You Came for an Explanation, He Sent a Refiner
"In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith — more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire — may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ." — 1 Peter 1:6–7
Good morning. I am glad you are here.
We are in week three of Share the Hope, and today is going to feel different.
Week one — we asked what the angels are looking at. And the answer was stunning. Angels who see the face of God, who have never sinned, never needed faith — leaning in, staring at what is happening inside ordinary believers like us. Not because of anything impressive about us. Because of the
gospel at work in us.
Week two — Peter talked about joy. Not good vibes. The kind of joy that comes from loving someone you have never seen. And the result of that faith, right now, in the present tense, is the salvation of your souls.
So we have talked about wonder. We have talked about joy.
And now today, Peter takes us to the one place nobody signs up for. Today we are talking about why suffering hurts.
When I sat down to work on this, I wanted to put my head in my hands. This is not a subject you master. It masters you. Every time you think you have a handle on it, you sit across from someone whose pain makes your handle feel like cardboard.
What I want to do today is take the question seriously — really seriously — and then show you what Peter actually says. Which surprised me.
1 PETER 1:6–7 "In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith — more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire — may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ." Two verses. But there is a lifetime inside them.
If we rush past the weight of the question to get to the answer, we have given people a band-aid and called it surgery.
WHY DOES SUFFERING HURT THEWAYIT DOES?
Here is something I need you to hear before we go any further. This question — why does suffering hurt — is not just a Christian question. It is a human question.
Down at the core of our souls, we are all the same. Pain does not segregate. Pain does not select. Every heart on this planet has the capacity to feel it.
And here is what bothers me. If every one of us knows what it feels like to hurt — then why do we treat one another as if they just do not understand?
Every worldview on the planet has had to deal with this. Buddhism was built on it. Hinduism says your suffering is payment for a past life. In much of Islam, God's sovereignty is so absolute that you do not even have the right to ask why. And atheism has to face the weight of human pain with no bigger story to put it in at all.
Of all the worldviews in the world, only one actually says: you are right to ask. You are right to feel that this is wrong. That is the Christian worldview.
If your worldview does not let you ask the question, it has not answered anything. It has just told you to be quiet.
The God who invented questions is not threatened by yours. Job asked. David asked. Jesus asked from the cross. The question is not a sign that your faith is weak. It may be the most honest thing your faith has ever done.
THREE KINDS OF WHY I want to describe something to you. Not a story — just a moment. A kind of moment that I think most of us have lived.
You are somewhere familiar. A room you know, a drive you have made a hundred times, a place that should feel ordinary. And something shifts. The medical report. The conversation that rewrote everything. The phone call that changed the map. And you are standing there holding the pieces of a life that looked fine five minutes ago.
That is the why of loss. Something was here. Now it is not. And the ground under your feet is not the same ground it was.
But there is a second kind of why that is quieter and, honestly, harder to name. Because nothing was taken from you. It was just never given. The word that was never said. The room that was never made for you. The relationship where you kept showing up and kept being treated like an afterthought. You cannot point to the moment it broke, because it was never whole. And the strangest
thing about this kind of pain is that it is almost impossible to name, because nothing happened. It was just — never there.
That is the why of absence. And some of you have been carrying it so long you have almost stopped calling it pain.
And then there is a third. You tried. You reached out. You showed up. And you were turned away. Not always with cruelty — sometimes rejection does not even raise its voice. Sometimes it just looks past you. The table that was already full. The door that was politely and firmly closed. You showed up and there was no room for you.
Loss. Absence. Rejection. Three different wounds. One word. Why.
And most of us have been carrying at least one of those in here this morning. And nobody asked. We are very good at keeping the service moving.
WHAT "WHY" REVEALS "Why" is not a small word. It assumes there is supposed to be a reason. It assumes your life is headed somewhere and this does not fit.
If life is random — if none of this means anything — then "why" is a silly question. You do not ask why a rock rolls downhill. It just does. But you do not experience your pain that way. Something deep inside you says: this is wrong. This should not be happening.
Now where does that come from? If you say this is wrong, you are assuming there is a right. If you say this is evil, you are assuming there is good. And if there is real good and real evil, there has to be something behind them. Some standard. Some source.
Paul says there is a law written on the human heart. Not on a tablet. On your heart. You did not learn that suffering is wrong by reading a textbook. You knew it. God's handwriting.
The person who says "how can God allow this" is actually proving that God has to be in the picture for the question to even make sense.
Take God out and you do not solve the problem. You lose the ability to call it a problem. Without God, your pain is just chemistry. Just stuff happening to stuff. But you do not experience it that way. And you know it.
Are you convinced of that? Not in your head — in your bones. Are you convinced that your pain is significant enough to bring to God? Because I find that most people who believe in God still live as if their specific pain is too small, or too complicated, or too embarrassing to actually put in front of Him. They believe He cares about suffering in general. They are just not sure He cares about theirs.
THE COLLISION — WHY IT HURTS THIS DEEP
When you follow the word "why" all the way down — when you chase it to the bottom — it leads you somewhere you did not expect.
You were not built for this world the way it is. You were built for wholeness. For presence. For love that does not break. For a world where things make sense. Suffering is the collision between what you were made for and what you are living in.
You were made in the image of God. And God is whole, and present, and love that does not break. When He made you, He wrote those things into you. Not as preferences. As design. You were designed for a world you no longer live in.
And every time suffering hits — every time something is taken, or absent, or turns you away — something in the deepest part of you rises up and says: this is not right. This is not how it is supposed to be.
That ache — that refusal to accept a broken world as normal — that is not weakness. That is the image of God in you. Still intact. Still functioning. Still pointing toward something you were made for.
Think about what that means. That ache you have been trying to manage or outrun — it is not a malfunction. It is a compass. It is pointing at something real. And the fact that you feel it so deeply is not evidence that something is wrong with you. It is evidence that something is right.
Now here is something most people never follow all the way through. If love is the highest thing in the universe, then real love can only exist where freedom
exists. You cannot make someone love you. The moment you force it, it becomes compliance. But it is not love. So God, in His love, created beings with genuine freedom. And genuine freedom means genuine choice. And genuine choice means the door to evil is real.
Love requires freedom. Freedom opens the door to evil. Evil requires a savior. That chain is not an accident. It is the shape of the story God has been telling since the beginning.
WHY IT REACHES SO DEEP — WHAT IS ALIVE INSIDE YOU
But that answers why suffering exists in the world. It does not fully answer why the same event can hit one person at the surface and another person all the way down to the floor. And I think that question deserves a real answer.
Here is what I mean. When you hit your hand with a hammer, pain has an address. You can point to it. You can locate it. It has a source and, usually, an end. But internal pain does not work that way. It does not have a zip code. You cannot point to where it is. You just know it is there. And that shapelessness — the fact that you cannot find the edge of it — is actually part of what makes it so hard to carry. You cannot explain it to anyone. You can barely explain it to yourself.
And this is where I think we have been hardest on ourselves and on each other. We say: what is wrong with me? Why can't I just move on? Why does
this still hurt? And the answer is not: because you are weak. The answer is: because of everything that was alive in you when the pain arrived.
The first thing pain walks into is your hope. Proverbs says it plainly — hope deferred makes the heart sick. Not disappointed. Sick. Because hope is not just a feeling. It is the direction your whole life has been leaning. You were not just living in the present. You were living toward something. A version of the future you had already imagined. Already counted on. And when that future does not arrive — the medical report that did not go the way you prayed, the relationship you thought was finally turning around, the door you asked God to open that stayed shut — the pain is not just about what happened. It is about the direction you were leaning when it hit.
And underneath the hope was love. Because you do not hope for things you do not care about. The reason the hope hurt when it fell is because you had given something real to what you were hoping for. The depth of your grief is proportional to the depth of your love. C.S. Lewis said it plainly — to love at all is to be vulnerable. The only way to guarantee you will never grieve is to never attach to anything. And most of us were not willing to do that.
Which means the size of your pain is actually a measure of the size of your love. You are not broken because it hurts this much. You loved that much.
But it goes deeper still. Because when something is taken — a job, a relationship, a role, a version of your future — sometimes what gets taken is not just the thing. It is the story you were telling about yourself. Who you were. What you were building. Where you were headed. And when the story
collapses, you are left not just without the thing but without a sense of who you are without it. That is a specific kind of pain that feels like more than loss.
It feels like disappearing. And that is one of the hardest things to say out loud, because it sounds dramatic. But it is not dramatic. It is one of the most common and least-talked-about things that happens when people suffer. They do not just lose what they lost. They lose themselves in the losing of it.
And then the mind does what it was designed to do. It goes back. Not because you are weak or stuck — because you were wired to return to what mattered. The same mechanism that helps you learn from experience replays the thing you lost. Over and over. What should be a feature becomes a source of pain. You keep going back not because you cannot move forward. You go back because what you lost was worth remembering. And part of you is still trying to make sense of it.
And underneath all of that runs anxiety. Which is pain running in the future tense. You are not just hurting about what happened. You are hurting about what might happen. What could go wrong. What you stand to lose. And the mind cannot fully distinguish between an imagined threat and a real one — it responds to both with the same alarm. So some of what you are carrying right now is pain about a future that has not arrived yet and may never arrive. You are paying the price of something you have not even lost. That is a particular kind of exhausting that is very hard to explain to someone who is not living it.
Ecclesiastes says it this way: in much wisdom is much grief. The more you understand, the more surface area for pain. A child does not grieve what they
do not know to expect. But you know. You have lived enough to know what can go wrong, what usually does go wrong, what you stand to lose and how fast. And that knowledge is not neutral. It costs something just to hold it.
There is a weight that comes from knowing too much about how fragile things are.
And underneath all of it — underneath the deferred hope, the love, the lost story, the replaying mind, the anxious future, the weight of knowing — there is something even deeper. Augustine spent his life trying to name it and finally did. He said: our heart is restless until it rests in Thee. This is not dissatisfaction with circumstances. It is a structural ache. You were made for God and you are living in a world that cannot satisfy that need no matter how hard it tries. And the soul knows the difference. Always. Which is why you can have everything going right and still feel the ache. Because the ache is not about what you have. It is about what you were made for.
So when suffering hits, it does not just land on the surface. It walks into every room. It finds your hope, your love, your story, your memory, your fear of the future, your weight of knowing, your restlessness — and it reaches into all of them at once.
That is why it hurts the way it does. Not because something is wrong with you. Because something was very much alive in you.
And I want you to hear that. Really hear it. The depth of your pain is not evidence of your weakness. It is evidence of your life. Of everything God put in you that was real enough to hurt when the world came for it.
SUFFERING ISOLATES — THE 1 A.M.
But suffering does not just reach into all of those rooms. It does one more thing. It locks the door behind it. It makes you feel alone.
There have been many times where my body just wakes me up in the middle of the night. One in the morning. I did not set an alarm. But my eyes are open and my mind is already running, and it is not running anywhere good. Everything I was managing during the day — everything I was able to push down while I was busy — it all comes flooding in at once. The worry. The weight. The things I do not have answers for. And I just lie there and receive it.
And I think a lot of us live that way. Not just at 1 a.m. All day. We let our hearts speak to us constantly, and we never speak back. Never say — that is not true. That is not the whole story. Always listening. Never speaking.
And for some of us — the reason we do not speak back is because we were taught through pain that speaking up brings more pain. Silence became survival. You stopped talking. Not because you did not have a voice. Because using your voice was dangerous.
And now, even when the voice at 1 a.m. is telling you things that are not true, you do not fight it. Because somewhere you still believe that speaking up will cost you.
I know that voice. And the honest thing to say is that sometimes I still believe it. Even after years in ministry. There are nights where the knowing better does not reach all the way down to where the voice is coming from. And if that is you this morning — I am not going to tell you to just trust God more. I am going to tell you the voice is lying. And that the man God called after His own heart said the exact same things at the exact same hour.
And you know what that voice says when you are lying there in the dark? It says: I am alone. And nobody sees me.
THE PRISON GLASS You are in this room on a Sunday morning. Someone asks how you are. You say "Fine." And you are not fine.
But the glass is not just shyness. It is more like a prison. You are behind it. And even when someone walks up and says how are you doing, really — you are talking through it. Shame is monitoring you. Fear is monitoring you. The voice that says if they knew what was really going on they would leave — that voice is watching every word. And so you do not say the real thing. You say "Fine."
That is not just loneliness. That is captivity.
I was on the phone with someone not long ago, and they asked me — how's your heart? Are we good? And I did not say fine. I said: no. I am hurt. I am struggling to lay it down. And my trust is broken. That cost me something.
Every instinct said protect yourself. But I did not.
Speaking through the glass — actually saying the real thing — that is terrifying. But it is the only way the glass ever breaks.
Are you behind the glass with God? Not just with people — with God? Because some of us come to prayer and say the fine version there too. We pray the presentable version of our lives. And somewhere underneath it, the real thing is sitting untouched. And God is already on the other side of the glass knowing the real version, just waiting for us to say it.
When people try to explain your pain instead of just being with you in it, the glass does not get thinner. It gets thicker.
WHEN HELP BECOMES A WOUND Job. One of the oldest books in the Bible. This man has lost everything — his kids, his health, his livelihood. He is sitting in ashes covered with sores. And three friends come to see him.
For seven days they sit on the ground with him and say nothing. Seven days of silence. That was the best thing they ever did. Then they opened their mouths.
One opens with a ghost story. Another calls him a windbag. The third says it would be easier to teach a donkey than to get through to Job. And Job says something that every suffering person has felt: "A despairing man should have the devotion of his friends. Your speeches are heartless."
The people who came to help became his tormentors. Not because they were bad people. Because they were offering explanations when what he needed was presence.
A friend of mine had shoulder surgery. And the hardest part was not the pain. It was that everyone forgets. What do you do when you see someone you love? You reach out. You put your hand on their shoulder. And then your hand lands and he flinches. You did not mean to hurt him. You love him. But you touched a healing wound out of habit.
That is what we do to people who are suffering. Not out of cruelty. Out of habit. We grab the sore spot with good intentions. We give them a Bible verse. We tell them everything happens for a reason. And we do not realize we just put our hand on the wound.
The deepest cry of the human soul in suffering is not "explain this to me." It is "is anyone there?"
And the person who got the explanation instead of presence does not stop asking. They just stop asking out loud. The question goes underground. To somewhere deeper. Somewhere harder to reach.
The psalmist knew that cry. Psalm 139 — where can I go from your Spirit? If I make my bed in the depths, you are there. Even the darkness is not dark to you. The psalmist is saying — even when I feel completely invisible, you see me.
WHAT YOU WERE LEANING ON And suffering does one more thing. It tears away what you were leaning on. We all lean on things, and we do not even know we are doing it. Your health. Your paycheck. Your marriage. Your sense of control.
And most of the time they hold. You lean on them every day and you do not think about it. Until the day they give way. And you hit the floor.
The shock is not the fall. The shock is: I had no idea how much of my weight was on that.
The job goes away and you find out your identity was built on it. The body breaks and you find out your peace depended on your ability to function. The relationship ends and you find out you were not just losing a person — you were losing the thing that was holding everything else up.
Meaninglessness does not come from being tired of pain. It comes from being tired of pleasure. The deepest emptiness comes from having everything and finding out everything is not enough. Which means what you were leaning on was never built to hold you. And suffering is just the moment you find that out.
And I think there is a quiet mercy inside that moment that nobody talks about. Because sometimes what gets torn away in the fire was never stable to begin with. And what is left standing when everything else burns is the one thing we should have been holding all along. Suffering does not just take things. Sometimes it clears the ground.
THE SILENCE — THE MAPLE TREE And then there is the silence. When I was young in my faith — really young — I was at a retreat, and I woke up early one morning, before sunrise, and I walked outside and sat under this big old maple tree. The kind that has been there longer than anyone can remember. And I prayed the most honest prayer I knew how to pray.
I said: Lord, let me see you. Show me something. Give me a sign. Anything. And I sat there. And nothing came. The sun came up. The birds started. People started moving around inside. And I walked back in with nothing. Just a kid under a tree who had asked God to show up and got quiet.
And I wish I could tell you that was the only time. But years later, after I had been in ministry, after I had sat with people in some of the hardest seasons of their lives, I found myself asking the same prayer in a different voice. Not: show me a sign. But: help me understand what I am seeing. Help me make sense of this much pain. And most of the time — quiet.
The psalmist knew this. Psalm 13 — "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?" That is not a man who has lost his faith. That is a man whose faith is so real that he will not pretend the silence is okay.
People say: if God is all-powerful and all-loving, why does evil exist? But why stop there? Is God also all-wise? Does wisdom not change the picture completely?
A one-year-old is at the doctor's office. The nurse comes in with a needle. And the baby looks at his mother — the person he trusts more than anyone — and she is not stopping it. She is letting it happen. She might even be holding his arm. From the baby's point of view, she has betrayed him. The same questions we ask God. Where is the protection? Where is the love?
Does the mother have a reason? Of course. A good reason. A loving reason. Can the baby understand it? No. Not yet. Not with what he can see.
The gap between what you are going through and what you can understand about it — that gap is where most of the suffering actually lives.
David wrote Psalm 23 from the valley of the shadow of death. And I think we have read that psalm so many times we have stopped hearing it. He does not say: I looked up and saw the shepherd standing in the light. He says: even here — even in the darkest valley I have ever been in — I will fear no evil. Not because the darkness lifted. Because you are with me. You do not always see Jesus face to face in the dark. But you see the silhouette of what He carries. The rod. The staff. The outline of a shepherd who has not gone anywhere. The shape of care moving through the darkness toward you. You do not see His face. You see His tools. And somehow that is enough to keep walking.
What if the silence is not abandonment? What if the silence is the sound of a shepherd moving through a valley He already knows?
Suffering shakes what I believe. It isolates me. It tears away what I was leaning on. And it leaves me in a silence I do not know how to read. But Peter does not ignore any of this. He just does not answer it the way you expect.
THE TURN — JOB AND PETER Before I take you to what Peter says, I want to show you something in the book of Job.
After all the speeches, all the arguments, all the terrible advice from his friends, Job finally gets what he has been begging for. God speaks. And God asks him sixty-four questions back to back. Which was the last thing Job wanted. He wanted answers.
Where were you when I made the earth? Were you there when I set the boundaries of the ocean? Do you understand how any of this works?
Job said: I will only accept what I can fully understand. And God said: okay. Let us start with the basics. Because if you do not understand the physical world around you, what makes you think you should be able to understand what I am doing inside your pain?
And there is something else in Job most people miss. Job did not just suffer for his own sake. He suffered to demonstrate before heaven itself that a person can love and trust God for who He is — not just for what they get from Him. The suffering in Job's life had a cosmic audience. And the question being answered
was not just his.
Can a human being, in the middle of real fire, love God for nothing? Job answered that question. And so does your faith when it is tested. You may be answering it for an audience larger than you know.
And here is what Job said at the end. After all of it. After the silence. After God showed up — not with answers, but in person.
"I had heard of you by the hearing of my ear. But now my eyes see you."
That is not an explanation. That is an encounter.
And Peter does the same thing. Look at verse 7 again.
"...so that the tested genuineness of your faith — more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire — may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ." Peter does not explain why you are suffering. He tells you what is happening to your faith while you suffer.
You came to this text wanting a reason. And Peter says: I am not going to give you a reason. I am going to tell you something better. Something is happening to your faith right now. In the fire. And it is worth more than gold.
Peter does not answer the origin question — where did this come from. He answers the goal question — where is God taking your faith through it.
The refiner does not explain the ore. He works it.
THE REFINER Peter uses gold and fire. In the ancient world, this is how gold was purified. You take raw gold — mixed with junk, impurities, things that do not belong — and you put it in the fire. The heat does not destroy the gold. It separates it. The junk rises to the surface. The impurities burn away. What is left is pure.
But a refiner does not throw gold into the fire and walk away.
"He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver." — Malachi 3:3 He will sit. Not stand at a distance. Not check in and leave. He sits. That is patience. That is attention. That is presence.
The refiner watches the metal. He knows how hot it needs to be. He knows how long. He knows when the junk has risen to the top. And the ancient refiners used to say — the silver is ready when the refiner can see his own face in it.
Picture that. Not a God who started a fire and stepped back to watch from a safe distance. A Refiner who has pulled up a chair. Who is watching this specific metal. Who knows this specific temperature. Who is not going anywhere. And who is looking for one thing — the moment He can see His own face in what the fire is making.
"When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned. The flames will not set you ablaze." — Isaiah 43:2
Not a promise that there will be no fire. A promise that you will not be in it alone.
And Paul makes it even clearer. Suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope. The fire is not random. It is constructive. The Refiner knows exactly what He is building.
THE REFINER WENT INTO THE FIRE HIMSELF
Now here is the part that changes everything. The Refiner is not watching from a distance.
The Refiner is Jesus. And He went into the fire Himself.
Martin Luther said this: no man ever feared death like this man. Not: Jesus breezed through it. Not: He had a divine advantage over the pain.
No man ever feared death like this man. Because no one would ever die a death like this man.
In the garden, the night before the cross, the Gospel writers say He was deeply distressed. Troubled. Overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. He fell to the ground and prayed. He was a real man. He knew hunger. He knew grief. He
wept at a grave. And now He was facing the fire.
Jesus cried out from the cross — "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" — that is the same question you ask at 1 a.m. The same question you asked when the ground shifted. He went there. With His own body. With the same word you use.
Why? Where are you? He knows that question from the inside.
Do you believe that? Not just that He suffered — that He suffered the way you have suffered. That the distance between His cry from the cross and your cry at 1 a.m. is smaller than you think. That He is not a God who understands your pain in theory. He understands it from experience. From inside it.
And I want you to know something about how He went in. Before the cross, they offered Him a numbing agent — wine mixed with something bitter, meant to dull the edge of the pain. He refused it.
He went in completely present. Nothing to blunt it. Nothing to take the edge off. He chose to feel all of it. So that no one could ever say: someone has suffered worse than this.
But the tomb was not the end. On the third day — the stone moved. The grave clothes were folded. He walked out. Not as a ghost. As a man with wounds real enough to touch. Thomas put his fingers in the nail holes. This was the Refiner coming out of the fire.
The resurrection is not just comfort. It is proof. Proof that what He starts in the furnace, He finishes. Proof that the fire does not have the last word.
Hebrews says we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our sufferings. Not: He understands in principle. He was there. Fully present. Without anesthetic. He can sympathize because He endured.
Henri Nouwen called Jesus the wounded healer. He does not heal you by standing outside your pain and fixing it. He heals you by entering your pain and being with you inside it. His wounds are not just something that happened to Him. They are how He reaches you.
And Brother Lawrence spent his whole life learning something that sounds simple and is not: God's presence is not something you have to earn or manufacture. You practice noticing that He is already there. In the ordinary. In the quiet. And yes — in the fire. The Refiner is already sitting at the furnace. The invitation is not to find Him. The invitation is to stop and realize He has been there the whole time.
The fire does not make your faith. It reveals the genuineness that was already there. God is not starting from scratch. He is burning off what does not belong so that what was always real can finally be seen.
Your faith is real. The fire proves it. And Peter says this proven, tested faith is worth more than gold.
YOU CAME FOR AN EXPLANATION. HE SENT A REFINER.
So let me bring this home. We have been honest this morning about what suffering does. It shakes what you believe. It isolates you. It tears away what you were leaning on. And it leaves you in a silence you do not know how to read.
And we have been honest about why it reaches so deep. Because it walks into every room where something was alive in you. It finds your hope, your love, your story, your memory, your fear, your restlessness. And it reaches into all of them at once.
And underneath all of that — underneath every layer — is one request. The same request Job made. The same request you have made at 1 a.m.
"God — just tell me why."
And God does not give you a reason. He gives you Himself.
That is what happened to Job. He begged for an explanation, and God showed up — not with answers, but in person. And Job said: I had heard about you. But now I see you. That is what Peter is saying. You are in the fire. Something is happening to your faith — something more precious than gold — and it will result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus is finally revealed.
But the reason it is not meaningless is not because you understand it. It is because the Refiner is in the fire with you. And the Refiner has scars on His hands that prove He has been where you are.
It hurts because you were not made for this. You were made for wholeness. For presence. For love that does not break. Suffering is the collision between what you were made for and what you are living in. That is not a flaw in you. That is the image of God in you, refusing to accept a broken world as normal.
It hurts because something was very much alive in you. And pain found every room.
And it hurts because God is coming near. And when God comes near, everything that is not Him starts to burn. Not because He is angry with you. Because He is too close for the junk to survive.
The pain is not destruction. It is restoration. He is burning away what does not look like Him, so that when He looks into your life, He sees His own face. The same face that walked out of the tomb. The same face that carries the scars.
Are you convinced of the love of God for you — that His concern about you, His interest in you, His desire for you supersedes anything you could long for in yourself? Not love in general. Not love as something He holds for people at a distance. His specific attention to you. His actual interest in what is happening inside you right now. Because here is what I have seen. Most people who are in the fire believe God loves people. They are just not sure they qualify. Not sure it is personal enough to reach into the specific thing they are carrying.
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted. Not the idea of the brokenhearted. You. In the specific shape of your specific breaking.
You asked God for a reason. He gave you Himself. And He has not left the fire.
There is a rare condition where a person cannot feel pain at all. They can step on a nail and not know it. Put their hand on a burning stove and not flinch. And the mother of a young girl with this condition said: "My prayer every night is that my daughter would begin to feel pain."
If pain is a signal that something is wrong, is it so hard to believe that God would let you feel it as a signal to turn back to Him? Not as punishment. As a hand on your shoulder saying: come back. I am here. Come home.
A God who went through the fire Himself and came out the other side will not let the fire have the last word.
I keep asking God for a reason. And He keeps giving me Himself. And sometimes that makes me angry, because I want to understand and He wants me to trust. But His presence in the fire is better than any explanation I could ask for. Because explanations do not change anything. But His presence in the fire changes everything.
CLOSE — INVITATION If you are in the fire right now — and some of you are — I am not going to stand up here and give you the reason. I do not know the reason. But I know who is in the fire with you. Someone who has been there. Someone who came out the other side.
Something is happening to your faith right now. Something real. Something precious. Something gold cannot touch.
You asked God for a reason. He gave you Himself. And He has not left the fire.
If your chair needs to become an altar this morning, it can. If you need someone to pray with you, I am here. We are here.
Some of you have been asking for an explanation for months, maybe years. And maybe this morning, the invitation is not to understand. Maybe the invitation is to stop demanding a reason and let the Refiner be what He already is. Present. In the fire. With you. Doing the most precious work of your life.
He has not left. He is sitting at the fire. And He is not going anywhere.
Let me pray for us.
Father, we came to you this morning asking why. Some of us have been asking for a long time. And you are answering us — not with a reason, but with yourself.
You are the Refiner. You are in the fire. You have not left. And we remember this morning that you went into the fire first. That the cross was not plan B. That the tomb was not the end. That the scars on your hands are the proof that you know what fire feels like — and you came out the other side.
We asked for an explanation. You gave us you. And that is enough.
Help us trust you when we cannot see what you are doing. Help us feel you close when the silence feels like you walked away. And do the precious work in our faith that only fire can do. We do not understand it. But we trust the one who sits beside it — and who walked through it Himself.
In Jesus' name. Amen.