God is Great, God is Good
“Are any among you suffering? They should pray.”
“I lift up my eyes to the hills—
from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.
The Lord will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time on and forevermore.”
—
Scott Peck began his book, The Road Less Traveled, with these three words – life is difficult. We all know life is difficult. I once saw a bumper sticker that suggested a response to the difficulty of life: Life is difficult – Pray hard.
James 5:13 acknowledges that reality. You will have sickness and suffering and sin, so pray, pray hard. The Christian response to suffering is prayer.
Sickness has a strange way of strengthening your relationship with God, if you are open to it. Whether you are angry with God, or desperately pleading for relief to your pain, God hears your prayer.
When we yell at God, God does not turn away or ignore our anger. In of the suffering and death of Jesus Christ, God knows what it means to suffer in pain and grief. God is big enough to hear our deepest sorrows and empathize with our greatest pain. When you are sick and suffering, prayer is the best response, even angry prayer.
When life seems out of control, we want to ask God the unanswerable question, “Why, God? Why?” Go ahead, cry out to God. Because if the anger is there and you don’t cry out, your anger will pour out on someone else.
God can take it, because of two simple characteristics of God we learned as a child. “God is great and God is good.”
God is great. We believe God created this world we live in and everything in it. We trust that in God’s greatness God is guiding this world toward God’s purposes. How that happens is a spiritual mystery that we trust in faith.
God is greater than humans can comprehend. We trust in the influence of God’s love working in our lives through the indwelling Holy Spirit. Such love is God’s greatness at work.
God is good. God is compassionate and loves us even when our pain and grief bring us to angry questions and doubts. God loves us and does not desire for us to be sick or to suffer. And yet, God knows, as we all know, that sickness and suffering are a part of human life. Life is difficult, remember?
In God’s compassion, what God desires most is relationship with us. Through our relationship with God, we come to know God’s compassion. We know the love of God is with us. We know the comforting presence of God as we walk through the deepest and darkest valleys of our lives.
Through prayer, we nurture our relationship with God, enabling us to find strength when our strength has gone. Through prayer, God will give us courage to face our most difficult trials. Through prayer, we will find faith that is greater than any sickness, suffering, or grief.
God is great, and God is good. God is working in us, even when our sickness does not go away. God works in and through the broken vessels of our lives, transforming our brokenness into spiritual strength, making us stronger in the broken places.