Pastor John Piper, founder of desiringGod.org
Pastor John Piper starts his conversation on recovering from suffering with an introduction of a broken woman's story. She asked for guidance saying, "Pastor John, I need your help. Tragically, back in 2007, I backed over and killed my 18-month-old grandson with a car. I was devastated. I remain devastated. That day changed me. I was once a children's church director and a Sunday school teacher. I don't serve anymore. Thirteen years later, I can hardly drive without crying. The guilt I feel for my grandson is greater than the guilt I feel for not serving God. People say I should be happy; he's in a better place. Or they say that God spared him a bad life - that he knew my grandson was going to go down a bad road. What do you say? What would make me happy again, serving God again, and at peace without my grandson? After all these years, can you help me?".
To address the woman's heartbreaking distress, Piper references three conversations from the bible.
Pastor Piper's first point to tackle is living with the grief. To do this, he addresses the Apostle Paul and his conflictual relationship with Jesus and Christians prior to his life as Paul. Before he was Paul, he was Saul and was known to persecute and even kill Christians. On this, Pastor Piper quotes, "Jesus told him that he was not merely a Christian-killer; he was a Christ-killer. "You are persecuting me - Jesus. You touch my followers, you touch me. You imprison them, you imprison me. You kill them, you kill me."
He then states the importance of 1 Timothy 1:15 and 1 Corinthians 15:9 where Paul states his guilt and shows his inability to forget the actions of his past. Piper then goes on to state that the way forward is not mainly to forget but rather owning and remembering as Paul had. His advice is to read 1 Timothy 1:15 and meditate on the possibility of moving on.
The second point made is the bear with the disability. This point is made to follow on from the first point of living with the grief. Piper states that the Lord may be calling you to not think of the tragedy as a wound to be healed but rather a disability to bear. Regardless of the fact that the disability might be mental, emotional, or spiritual, the best method might be for the mindset to shift from moving past the pain. He relates the second point to Christian individuals who have to deal with detrimental disability who have turned this impairment into a "life-giving, power-in-weakness ministry of grace."
The third and final point is to embrace brokenhearted joy. This last point follows the second and should serve as a continuation of the previous two points. Piper opens up his third point by stating that if an individual feels rejoice and delight in ministry after a tragedy they might feel shame or disrespect to the guilt that they might face. As such, there must be a sense that the individual would not dare return to their previous sense of normalcy. Instead, Piper says that embracing the "limp" the individual now bears is the way forward. As an individual who has drunk the bitter cup, they will have the ability to minister to others with "a kind of joy, a kind of hope, and a kind of peace" that only they possess. He relates this to 2 Corinthians 6:10 in which the Apostle Paul carried out his ministry "as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing" due to his past as a Christ-killer which he always carried with him. Paul was able to bear the weight of his past and transform the sorrow into a ministry deepening power with a kind of joy that only a sinner can have through the grace of God.
