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Adultery: Where Dead Men Lie — Letter to a Would-Be Adulterer

Source:  Greg Morse/Desiring God

Dear Husband,

If you value your life, if you cherish your manliness and honor, if you love your family and your God, listen to his voice. As she whispers in your ear, as her lips yield the sweetest honey, as her speech soothes and excites, listen to his words instead. Drown her lies in wisdom.

She entices, “Come, let us take our fill of love till morning; let us delight ourselves with love” (Proverbs 7:18). She says that she can satisfy your longings. She says that no one will know. She makes you feel desired, dominant. She crowns you a king.

And she can provide some of the promised pleasure — for a time.

But mark these three words: in the end.

“In the end she is bitter as wormwood.” In the end she is “sharp as a two-edged sword” (Proverbs 5:4). In the end it would have been better to sleep every night embracing a Japanese Katana or a motion sensor grenade.

In the end you will realize that what you mistook as harmless pleasure, as “true love,” as the path to lifelong satisfaction, was the coffin where your reputation, your honor, your family’s flourishing and trust and — if unrepentant — your very soul goes to die. Her chamber of secrets is a chamber of death (Proverbs 7:25–27). Her bed is a graveyard where dead men lie.

Suicide of the Senseless

She will never lead to life (Proverbs 5:5). She does not even know where to find it (Proverbs 5:6). She gives no thought to Christ, to everlasting joy, to the narrow way. If you follow her, you go as an ox to the slaughter. You will end life with an arrow protruding from your liver (Proverbs 7:22–23).

If we could exhume the tongues of her dead victims, they would warn you, as that anguished rich man in torment, to avoid their fate (Luke 16:19–31). She lied in wait for each (Proverbs 7:12), seized upon their lust with kisses, and ferried them into Sheol.

The dead would cry, Adultery is the suicide of those who lack sense (Proverbs 6:32). None who touches her will go unpunished! (Proverbs 6:29).

Place your head on her pillow, and you write your name on a headstone.

Stay Far Away

And now, O husband, listen to me! Keep your way far from her. Do not go near her bed or even near the door of her house (Proverbs 5:8). Don’t fool yourself: you’re not strong enough to harmlessly chat via email, text late at night, meet up for a friendly drink. Stay away! Can you embrace fire and not get scorched (Proverbs 6:27–28)?

In the end — oh, that dreadful end — you will realize that it was not ultimately her fault, but your own. You will groan for your lust, when your flesh and body are consumed. You will wail, “How I hated discipline, and my heart despised reproof! I did not listen to wisdom’s voice! I did not heed my best friend’s warning! I slowly muted my conscience and cast God’s word aside in my madness. And now I am at the brink of utter ruin in the rubble of a broken existence” (see Proverbs 5:11–14).

In life, you will be a shell of a man, a skeleton. The jagged pieces of shattered hearts will be your bed. If you have any conscience left, it will become an enemy. Old relations will cringe at your name. You will be a man worthy of contempt and dishonor (Proverbs 6:33).

And in death, if you have not been washed and made new in the blood of Christ, you will not enter the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9). You will forever be the adulterer. A man who, by living for himself, lit his family on fire. A man who, in the end, will himself be lit with an everlasting flame.

Your Wife, Your Choicest Wine

Rather, “drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well” (Proverbs 5:15). Rekindle the passion that carried her across the threshold.

Drink deeply from her springs to refresh your love. Has your love proven feeble? Have grand promises now hushed into a whimper? Gird up the loins of your affection and play the man! You who would wrestle every challenge to the ground, and die in battle before conceding, will you now fall to fluttering eyelids? No. Rejoice in the wife of your youth!

She is a lovely deer, a graceful doe (Proverbs 5:18–19). Look at her — she sits with a thousand more reasons to love her than when you vowed to forsake all others for her. Rejoice in her! She still is that doe, that deer. Do not trade the doe for the skunk.

“Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight” (Proverbs 5:19). This includes the first time you brought her into the bedroom, the second time she bore your child, and the anniversary where you celebrated your third decade of marriage together. At all times. Be intoxicated always in her love (Proverbs 5:19). Get drunk in her passion, be inebriated with her smile, let the room spin as she walks in. She is your choicest wine.

Choose Life

Be not intoxicated with the forbidden woman.

Why? Because all your ways — no matter how dimly lit the hotel room — are before the eyes of the Lord (Proverbs 5:21). Your wife may be away, but your Lord is not. The Judge of all the earth watches. He is there with you. And there will be a reckoning for the heinous deed — either at Calvary or in the lake of fire.

He invites you even now to choose life, choose peace, choose obedience.

Be not intoxicated with the forbidden woman.

Why? Because the iniquities of the wicked ensnare the man who is, and he is held fast in the cords of his sin (Proverbs 5:22). You will get caught in your own web. Your family will be torn. Your name will be tarnished. And you will be bound by your own mischief.

Even the mighty Samson could not break such chains.

Be not intoxicated with the forbidden woman.

Why? Because you will die for lack of discipline (Proverbs 5:25). God will not be mocked. Because of your lack of discipline, your lack of earnest limb-cutting, lack of genuine repentance and faith, you will be led away into hell (Matthew 5:27–30).

Dear husband, forsake not your precious wife. Forsake not your honor and manliness. Forsake not your witness. Forsake not your God. Let Christ’s fidelity and love win your heart afresh to your wife. Be intoxicated with your bride. And with our Groom.

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What Should Be the Husband’s ‘Role’ in Marriage?

SOURCE: Dennis Rainey/Family Life

The Scriptures clearly give us the model for being a man, a husband, and father.

There is a story of a man who died and went to heaven to find two signs above two different lines. One sign said: “ALL THOSE MEN WHO HAVE BEEN DOMINATED BY THEIR WIVES, STAND HERE.” That line of men seemed to stretch off through the clouds into infinity.

The second sign read: “ALL THOSE WHO HAVE NEVER BEEN DOMINATED BY THEIR WIVES, STAND HERE.” Underneath the sign stood one man.

He went over to the man, grabbed his arm and said, “What’s the secret, how did you do it? That other line has millions of men and you are the only one standing in this line.”

The man looked around with a puzzled expression and said, “Why, I am not sure I know. My wife just told me to stand here.”

We have all heard jokes about “who wears the pants in the family.” Yet leadership in the home is no laughing matter. During the last few decades our culture has redefined the meaning and responsibilities of men and women in society and in the home. Many men are confused and insecure. Many do not know how to act in the home. Growing up, they lacked a good model for leadership at home and have no mental picture of what it means to lead a family. Consequently, they do not lead effectively, or they do not even try.Increasingly, many men are becoming passive in the home. They’ve decided that the easiest thing to do is nothing. The simplest thing—with the smallest risk—is to stay on the fence with both feet firmly planted in mid-air and let the wife do it. When a man is married to a strong wife who will take over, he often lets her do just that.

Fortunately, there is an answer. The Scriptures clearly give us the model for being a man, a husband, and a father. I call that model the “servant/leader.”

I hope that the concepts I share will help you understand the biblical role of a husband more clearly than ever before. When correctly interpreted and applied, these concepts not only result in freedom for the husband and wife, but will also help you work better as a team to combat isolation and conflict in your marriage.

#1: Be a leader. The Scriptures provide a clear organizational structure for a marriage. For example:

But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ. —1 Corinthians 11:3

Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless. So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body. —Ephesians 5:22-30

In his commentary on Ephesians, William Hendriksen points out that God “… placed ultimate responsibility with respect to the household on the shoulders of the husband . . . The Lord has assigned the wife the duty of obeying her husband yet … this obedience must be a voluntary submission on her part, and that only to her own husband, not to every man.”

“Head” does not mean male dominance, where a man lords it over a woman and demands her total obedience to his every wish and command. God never viewed women as second-class citizens. His Word clearly states that we are all equally His children and are of equal value and worth before Him. As Galatians 3:28 tells us, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

The teaching of the New Testament clearly shows that women are to be respected, revered, and treated as equals with men. Unfortunately, many husbands have not gotten the message. They degrade their wives by neglect or with insensitive and abusive treatment. One cause of the feminist movement may have been that men abandoned God’s design. When God presented Eve to Adam in the Garden, Adam received her as a gift of great value to God and to himself. When husbands, particularly Christian husbands, do not treat their wives as a precious gift from God and helpmate, they can cause those wives to search for ways to find significance and value as persons, often outside God’s will.

Are you a leader? Men who are natural leaders have no trouble answering the question “yes.” They know how to take over, control, guide, and get things done. Some men are not strong or are not natural leaders. How can they lead in the home?

Paul says the same to everyone. God has placed the husband in the position of responsibility. It does not matter what kind of personality a man may have. Your wife may be resisting you, fighting you, and spurning your attempts to lead, but it makes no difference. I believe our wives want us and need us to lead. You are not demanding this position; on the contrary, God placed you there. You will not lead her perfectly, but you must care for you wife and family by serving them with perseverance.

Scripture does more than assign leadership in a marriage to the husband, however. Those same passages you just read also provide a model for that leadership. The Apostle Paul says that the husband is head of the wife as Christ is head of the church. “This comparison of the husband with Christ reveals the sense in which a man should be his wife’s ‘head.'” Hendriksen writes, “He is her head as being vitally interested in her welfare. He is her protector. His pattern is Christ, who, as head of the church, is its Savior!”

Let’s look more closely at two responsibilities that flow out of proper leadership.

#2: Love your wife unconditionally. Ephesians 5:25 reads, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her.” Your unconditional acceptance of your wife is not based upon her performance, but on her worth as God’s gift to you. If you want to love your wife unconditionally, always be sure her emotional tank is full. One of the best ways to do that is to affirm her constantly. Let her know verbally that you value her, respect her, and love her. I have discovered that I simply cannot do that enough.

There is no question that words communicate love, but so do actions. You need to do both. As the Apostle John wrote in one of his letters: “let us not love with words or tongue, but with actions and in truth” (1 John 3:18). One of the missing ingredients in male leadership in homes is sacrificial action. When was the last time you gave up something for your wife—something you genuinely valued, like your golf game, a fishing trip, or your hobby? Sometimes you need to give up something you enjoy so your wife can have a break and see your love for her.

#3: Serve your wife. According to the New Testament, being head of your wife does not mean being her master, but her servant. Again, Christ is our model for this type of leadership. Jesus did not just talk about serving; He demonstrated it when he washed His disciples’ feet (John 13:1-17). Christ, the Head of the Church, took on the very nature of a servant when He was made in human likeness (Philippians 2:7).

One of the best ways to serve your wife is to understand her needs and try to meet them. Do you know what your wife’s top three needs are right now? If she is a young mother, she has a certain set of basic needs. If your children are grown and gone and you are in the empty nest, your wife has a different set of needs that you should try to meet. What is she worried about? What troubles her? What type of pressure does she feel? Learn the answers to questions like that, and then do what you can to reduce her worries, her troubles, her pressures.

What do you know about your wife’s hopes and dreams? I bet she has plenty—do you know what they are? Are you cultivating her gifts? If she has a knack for decorating, do you help her develop that?

Another way to serve your wife is to provide for her. This provision first involves assuming responsibility for meeting the material needs of the family. Paul tells us in 1 Timothy 5:8, “But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever.”

Providing for your wife also means taking the initiative in helping meet her spiritual needs. You do this by modeling godly character, by praying with her, by spending time together in God’s Word, and by looking for ways to encourage her spiritually.

To be a leader, a lover, and a servant is to accommodate your life to the gift God has given you—your wife. Give up your life for hers and, at the judgment seat of Christ, He will say, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

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Dissect Your Discouragement

Originally posted at: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/dissect-your-discouragement/

by Aimee Joseph 

Defeated. Deflated. Defunct. Discouraged.

We’ve all known times of discouragement in both its fleeting form and its stubborn, seasonal form.

As Christians, we’re invited and encouraged to honestly experience the full spectrum of human emotion; however, there is a point when choosing to dwell on and wallow in discouragement can become sin.

Discouragement is to be dealt with, not ignored, but it ought not dictate our behavior.

Facing Discouragement

Any emotion can be used as a diagnostic tool. Negative emotions, while uncomfortable and often unwelcome, can serve as instruments alerting us to what is going in on our souls, forcing us to slow down and deal with something gone awry within. As such, discouragement isn’t something to be ignored or squelched in a stiff-upper-lip way.

When my child comes home from school disgruntled and downcast, I don’t want him to harden his heart and just stoically move on. I want to hear what’s bothering him, even if it’s fairly petty in the grand scheme of things. If he lost at dodgeball or missed a spelling word, I care about those things, because I care about him. The wave of discouragement can become a window into his heart, and an avenue toward intimacy with him. To insist that he simply “get over it” would be to demand something less than human of him.

At the same time, it would be terribly unloving of me to allow my son to cry and pout all afternoon about the friend who snubbed him at lunch or the catch he missed in the game. As a parent who sees and knows more than he does, I must offer perspective and tell him what is true. He may not like it, but it will keep him from being swallowed by despondency.

Dissecting our discouragement paves a way to Christ that neither denies discouragement nor allows it to dictate.

It’s one thing to feel a wave of discouragement; it’s another to sit in a puddle of self-pity. Dissecting our discouragement paves a way to Christ that neither denies discouragement nor allows it to dictate.

When discouragement is dissected, three lies are often found wreaking havoc beneath the emotion.

1. God Promises Me a Comfortable Life

When interruptions or tragedies or discomforts pop up in our lives—and they will until Christ returns—they can expose the insidious lie that God exists to give us easy lives.

On the contrary, Christ promised his disciples they would have trouble. And yet, he accompanied this hard promise of an uncomfortable life with the soothing promise of a divine Comforter (John 14:16–18; 16:33).

2. God Should Do Things My Way

Waves of despondency have a way of shaking up the sinful silt that settles on the bottom of our souls. When we don’t get the job we’ve dreamed of, or when our family life looks different than we imagined, we often realize we’ve been bartering with heaven. While few of us would ever verbalize such a contractual approach to God, many of us say, in our hearts: Lord, I’ll do x and y; then you can give me z.

But God lovingly resists and redirects our plans, because, in his own words through the prophet Isaiah: “My thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are my ways your ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:8–9).

3. God Should Work According to My Timetable

Sometimes, discouragement results from gradual disappointments and hopes deferred. Long waits—whether for clarity, spouse, opportunity, children, or any other right desire—can make our souls irritable and sick. In Proverbs 13:12, Solomon observed that “hope deferred makes the heart sick, but desire coming is a tree of life.” When God doesn’t work on the timetable we prefer, we do well to remember that he is the deepest desire of our hearts and that he has already come. And he will come again to set all things right and usher us into glory with him forever.

Moods and moments of discouragement can be opportunities to crawl into the loving lap of the Father. There we are invited to bring our tangled knots of disappointments under his loving scrutiny. We will be met by a Father who loves us enough to receive our emotions, while also exposing the lies that often hide under discouragement’s cloak.

Again and again, our patient Father invites us to exchange our lies for his truth—the truth that sets us free.

Aimee Joseph works alongside her husband, G’Joe, who directs Campus Outreach San Diego. They love watching college students brought from lost to leaders through Christ in the church for the world. Parenting three little boys keeps her busy; writing on her blogand studying the Word keep her sane. She has a passion to see women trained to love God and his Word.

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Adultery: Will You Cleave and Leave Your Man?

SOURCE:  Noël Piper/Desiring God

Dear Wife,

Cleave is a strange word. It’s a contranym — a word that can have opposite meanings.

In an upper story of a concrete apartment block in a small Chinese city, I watched Rene wield her cleaver like a top chef, preparing vegetables for her family’s dinner. I was impressed how she positioned her fingers so they didn’t get chopped with the carrots. “Wow! I want some of those knives to take home as gifts,” I said. Rene pointed out the window toward a shop across the busy street. “You should be able to find them there.”

The name of one brand was Family Cleaver. It was easy to see how the difficulty of grasping a double meaning in English must have tripped up a Chinese translator. I was glad to discover a different brand with a happier name (that wouldn’t have implications of splitting a family apart).

On the opposite side of the word, there’s the other meaning of cleave, as it’s used in a time-honored wedding text: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24 KJV). Or as the ESV translates the same word, the husband shall “hold fast” to his wife.

Johnny Picked Me

At a small country church in middle Georgia, on a mild Saturday afternoon in December almost 49 years ago, we were married. We had waited two and a half years for this day. I still could hardly believe that Johnny Piper had chosen me, and that he wanted to spend his life with me just as much as I wanted to be with him.

I understood — as well as a person can at the beginning of the rest of her life — the happy, solemn weight of promising to be faithful to him until death parted us, no matter what challenges God might bring into our lives. It didn’t seem possible I would ever want anything else.

“Noël, do you take John to be your wedded husband to live together in holy matrimony? Do you promise to love him . . . and forsaking all others, be faithful only to him so long as you both shall live?” There was not a doubt in my mind or heart when I declared, “I do!”

How could I have known that the worse of “better or worse” would lead to a season of sleepless nights when I wondered how I could keep on? I felt desperate for something different. That’s the time in our marriage when I would have been most likely to turn to someone else. But thank God, it didn’t happen. He held us together. There were a few habits that helped.

Faithfulness to Johnny, through the years, from boyfriend to husband, meant:

  • Not flirting with other men.
  • Avoiding men who seemed too interested.
  • Not meeting alone with any other man.
  • Having regular devotions together with Johnny.

Faithfulness required more than four habits, but these four have been central and essential.

Hardest Habit

The last is the hardest, but most important. My appreciation for it began, as with many things, with my parents. It is amazing my parents stayed together. About twenty years into their marriage, their rampaging differences seemed about to rip them apart.

Through even the most difficult months — years, really — Daddy and Mother took us all to church every Sunday. And every evening of the week, one of us kids was sent to the front porch to holler down toward the pasture and out toward the woods, “Sto-o-ory and pra-a-yers ti-i-ime!”

After all nine of us kids (later we were ten) had tumbled into the living room from the barn and creek and kitchen, Daddy read the next passage in our years-long path through the whole Bible. Then we kneeled at our chairs and took turns praying.

I realize now how difficult that must have been for my parents. Often they must have felt like hypocrites, going through motions when they didn’t feel like worshiping or praying together.

Of course, it would have been ideal if they had come before God with whole and happy hearts. But it was better to come somehow than not at all. And God held them together until he brought their marriage through the tempest into peace, using his glue of faithfulness — his faithfulness to them, and their faithfulness to each other and to those family devotional traditions.

What Kind of Cleaver?

What did it boil down to during my darkest nights? I was saved from wandering by some form of this question: What kind of a cleaver am I? Am I the deadly implement who will split my family — with a husband and five children — into shreds? Because, with or without divorce, that is what unfaithfulness will do to us.

Or will I cleave to the husband God has given me? Will I cling to my marriage and pray desperately for something different? I chose to cling, and God is still proving his faithfulness. He will do the same for you.

By

10 Things You Should Know about Suffering

Originally posted at: https://www.crossway.org/articles/10-things-you-should-know-about-suffering

1. Suffering is a result of the fall.

God warned Adam that eating the forbidden fruit would result in death (Gen 2). Romans 5:12 confirms that this happened after Adam’s fall, “Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.” Death (and the accompanying pain and suffering) came as a result of that first sin and our continued sin. Pain, suffering, and death—in and of themselves—are not good.

2. God uses suffering for good.

Thankfully, Romans 8 tells us “That for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” God never tells us our pain is good, but he uses pain to work for our good in his miraculous and mysterious way.

One of the ways God uses pain is to wake us up and bring up to himself. Our tendency in times of trial may be to run away from God, become angry with God, or idolize worldly comfort. Charles Spurgeon said it well when he encouraged us to look to God in our pain. He is attributed with saying, “I have learned to kiss the wave that throws me against the Rock of Ages.” We need to realize that God is in control over all our circumstances . . . and he is good. We need to open our eyes in our pain and see that our circumstances are taking us right to God.

3. We can’t always see what God is doing in our pain.

Augustine wrote of God and our circumstances, “If you understand, it is not God you understand.” We can hardly scratch the surface of the intentionality, creativity, and wisdom of God’s handiwork. Who can give him counsel or criticize his work? Proverbs 16:4 says, “The Lord has made everything for its purpose.” We can trust that God is always doing more than we can fathom.

We need to realize that God is in control over all our circumstances . . . and he is good.

4. God uses suffering to mature us in Christ.

James 1 says, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” Trials can be counted as joy because God is persevering our faith. He is making us more like Christ, and that is always gain.

5. Persevering through suffering allows us to comfort others who suffer.

God brings us through suffering so we can comfort others who are suffering. 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” The best burden-bearers are the ones who’ve needed someone to carry their burdens in the past.

6. Suffering opens up ministry opportunities you’ve never dreamed of.

Growing up with a healthy body I never knew one day my life and ministry would include encouraging the hurting and helping those who care for the hurting. I am in constant pain—each day I feel burning sensations and sharp pains in both of my arms. I can’t put on my seatbelt, open a bottle of water, button my shirt, or shake hands with my friends. In the past couple of years I have begun to feel similar symptoms starting in my legs. Some days the pain is agonizing. Most nights I struggle to sleep. Depression has engulfed me on more than one occasion.

And yet! God’s grace is seen in the bright rays of light that shine through opportunities he has given me to encourage others. He has granted me grace to pastor out of weakness and witness to others about his unrelenting love. I never would have chosen or dreamed of a ministry like this—the Lord has done marvelous things.

7. God moves through weakness and suffering and not in spite of it.

Christianity teaches that the goal is not to eliminate pain and weakness (in this life), but for God to work in and through you in your pain. Paul had a thorn in his flesh and asked God multiple times but it remained. One could wonder how amazing Paul’s ministry would be if Paul didn’t have his thorn. But God didn’t use Paul despite his thorn, but through his thorn. God moves not in spite of our suffering, but through our suffering. Weakness is God’s way of moving in this world.

8. Our earthly perspective on the duration of suffering is very different from God’s.

Noah worked on an ark and waited for a flood. Abraham waited for a child with Sarah for years. Joseph was in prison for years. Moses wandered in the desert wilderness for 40 years. Hannah wept continually for a child. David fled from a wicked king for 13 years in the desert. Jeremiah “the weeping prophet” preached and saw no fruit for several decades. Paul faced imprisonment one after another. 2 Corinthians 4:17 gives us a healthy perspective on persevering in trials, “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.”

9. Suffering can propel us into community.

My suffering has caused me to depend on the believing community for help, service, encouragement, and prayer. Though seeking help is humbling, it has an added bonus of friendship. I think of all the rides my friends Chris and Scott have given me over the years; I think of Glen’s encouragement; I think of John’s phone calls from halfway around the world and Darren and Kieron’s text messages. When we resist the urge to isolate ourselves God blesses us with sweet fellowship.

10. Christianity has the only solution to suffering.

All other religions have insufficient means of coping with and resolving pain and suffering. Some present plans of escape from the reality of pain. Some teach ways to placate the gods. Some tout karmic philosophies. Some focus on working for paradise—a place with no pain and unbounded pleasure.

But only Christianity provides true hope for the hurting. Suffering and death is inevitable for all of us but we can have hope because one has gone before us in death. Jesus Christ, truly God and truly man, lived a sinless life in our place. He faced various temptations and trials—betrayal by those closest to him, mockery, emotional anguish, physical agony, and most of all, judgment by God the Father.

When Jesus hung on the cross bearing the weight of his people’s sins, he not only faced the worst earthly death imaginable (reserved for only the worst criminals), he faced the overflowing cup of God’s wrath. But the story doesn’t end there with the death of Jesus.

Three days later he walked out of his tomb; Jesus had risen from the dead. Christ’s resurrection means that our pain and our trials and even our death are not the end of the story.

Dave Furman

Dave Furman (ThM, Dallas Theological Seminary) serves as the senior pastor of Redeemer Church of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, which he planted in 2010. Dave and his wife, Gloria, have four children.