Let me ask a ridiculous, silly, I already know the answer question.  Have you ever been stung?  Has something ever happened to you and it hurt deeply because of the source of the sting and the nature of the hurt?  We all have had this happen to us.  If you haven’t, your turn is coming.  I had that happen to me recently and became uniquely aware in the early moments that God wanted me to trace the steps of my soul so that I could see very clearly my sin and very clearly His wonderfully precious sanctifying grace.  So, walk alongside me.  Look and listen.  I tend to think that most of us respond the same kinds of ways when we are stung by some hurt.

The first thing that I saw in myself was from my perspective a rightful and righteous indignation at the injustice of it all.  It was so unfair. How could they?  All that I had done and all that I had given?  I had been there in difficult times and in dark days and now this . . . .  Are you tracking with me?  I wanted to lash out from within my hurt feelings and let everybody know how wronged I had been.  Then God showed me all the “I” in everything I was feeling and saying.  This wasn’t right and righteous indignation.  This was ugly, smelly, stinkin’ pride.  This was all about me.  And you would think that at this point that I would just bow before God and ask for the grace of forgiveness.  But I didn’t.  Recognition of sin does not necessarily lead to repentance of sin.  Knowledge may be power but it does not always lead us to repentance.  At least it doesn’t me.

So, I took the next step and told a few close friends including my best friend Anne about what had happened.  I was hurt, wounded, stung.  I was using the right words to say the right things and was getting much desired encouragement and support except from my best friend who was listening carefully but loving enough to remind me that it is in times like these that we show who we really are, otherwise; we are just talking.  Stung again!  But this time from the right person in the right way.  Conviction was deepening because God wasn’t going to let me go far down this road of “wrighteousness.”  I tossed and turned during the night, alternating between praising God for His grace and throwing pity parties.  Then the morning came.

I am studying 1 Peter in preparation for preaching on how believing spouses are to relate to unbelieving spouses and the text in chapter 3 cannot be properly understood apart from what precedes it and what precedes it is a passage about the inevitability of suffering.  Wow!  I was really stung now because the suffering of this text is about being persecuted, put in jail, and put to death for the Gospel.  God got all over me in reminding me of what a whimp I am:  upset about nothing of any eternal value, what would you do if a lynch mob came committed to killing you lest you stop preaching the gospel!!  And then the kicker was a sermon by Erwin Lutzer on forgiving others when hurt by them so as to show the grace of God in the Gospel which is the reason we were put in that place of pain in the first place!!  I was talking to Lutzer while shaving, “that is easy for you to say in your comfortable pulpit in Chicaco; you don’t know what I am facing.”  Then I laughed and cried through my half-shaven face.  God is so good.  He sent me into this place to teach me yet again how easy it is to say that we love Jesus and how absolutely demanding it is to surrender all to Him so that He really does live in and through us.  Have you traveled a similar road on the way to finding that the path that leads us toward being His people is often more painful for us than the pain that necessarily comes to keep us on this path?

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