{"id":90,"date":"2018-11-06T16:33:33","date_gmt":"2018-11-07T00:33:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/migrate.bettersermons.org\/?p=90"},"modified":"2020-06-01T11:41:03","modified_gmt":"2020-06-01T18:41:03","slug":"the-agony-of-painlessness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/the-agony-of-painlessness\/","title":{"rendered":"The Agony of Painlessness"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Agony of Painlessness<\/span><\/div>\n

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Key Passage<\/strong>:\u00a0Hebrews 5:8, 9:\u00a0Although He [Jesus] was a Son, He learned obedience from what He suffered and, once made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him.<\/em>Key Thought<\/strong>: Even spiritual pain can serve as an important warning mechanism, a wakeup call when we are in danger of being lost.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Introduction:\u00a0<\/strong>In\u00a0Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants<\/em>, Dr. Paul Brand tells the heartbreaking story of a baby girl named Tonya. This small child, 18 months old, had a rare medical problem described as \u201ccongenital indifference to pain.\u201d Her mother first discovered it when she came into the baby\u2019s room one day and found her tiny daughter happily fingerpainting red swirls all over the white plastic sheet in the playpen. To her horror, Mom discovered that Tonya had bitten off the tip of her own finger and was playing in the blood. Apparently she simply didn\u2019t feel pain\u2014ever! Cuts, bruises, bites, and even discipline were completely ineffective as danger signals. Nothing hurt and it got to the point where the parents simply couldn\u2019t protect Tonya from herself. In fact, this child discovered that she could emotionally blackmail her own parents; if she misbehaved and they threatened anything, she would simply raise a finger to her mouth as though about to bite it, and they would cave in.<\/p>\n

Pain a Blessing:<\/strong>\u00a0Pain can actually be one of life\u2019s greatest blessings. Brand describes himself as a \u201ccareer lobbyist for pain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sympathy:\u00a0<\/strong>Some of you here today deal daily with unremitting pain.<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0Cancer: you already know it\u2019s there. You don\u2019t need the daily ache to keep reminding you of your desperate condition.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0Divorce: after years of marriage a relationship is over and there\u2019s emotional pain. But the pain is now too late to serve as a warning, because the breakup is already final. And you join others in asking helplessly, \u201cWhy does it have to hurt so bad?\u201d<\/p>\n

Ask God:<\/strong>\u00a0There sometimes aren\u2019t good answers to that question. When we get to heaven we\u2019ll ask God about why He allowed our specific pains to continue so long. We\u2019ll be satisfied with His answer then; that we know for sure. But I hope that today and for the rest of this series, we can already begin to partly understand why pain is here.<\/p>\n

What Is the GOOD of Pain?<\/strong>\u00a0Pain is often a lifesaver. Sufferers of Hansen\u2019s Disease (formerly referred to as leprosy) don\u2019t have sensations that warn them of danger. They burn fingers and don\u2019t know it. They walk on sensitive sore spots, even raw places, on their feet, and don\u2019t know to shift their weight to protect themselves. As a Christian missionary in India, Dr. Brand saw seeing lepers walking along briskly, almost jogging, on bleeding stumps with the bones sticking through. They simply didn\u2019t know to stop. The element of pain was not there to protect them.<\/p>\n

Pain Reveals God\u2019s Design:<\/strong>\u00a0Brand and co-author Philip Yancey relate how our bodies reveal what is actually a Creator\u2019s loving design.<\/p>\n

Example #1:<\/strong>\u00a0The Eye: it\u2019s a thousand times more sensitive to pain than the sole of your foot\u2014which makes sense. With the eye being a tool of vision, it needs to be transparent; that limits the number of opaque blood vessels. And the tiniest intruder like a speck of dust or a fist coming toward it invokes an immediate and reflexive act of protection. Your two eyeballs have a hair-trigger sensitivity to pain and a hair-trigger blink mechanism to keep pain out.<\/p>\n

Example #2:<\/strong>\u00a0The Foot: your soles are tough enough to withstand a lot more pain: two hundred grams per square millimeter of pressure, as opposed to two tenths of a gram on the eyeball. This differential is built into our human design. We\u2019re made to feel the right levels of pain in order to protect ourselves.<\/p>\n

Dr. Brand:\u00a0<\/strong>\u201cThe beauty of pain is that it lets you know right away when you are harming yourself. Pain, my body\u2019s way of alerting me to danger, will use whatever volume level is necessary to grab my attention. It was their very deafness to this chorus of messages that caused my leprosy patients to destroy themselves. They missed the \u2018shouts\u2019 of pain, leading to the direct injuries that I treated every day. And they also missed the whispers of pain, the dangers of the ordinary that come from constant or repetitive stress.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christian Application:<\/strong>\u00a0Spiritual pain is something God can often use as a warning of upcoming danger in the realm of the soul. For example, the first bits of carelessness begin to manifest themselves in the area of your personal devotions. You used to spend time with God each day, but for the last month now you\u2019ve put it off. Things were hard at the office, and you just didn\u2019t get around to having any meaningful time of Bible study and prayer. All at once, you felt the twinge of guilt, and noticed how you missed it! Or a temper flare up reminded you that things were different inside your heart. The soft tenderness had developed a bit of a crust.<\/p>\n

I Miss The Way\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>(Michael W. Smith, from his album\u00a0Eye To Eye<\/em>) a friend laments, \u201cI miss the way His love would dance within your eyes. I miss the way His heart was the soul of your life. And somewhere in the saddest part of heaven\u2019s room, Our Father sheds a tear for you. He\u2019s missing you, too.\u201d Sometimes spiritual pain serves as a jolt: \u201cWake up! Smell the burning coffee! Something is wrong in your prayer closet; it\u2019s been empty far too long.\u201d<\/p>\n

Levels of Needed Pain:<\/strong>\u00a0A wise God knows our spiritual pain threshold and sends just the signal we need. For some sensitive Christians, just the slightest tremor of conscience will send them to their knees. Some of the rest of us, more hardened and foolish, like the sole of Huckleberry Finn\u2019s bare foot, have needed more drastic pain signals. A loving God provides the necessary pain, that corrective measure, to bring us back to Him.<\/p>\n

Blocking It Out:<\/strong>\u00a0It is an oh-so-human temptation to try to block out the pains of life. Sometimes this is appropriate. Yet both in the physical and spiritual arenas, our bottles of aspirin and sore-muscle ointments can be deadly deceptions.\u00a0Pain relief in the United States is now a well over $70 billion-a-year industry; Americans, who represent five percent of the world\u2019s population, consume 50% percent of its manufactured drugs. Dr. Brand quotes the TV commercial line: \u201cI haven\u2019t got time for the pain.\u201d He wishes there would be at least one spot or ad acknowledging some benefit to pain. \u201cI wish they would say, \u2018First, LISTEN to your pain. It is your own body talking to you.\u2019\u00a0 It may be trying to tell you that you are violating your brain with tension, your ears with loudness, your eyes with constant television, your stomach with unhealthy food, your lungs with cancer-producing pollutants. Listen carefully to the message of pain before I give you something to relieve those symptoms. I can help with the symptoms, but you must address the cause.\u201d<\/p>\n

Drowning Out God\u2019s Messages:<\/strong>\u00a0We sometimes try to block out spiritual symptoms as well. We ask the coach of the team to rub some pain-killing liniment on our soul, as it were, so that we can play the entire second half without feeling pain. There are many ways to drown out the twinges of sin.<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0Busyness
\n2.\u00a0A louder TV
\n3.\u00a0A more frantic social life
\n4.\u00a0Even more work at church<\/p>\n

These all mask the pain, the still small voice of the conscience. They all block out the pain that a loving God, the \u201cGreat Physician\u201d may be trying to use right now as a signal to your heart.
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\nThe Pain of Jesus:<\/strong>\u00a0All pain is not good\u2014either in the world of medicine or spiritually. Even our Savior underwent heartaches and excruciating pain that can only be described as horror, a price paid for our sins. Hebrews 5:8, 9:\u00a0Although He [Jesus] was a Son, He learned obedience from what He suffered and, once made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him.\u00a0<\/em>So Jesus learned obedience through pain, and maybe God is calling us to do the same.<\/p>\n

Grandpa\u2019s Test:<\/strong>\u00a0After a lifetime of helping people whose lives were tragically destroyed because they couldn\u2019t feel pain, and after many long years of helping people compensate for that congenital handicap, Dr. Brand\u2019s own daughter had a baby boy. So Grandpa had to personally check to make sure that there were ten fingers and ten toes and that the spine was in line. But there was one test Dr. Brand wanted to perform on little Daniel\u2014and he waited until Mom was in the other room. With an ordinary straight pin, this loving physician gave that infant boy a healthy poke in one finger. The baby yanked his hand back, looked at the injured finger, and then at Grandpa Brand\u2014no doubt a look of severe disapproval.<\/p>\n

And this Christian physician held that grandson close to his heart and thanked his Creator for the intricate mechanisms that caused pain\u2014and that would provide this small baby with protection throughout his life. \u201cPreviously I had thought of pain as a blemish in creation, God\u2019s one great mistake. Now pain stands out as an extraordinary feat of engineering valuable beyond measure.”
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Submitted by David B. Smith. Better Sermons \u00a9 2005-2008. Click here for\u00a0<\/span>usage guidelines<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Agony of Painlessness Key Passage:\u00a0Hebrews 5:8, 9:\u00a0Although He [Jesus] was a Son, He learned obedience from what He suffered and, once made perfect, He became the source of eternal …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91,"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions\/91"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}