THE SUFFERINGS OF CHRIST WITHIN US

Jesus Christ was the personification of the Father. You remember how, among other things, He stood over Jerusalem and wept, saying, “how I would have taken you under My wings like a chick, like a mother hen does her chicks.” And He wept, and He was grieved over it. So we have a personification of God, we see it in Christ, we see it in the Gospels of how Jesus thought and reacted.

You don't think God feels pain? He feels pain when He looks at His creation, and He sees the mess. He sees the hearts that are not yet open. He sees the places where He wants to love. And He can't because people are not open. But I just see the necessary, how necessary the pain is as we come forth, because we're experiencing a little bit of His.

It does something to you, and it changes us. The sufferings we've gone through, I don't care what level they've been on, God has allowed them. That the things we go through is what is molding us into who God wants us to be. I was just thinking in the Hebrews there where it says, He perfected the Son, He was perfected through suffering. The author of our faith, et cetera, et cetera, perfected through the sufferings.

And there's things that we've gone through, everything is shaping us. Suffering has a way of either opening your heart wide, or it closes it. The pain and the things we go through, they have that tendency to open our hearts up wider. For what reason? That we can know His heart in a greater way. Isn't that amazing?

You go look out there in the world and religion, they've written books for thousands of years. Why does mankind suffer? Why the suffering? Yeah, I know that, that mankind brought it upon himself, themselves, ourselves in disobedience. Nevertheless, God has used that again and again to find hearts that are open. That He can reveal Himself to.

Suffering is a mystery. It's been a mystery forever. Why do Christians suffer or why does everybody, anyone suffer? I think it's His love. I think He realizes that there is a limitation that the human being has to open up to His love. For His children, they open up to Him in a deeper way through suffering.

Why that has to be? Probably because we're in this human flesh. He knows it better than we do. He knows the way it operates. He knows all this stuff that we don't quite get it's a mystery to us. Suffering has a point in Him, and that's love. That's why He allows suffering. It's for us to be able to open up to a deeper realm of His love.

This thing of suffering is not just Him allowing you to go through something because you're going to grow. No, He allows you to go through it because you're going to open up to His love in a deeper way. It just is, it's for His children. Isn't that Scripture interesting that Christ learned obedience through suffering?

He grew in that. He experienced all this stuff. As a forerunner, Christ experienced it, He walked through it, and it had to do with suffering.

Pain is inherently part of God, at least for His sons. The Word talks about how He chastens every son, or scourges every son whom He receives. I think that when we partake on that level, there's something of the divine that we're being allowed to experience.

I just go back to that thing of the pain that was in Jesus's heart, not over the physical getting nailed to a cross, but the pain that was in Him. What does it say in Isaiah 53? He was a man of sorrows. acquainted with grief. That was what was in God's heart. It's still in God's heart. The grief and the sorrow, the pain as part of His love for us and for all of His children, because they're not open.

They're not open enough. The pain and sufferings we go through are an allowing us to touch, a part of God that's real, too, that nobody wants to talk about or even acknowledge. The love of God is revealed to us. He reveals His nature to us. Inherent in it is the sorrow He carries - the grief.

Isaiah stands in the temple. And the Lord appears to him, and what's his first words? Woe is me. Immediately he's into suffering. Immediately, because he's partaking of God's nature, the impartation of God. It's not something we like to talk about, because it's suffering. I think we're going to change our thinking in this because it's going to be the drive, the cry of our hearts

is to become like Him. And that's going to be a greater drive than the suffering. If you read about the disciples, they talks about those who refused resurrection for a greater resurrection. They died in the arenas with wild, all the stuff that happened to them, sawn in two, all this stuff you go, how in the heck did they endure that? There was something that was real to them. There was a divine nature that they wanted so, that screamed to have the divine nature of the Father. That suffering pales, pain pales, suffering pales in comparison to receiving the divine nature.

A couple of years ago I was reading in Colossians two and I saw where Paul said they were helping to fill up the sufferings of Christ. And it hit me so and I said I'm willing Lord to do that.

Since then there's been a lot but you know I said I'll never complain about it because it's what a privilege. What a privilege to help fill up the sufferings of Christ.

I think the biggest reason why we go through the suffering is because our Lord Jesus Christ went through suffering. He was the firstborn son, the firstborn of many sons that were to come to birth.

And why would we not go through suffering as He went through it? God came here in Christ. He was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself. And Christ, in flesh and blood, suffered many things, went through certain agonies, trials and I could equate to the fact, that I'm going through nothing more or less than what He went through.

So if we can relate to the fact that the Lord felt and went through things that you and I feel and go through in our lifetimes, and it's all for a reason. It's part of this thing when God sent us down here to experience the sinfulness of sin, to experience what it's like to be in this atmosphere, because in the heavens, there is no sin, it's perfect.

There is no, there's nothing negative about being in the presence of the Lord. In the heavens you're worshiping; you're loving Him; you're part of an atmosphere that has nothing in it of what we're experiencing down here on this earth. I thank the Lord for reminding me of that fact, that everything He went through, we're going through.

And the reason for it is. It's helping us to mature as sons. We're becoming more like the Lord, who became more like His Father. This is what we're in this process of, is we're becoming more like our Father who created us after His image. It's all part and parcel to this walk with Him, that our walk is no different than what the Lord Jesus walked through when He was here.

Just reading the 11th chapter of Hebrews, it's all about the triumphs of faith. But then you turn the page, and uh oh, the Father's discipline. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Jesus, therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.

All this is set up, so that we get down to verse 9 in chapter 12. We had earthly fathers to discipline us. We respected them. Shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time, as seemed best to them. But He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness. We're sharing His holiness, but we're going to have to go through the discipline and the trials, tribulations, all of that business, if we're going to get there. And so we're doing it. So it's our choice and we've made it.