Get a Good Theology Around Suffering

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. Dr.

Lee Warren here with you, hopefully your favorite internet brain surgeon,

podcaster, author, and I am coming at you today for some self-brain surgery.

We're going to do a little theology, and today, the Theology Thursday talk that

we're going to have is about suffering, and I think one of the biggest problems we have,

because we all know by now, especially if you've been listening very long,

most of the people listening into this podcast I think are people who have been

through some sort of trauma or tragedy or other massive things.

And we talk a lot about neuroscience and how your brain works and how your mind

and your brain interface with your creator and all that stuff and how science

and faith aren't enemies and all those things.

But we do all of that for the purpose of arming you, preparing you for what

to do when life gets really hard.

And if you're already in that place or you've been through the massive thing

already, already been through the major trauma, major tragedy,

then it's what comes next and what do we do now and how do we get back on track.

And I just want to tell you today that one of the big problems when we suffer

is if we have bad theology around suffering. What's theology?

Theology is the study of who God is and what God does and if we have the wrong

idea of what suffering means,

especially if we buy into this secular worldview idea that either God can't

be real because there's evil and suffering or that God must not love me because

this happened or I must not have enough faith because this happened,

or I must not have given enough money because that happened,

or all that prosperity garbage that you hear sometimes.

If you have the wrong theology around suffering, then you will suffer more.

And not much light will come to you.

So I just wanted today, I want to give you a quick little talk about a good

theology that you can build around suffering.

We're gonna look at an example from a guy in the Old Testament named David,

who of course wrote most of the Psalms.

He was one of the kings of Israel, and a man after God's own heart and the whole

Old Testament is full of stories about David and David and Goliath and David

and Bathsheba and you know all about him,

but one thing you might not have picked up on is there's there's an example

of how the same person who knows God well enough that the Bible calls him a

man after God's own heart can get confused about where God is and what God is

doing during suffering.

And you can see how easy it is to get off track and how good it is when you get back on track.

I'm going to give you an example of three different times when David talked

to God about his suffering and how he managed to make himself confused and how

he managed to get himself right and I think that'll help us.

We're gonna end with a song that my friend Tommy Walker wrote called Lord I

Run To You that's right out of Psalm 121.

The reason I'm bringing that to you today is because I had a really hard time

sleeping last night and I was frankly suffering.

I've told you before, holidays are a rough time and especially if you've lost

a child and this year for some reason one of our daughters is having a little bit of.

Not a little, she's having a scary health care issue, so be praying for her.

And in the middle of that, there's all this memory and movement around losing

Mitch and the holidays are just a hard time.

And so we're struggling a little bit. And when you get to remembering and when

you get to reminiscing and you get to bringing up the traumas and tragedies

and troubles from the past, your theology can be challenged.

And that's why I'm always telling you to have a prehab plan in place and know

who God is make some decisions so that when you suffer.

You have the right framework and the right toolkit and you have a floor that

even if you fall a little bit, the floor's pretty high and you'll find yourself

back on your feet pretty quick.

That's what we're gonna do today. Just in a few minutes, we're gonna cover that

ground about a good theology around suffering and what happens when you don't

have a good theology around suffering. We're gonna end with Tommy's song, Lord I Run to You.

And before we do any of that, I have one question for you.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place for the neuroscience

of how your mind works, smashes together with faith and everything starts to

make sense. Are you ready to change your life?

Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,

take control of our thinking and find real hope. This is where we learn to become

healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready?

This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your time,

my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

All right, my friend, so the other day we talked about this quote from J.I.

Packer that's really been sticking in my head.

We talked about suffering a little bit a few days ago, and I gave you this quote from J.I.

Packer when he said, if you ask, why is this happening?

No light may come, but if you ask, how am I to glorify God now?

There will always be an answer. And here's the first thing about suffering.

The first thing we do, instinctual as humans.

The first thing we do is we say, why?

Why God is this happening? Why is this happening? Why did I lose my son?

Why did that tumor come back?

Why did my finances fall out? Why, why, why?

And what you do when you ask why is you usually don't get an answer.

Like we don't get to know why Mitch was stabbed to death. We don't get to know

why his best friend was stabbed to death.

We don't get to know if there was another person there or if they fought or

if one of them went crazy and something happened, we don't know.

I've written about that, I've been vulnerable about it. You can read Hope is

the First Dose, hopefully, and you'll find a path forward like we did after our massive thing.

But the bottom line is, there's a woman who's listening today,

most likely, whose son drowned, and she doesn't get to know why.

You don't know why some of these things happen.

There's a woman in Lincoln whose husband died with glioblastoma recently.

We prayed for her, we've asked you to pray for her, and she doesn't get to know

why that tumor happened. There's a hospital close to you somewhere,

wherever you live, full of people who are asking why.

And most of the time, we don't get to know.

And so if you ask why, you find yourself still in the darkness.

It's natural to ask why, but I'm just telling you that when you start to ask

those why questions, that's when the theology issue bumps up, okay?

When you start to ask why and you don't get an answer, you start to wonder where God is.

You start to wonder why he's not talking. You start to wonder why it's not working

out to where you can understand. And then you start to ask the next question.

Maybe God doesn't love me. Maybe God's not real. Maybe he's not there. Maybe I'm all alone.

Maybe it's because I did this thing in the past. Or maybe it's just because

I came from the wrong family.

And maybe I'm just born to suffer. And all these things that you start thinking,

none of which are true, start to cloud your eyes and it gets darker and darker

and harder to make yourself move forward. Now, that's natural.

But then the next natural thing that happens, if you have the wrong theology

of suffering, is you start thinking, now I'm just telling you this out of my own experience, okay?

And out of my experience of working now for more than 10 years after losing

a son and more than 20 years in neurosurgery around people who are suffering, this is what happens.

Like people start getting into this fantasy world where we think if only this

hadn't happened, then I would be happy.

Or if only I can get this, or if only she recovers, or if only the tumor goes

away, or if only I make this amount of money, or if only I get that promotion,

we start tying circumstance to our potential happiness.

And if only God would bless me with this, then I'll be happy. And the problem is,

Martin Lloyd-Jones said this this way, we have this fantasy where we believe

that if a particular circumstance happened, if we could just,

and you can see it in progressive theology too, by the way, and you can see

it in progressive politics and people who don't believe in God,

they think that building a utopian society, that's what communism is all about.

We build the system, build the structure right, make people behave a certain

way, get rid of all the bad people, build politics the right way,

and we'll build a society where everything is perfect and then everybody will

be happy. And that sounds so great.

But only a moron would think that we could actually pull that

off because you can look at human history and see that no matter how hard you

try there's always a problem and the problem is people are evil and people are

tend people always tend to do what they think is best for them so when you finally

get rid of all the bad people then only the good people are left and then they

start thinking that the other one across the aisle is the bad person and they start keeping,

the perpetual problem going there's no perfect society there won't ever be until

we are redeemed So Martin Lloyd-Jones said this, here's the root of the fallacy,

the terrible, tragic fallacy of the last 100 years, and I would say of all human history.

The terrible, tragic fallacy has been to think that all man's troubles are due

to his environment, and that to change the man, you have nothing to do but change

the environment. That is a tragic fallacy.

It overlooks the fact that it was in paradise that man fell.

That's a stunning statement of true theology, friend.

If you think that if only this tumor goes away, then I'll be happy,

then I'll be okay, then I'll be able to live my life in peace.

If only she doesn't die, if only he comes back, if only I hadn't lost my son,

if only this, if only that.

If you think that will be the thing that finally makes everything right in your

life, you have to remember that Adam and Eve had paradise.

They literally had a perfect, sinless, disease-less, trouble-free life, and they still fell.

And from that fall came death and sin and disease and loss and pain and destruction and all of that.

But they had a perfect environment before that occurred.

So why would you think that if you could somehow magically have this perfect

environment where that thing didn't happen, and then you would finally be able

to live your life the way you're supposed to, Why would you think that that's

gonna solve your trouble?

My friend it won't so the problem is you get this bad theology around suffering

and you start thinking why and then what if and then maybe and then hopefully and,

And you wind yourself up into this thing where you realize you can't really

ever be okay again Because that thing did happen and you forget the rule of

trauma that we've talked about a million times on this show Which is the rule

of trauma as Gabber Monte said so perfectly.

Trauma is not what happened to you.

Trauma is your response to what happened to you.

And we're always talking about the neuroscience of it, but today we're just

talking about the theology of it. That thing that happened...

That massive thing happened and you can't go back in time and make it not have happened.

So that means that your response, the way you're living life now and your hope

for the future can't be related to making that thing not have happened.

It can't be related to being able to forget that that thing happened.

It can't be related to being able to pretend that it never occurred because it did occur.

So the whole question comes down to what now?

What now? So the question is not, why did this happen, but how am I to glorify God now?

Remember the other day, we talked about the Westminster Shorter Catechism,

and the idea is the chief aim of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

So if you ask why, you won't get an answer.

If you ask, how am I to glorify God now, how can God come alongside me in this?

How can God keep His promises to me in this? And knowing those promises by knowing

the Word is how you fill your toolkit up with things you can use to perform self-brain surgery.

When you need to put things back together, stop the bleeding and find a treatment

plan for going forward because those massive things are going to keep coming.

So the question is not, why?

The question is, what now?

That's the whole thing. Now let me talk to you about David for a second.

King David, famous guy, David and Goliath. David killed the lion in a pit on a snowy day.

David killed the giant. David, you know, rescued the people.

David overcame Saul and overcame all the enemies of God.

He was a great king, but he also had great problems with sin, right?

He committed adultery, he impregnated a man's wife, he murdered a man, he did all those things.

So David was not a perfect man, but he was a man after God's own heart,

which means he kept trying to get his way back.

But let me just give you three different looks at David.

So here's David, the guy who knows God well enough to be called a man after

God's own heart in Psalm 28, to you, O Lord, I call, you are my rock.

Do not turn a deaf ear to me, for if you remain silent, I will be like those who go down to the pit.

David's saying, there's a place down in the pit where people go,

people can die or people can be lost, and they can go to this place where God isn't there.

If I can't hear you, God, I'll be like those people down in the pit,

which is implying that he thinks when you're in the pit, you can't hear God. God's not there.

He's not speaking to you. There's a place that you can go where God isn't there.

And that's how you feel after a major trauma. You feel like God's not there.

With you. You're saying, why into the darkness?

You're not getting answers. You wonder where God is. So here's David saying,

don't turn a deaf ear to me, or I'll be like those poor people down in the pit

who can't hear you because you're not there.

Psalm 143, the same guy, Lord, hear my prayer. Listen to my cry for mercy in

your faithfulness and righteousness. Come to my relief.

He goes on and on and on and on. Answer me quickly, Lord, my spirit fails.

Do not hide your face from me, or I will be like those who go down to the pit.

So now the same guy in two different places, he said, I know if I have to go

down to the pit, if something devastating happens, if I'm down in that hole,

you're not gonna be there. I can't hear your voice.

Now he says, I can't see your face there if you're not there.

So here's David suffering in two different ways at two different times,

and he's saying to himself, I'm in real trouble.

I'm like these people who are down in this place, and God can't hear me,

and I can't see him, and I'm all alone in this, and I don't know what to do.

Well, let me tell you, the very same guy in Psalm 139 said this,

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

You've known when I sit down and when I rise up. You discern my thoughts from afar.

You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways,

even before a word is on my tongue. and behold, O Lord, you know it all together.

You hem me in behind and before me, you lay your hand on me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high and I cannot attain it. Listen to this, friend.

The same guy who just said in Psalm 28 before this and Psalm 143 after this,

I'm gonna go down to this place, I'm in trouble and I know if I go down there,

you won't be there, I won't be able to hear you, I won't be able to see your face.

Here's what he said in 139. Where can I go from your spirit?

Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to the heavens, you are there.

If I make my bed in Sheol, in the pit, you are there.

You see that? David knows. He's found the answer.

There is no place he can go where the Spirit of the Lord is not with him.

If he goes up to the heavens, God's there. If he goes down into the depths, he's there.

He's in the ocean. He's in the sky. He's in the depths. He's in the pit.

He's in Sheol. He's in trouble. He's in pleasure.

He's always there. This is the

same passage where he talks about how I'm fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works. My soul knows Well, he's got a good solid theology

of who God is here, but I'm telling you this just to tell you,

That it's natural For when you're under great distress for your brain to tell you.

Hey, you're really hosed now God's not not here with you.

Your son died. He is not there with you. You are all Alone in this nobody cares.

You're gonna all your kids are gonna not listen to you anymore or your wife's

gonna leave you, you might as well just drink yourself to death like your dad

did. You're just like him.

Your genes are, you're stuck with them, and you come from a long line of losers,

and you are never gonna be okay, and God's not even with you. He can't hear you.

You can't see his face. You might as well go down to the pit.

That's what your brain will say when you're in trouble, and you know it.

Your words are different than mine, but that's what your brain says when you're

in the pit, and if you don't get the self-brain biopsy, If you don't learn how

to think about your thinking and turn those thoughts around and take them captive

and say, hey, wait a second.

That's not what my Bible says.

My Bible doesn't say that God won't be with me. My God says,

if I'm up in the sky, he's there.

If I'm down in the ocean, he's there. If I'm down in the depths,

he's there. I can't go anywhere apart from his spirit. He's there with me.

In Psalm 121, I lift my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from?

My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.

And I just want to remind you, as we talked about the other day,

the writer Ursula Le Guin had a little note on her desk when she was gonna write,

and she said, when I write something, I need to know, is it true,

is it necessary, or at least useful?

Is it compassionate, or at least empathetic, or unharmful?

Those three things are great processes and filters to put your thought biopsy through, okay?

Think about this in relation to your theology of suffering. I'm thinking about

how I feel about having lost my son.

I start to go down that hole and I start to think God's not there with me and

I'm a loser and nobody's ever gonna trust me or love me and I should have been

there and I could have done something different and why wasn't I there and was

he suffering and I couldn't help him and all of that stuff.

And then I start biopsying the thought and say, wait a minute, is it true?

Yeah, it's true that I lost my son, but is it true that my wife's gonna leave

me? No, we've managed to make it through 10 years after that happened.

Our marriage is stronger than ever. Is it true that nothing's ever gonna become

of me because I'm never gonna be able to get over this?

No, God somehow managed to give me words to speak to you, to write,

to stand up and reach out and help other people who are hurting like Brad and

Jill Sullivan did after they lost their child. They started a ministry to other bereaved parents.

And Lisa and I haven't done that, but we have watched our ability that God has

given us to be a light to other people, blossom into something that's helping

people all over the world now.

So the truth is, if I start hearing that thought, you're always gonna be sad.

Yes, that's true. Nobody's ever gonna love you. That is not true.

I have to start filtering those downstream thoughts. Is it necessary for me

to think about this? No, it's not necessary right now. I need to think about something else.

God gave me the gift of being able to shift and use selective attention and

move forward in a different thought

process towards something that is necessary, or at least is useful.

Can I use this thought? Is it going to help me if I spend time in this thought,

or is it going to ultimately hurt me?

Remember Psalm 37, fret not yourself, it tends only to evil.

The more I think about my own troubles.

The more I wallow in them, the

more I'm likely to land on something that's going to push me towards evil.

Arguing, fighting, drinking, some kind of behavior to numb myself,

something's going to happen. If I wallow in that, it tends towards evil, right?

Threaten not yourself. Is this thought compassionate?

God says, love your neighbor as yourself. You're supposed to love yourself too.

Is this thought process that I'm in right now, this place that I'm stewing,

is it compassionate to me is a compassionate to anybody else and as if it's

not compassionate is at least unharmful.

Remember if we're self brain surgeons that means you're a physician to yourself

and the primum that the prime directive the oath that you take is I will not

harm myself first no harm I will relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.

I got a beautiful email from Jenny Norton one of our listeners who said hey

I'm I'm following that advice I'm relentlessly refusing to participate in my own demise.

I'm not going down these rabbit trails of destructive thinking anymore because

I've got that self-brain surgery in my heart now and I'm using it and it's helping me.

Listen friend, that's the whole thing.

The first principle is don't harm yourself.

Don't harm anybody else, but don't harm yourself either. And negative spiraling

thinking around bad theology of suffering is harmful to you.

You must be purposeful about changing your own mind.

I'm just telling you that you can get yourself in the Word of God and you can

find examples of people who had bad theology around suffering and what happened.

Find people who had good theology around suffering and what happens then in

Psalm 143, I'm sorry, Psalm 139 is a great example of a good theology of suffering.

When you're hurting, God is there for you.

You need to get you some promises. You need to get you some good words.

Get you a Susie Larson book or a Max Lucado book or a Phillip Yancey book or

Richard Foster book or a Pete Greig book or maybe a Lee Warren book and get

you some good stuff in your heart on top of the Word of God,

to give you somebody else's words to help you look at Scripture in a different

way, and then get into Scripture and realize you're not just reading a book.

That book is reading you, too.

When we talk about self-brain surgery, the Word of God is like a functional

MRI scanner, and it will get inside you.

It will reveal things in you that are broken, and it will reveal places in you

where you're stronger than you think you are, and it'll show you the truth about

who you are and who God is, and if you get in that Word and you start letting

that build up this foundation,

you'll have a better theology around suffering.

And when you do suffer, when the next time the massive thing happens or that

handle gets pulled and you get ejected out of your life and onto something crazy,

like some of the things that are going on in our family right now,

there's some scary stuff happening medically.

And you find out that's happening, you won't fall as far before the parachute

opens because you've got a good theology of suffering, you've got good prehab,

you've got some promises in there, You've got some words in there.

You've made some decisions ahead of time about what you're gonna do when life

really hurts, and you're gonna turn your eyes to the hills and know where your

help comes from. The help comes from the Lord.

Right? And he's going to show up as a great physician and you're going to understand

that if you say why, you might not get an answer.

But if you say, what am I supposed to do now? And how am I supposed to use that for your glory?

How am I going to use this to move forward and find meaning and purpose?

Then you're going to make it, okay?

C.S. Lewis said this, If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end.

If you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap.

And wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

Listen, friend, the way you build your theology of suffering in this time of

year, with the holidays coming, if you've been through something hard,

you need to have a good theology, because you're gonna start hearing those negative voices you're going to.

There's gonna be some quiet time, and you're gonna start reminiscing,

and you're gonna start ruminating, and that magnetic tractor beam pull,

Granger Smith calls it the slideshow, I call it the staircase,

you're gonna start going down there towards those old memories.

And you better be ready because that's going to happen and

if you're ready and you realize if I'm looking for comfort

I usually don't find it if I say this thing

will make me happier if that didn't happen I'll be happier if I just drink this

or push click on buying that or send this message to that person or meet that

person or do that thing then I'll feel better and you'll find yourself some

dopamine but in the end you'll realize it leads to despair because the target keeps moving.

If you think I need something outside of me and outside of God to make me happier,

to make me manage this moment, I need this help to get through this time.

You're not gonna find it.

But if you search for truth, what am I supposed to do now, God?

How am I supposed to use this? What do you want me to know now?

Where are you? Keep these promises that you made. Start telling him the promises.

Get in the Word and find you some. Get O.S. Hawkins' book, The Promise Code,

and read yourself a promise every day and start looking for the ways that God's gonna make it true.

And let that functional magnetic scan of the Word of God scan you and show you

who you are and reveal who he is to you.

And remember, you can lift your eyes and you will see where the help is coming

because he's gonna come and help you if you ask him to.

He won't leave you alone. He won't.

Will he snatch you up out of the situation? Probably not. But our God,

Hosea said it, he'll take the valley of trouble and show you a door of hope

in the midst of it. That's what'll happen.

So friend, here on Theology Thursday, get yourself a good theology of suffering.

And that'll help you become healthier and feel better and be happier. It will help you.

It will help you because you can't change your life until you change your mind.

You change your mind about suffering from why to what am I supposed to do now,

that will start paying great dividends for you.

And we're going to finish with Tommy Walker's song, Lord I Run To You,

straight out of Psalm 121.

It's going to help you get your mind around what to do next when life really hurts.

I hope it doesn't happen to you. I hope you're the one who doesn't have to suffer,

doesn't have to have a massive thing, It doesn't have to have a trauma or a tragedy.

But you know what? Jesus promised us that we're going to. So you better be ready.

And when you are, if you have a good theology around it, you'll find yourself

able to live in that quantum reality of suffering while you're living in abundance.

And that's the best I can offer you.

I can't tell you your life's gonna be perfect, but I can tell you that there's

a perfect way to learn how to navigate it.

And that's to let the great physician come alongside you and help you with it.

And he'll do that. And the good news is, he'll help you start today. Oh, how faithful.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren podcast is brought to you by my

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It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

It's available everywhere books are sold, and I narrated the audio books.

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship

the Most High God. and if you're interested in learning more,

check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

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Self Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states

and 60-plus countries around the world.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend,

you can't change your life until you change your mind, and the good news is you can start today.

Music.