Mourning Into Dancing

God’s Healing for Life’s Losses:
How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting

Post 39: Mourning Into Dancing

Problems can either shove us far from God or drag us kicking and screaming closer to Him. So in suffering leading to worship, we ask a core soul care question, “How are these problems influencing your relationship to God?”

Worship and the Hymn

As the hymn writer poetically states it:

Be still, my soul; the Lord is on thy side;
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain.
Leave to thy God to order and provide;
In every change He faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul: the best thy heavenly Friend,
Thro’ thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

Worship and the Word

Many passages support the concept of worship in the midst of suffering and worship as the end result of suffering. This has been the experience of saints throughout Biblical history.

Asaph, reflecting on his suffering, concludes, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you (Psalm 73:25).

David concurs, as his suffering creates a God-thirst. “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?” (Psalm 42:1-2).

Peter, in the New Testament, explains the purpose of problems, teaching that they come so that our faith in God may be refined, then concludes with these words about suffering’s significance:

“Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filed with an inexpressible and glorious joy” (1 Peter 1:8).

Peter’s message reminds us of Paul as he looks back upon a lifetime of suffering and says:

“I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish that I may gain Christ. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:8, 10).

Mourning into Dancing

In suffering, God is not getting back at you, He is getting you back to Him.

Throughout Mourning Into Dancing, Walter Wangerin explains that suffering and death are meant to teach us our need again.

“The actual experience of dying persuades the little god that he is finite after all” (Wangerin, Mourning Into Dancing, p. 76).

Suffering opens our hands to God. It was Augustine who declared, “God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full—there is nowhere for Him to put it.”

God makes therapeutic use of our suffering. Suffering, as Martin Luther taught, creates in the child of God a delicious despair. Suffering is God’s putrid tasting medicine of choice resulting in delicious healing. Healing medicine for our ultimate sickness—the arrogance that we do not need God. The arrogance that anything but God could ever satisfy our soul.

Suffering’s ultimate goal is worship. Suffering’s ultimate goal is knowing and worshipping God as our Spring of Living Water—our only satisfaction and our greatest joy.

Guiding Others to the Spring of Living Water

Easy words to type…harder words to live. Journey with us again in our next post as we ponder how to guide others toward God the Spring of Living Water even when life is like a parched and barren wilderness.