issues now?

-The final piece that I think we need to consider on this topic is God as our Father. Fathers are given a unique role in the family to represent and image God to the rest of the family. We know that no earthly father will do that perfectly, but they’re supposed to give us a little picture of what God does in all our lives.

• Loving Discipline (Hebrews 12:7-11)

-We need to talk briefly about the role of parents here. Parents are meant to shepherd the children God gives them. This means training them morality, providing for them, and at times disciplining them as a necessary consequence to disobedience. 

-It’s not fun or easy to discipline, but it is necessary. I once heard a comedian say that he was spanked as a child, and everyone who wasn’t is just entitled today. Every parent has to discipline somewhere. For example, you’re not going to let your kid play by the stove without supervision (up to a point), or you’re not going to let your kids play in the street without first teaching them that cars would win in any battle they had with one! 

-Yet that discipline (though painful and difficult in the moment) leads to better outcomes because the children learn how to pursue the right things. God does the same thing with us. Sometimes He allows suffering to come into our lives (righteous suffering) so that we can be made more like Jesus, that is so that we can become more truly human. The question is can you be faithful in enduring that suffering, or will you just give up?

-One of my favorite quotes I’ve ever read: “Why do bad things happen to good people? That only happened once. And he volunteered.” R.C. Sproul

-Friends, any suffering we face is a tiny sliver of the suffering Jesus faced when he bore the penalty for our sins. He did that both to provide salvation for us, and to demonstrate to us how we can endure in the midst of our suffering, so for anyone who is sick today, either physically or spiritually: run to the Lord! Salvation, true eternal healing is found in Him, and Him alone.