Heart Tracks - Worship In The Darkness - Part 4

"I am feeble and utterly crushed; I groan in anguish of heart." Psalm 38:8....."How you handle your pain says a lot about what you think of God....David didn't necessarily know how God would help, just that He would. He worshiped God with his pain." Chris Tiegreen...."Our greatest life is on the other side of our pain and suffering." Erwin McManus......"Christ's Light guarantees that darkness need never have the final word." Sheila Walsh

Can the Father entrust you with suffering? You might think that a strange question, but it isn't. There are so many lives that can't be trusted with pain and sorrow. Not by Him. Heartache comes to us all, but our major response in it is to seek the quickest way out that we can. We pound the doors of heaven for relief. We are not looking for Him in the midst of it. We're looking for Him to get us out of it. Suffering and loss are a part of life due to this fallen world we live in, but it is His intent to use it to reveal to us a knowledge of Him that we could know in no other place. Not many of us want that. We look for relief and not Him. The things He would speak to us in the darkness cannot be spoken because they would not be heard. We seek to flee from pain, but we never really can. If we don't face it, it will, in some way, at some time, deal with us. When we discover His reality in the darkness, His Light and Life pierce that darkness.....and take away it's power over us.

Peter, James and John were with Jesus, in the Presence of the Father on the Mt. of Transfiguration, but it was not there that they truly learned the fullness of who He was and is. After the mount came the valley...and darkness. At times, seemingly endless darkness. It was in the deep darkness that each, that all of the disciples were led into, that they discovered the wonder, sufficiency, beauty, faithfulness and love that is Him. He knew, despite all their failings, their lack, that they were ones He could trust with pain, suffering, and darkness. They would not miss the riches to be found there. Do we?

For me, the lives that have impacted me most are those who knew the secret and joy of worshiping Him in the dark. Lives that could do more than just offer Bible promises, or tell me that they'd be praying for me. Lives that have themselves walked in the dark places where I was walking. Walked into and through....to a deeper, richer, more abundant life than they had believed possible. They offered more than their encouragement. They offered themselves, and in the offering, the Presence of Christ as well. Tiegreen says, "He pursues us in our pain not because He wants to explain it, or even because He wants to take it away. He wants to be with us in it." He comes alongside us in the darkness through the lives of those He's already come alongside. We learn a deeper worship that can't be learned in the bright sunshine. Somehow, if we will trust Him for it, we will receive our sight there. It's in the dark that we come to know Him, hear Him, see Him....and worship Him.

In the darkness we will come to know the truth of Walsh's statement, that darkness will never have the final word. It won't because even at its blackest, it cannot prevent His Light from bursting through and into its midst. It cannot stop His joy, His peace, or the fullness of His Life. Darkness is not darkness to Him. And it will not be so to us either. Not when we've learned to worship in the dark.

Jesus knew the darkness that Peter would soon be walking through, and that satan desired to "sift him like wheat," in the midst of it. But He also knew that he would emerge on its other side, and when he did, he would "strengthen his brothers." It's the devil's hope to break us in the dark, to get us to give up hope in Him. It's the Father's heart to draw us to Himself...in worship. And when we have emerged on the other side, it's to be His Light and Life to others walking through their own paths of night. That's what McManus means when he says our greatest life is found on the other side of pain and suffering. That kind of life is not found in ease, comfort, and lack of pain. Such lives have no power to speak into other lives that know nothing of that. Such ministry comes from those who know the joy and wonder of what it is to worship Him in the dark.....Can you and I be such a life? Can you and I offer such a ministry? Can He entrust us with pain, suffering...and darkness? Are we "Sunshine Christians," or are we believers, and worshipers, for all seasons.....even the darkest and coldest of them?

Blessings,
Pastor O