Pain, Presence, Comfort, and......JOY. We've come to the end, but notice it starts with pain. It will lead to joy if we give it permission. Servais Pinckaers wrote a book, The Pursuit of Happiness. I've been reading it these last few weeks. It's a commentary on the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:1-12, our text for this weekend. He says, "The voice of suffering is a strange voice. It silences all others, leaves us breathless, speechless when it reverberates. Is this not precisely the quality which likens suffering's voice to the voice of God who leads us into the solitude of the desert to speak with us?" Now that is profound, deep and life changing. Focus on that a minute. Maybe suffering leads us to hear the voice of God. Our entire series comes to a close with this thought: Maybe God eagerly awaits to use your suffering to bring you to a place to hear his voice, sense his comfort, be in his presence, and to be filled with his joy. And here it ends. God's joy is deposited into the heart of the one who humbles herself under the magnificent guiding and loving hand of the Lord. What better place to discover God's joy than the beatitudes. The beatitudes are the course correctors in our lives that bring us to this place to experience true joy. Jesus says, "Rejoice and be glad" right after listing the beatitudes. Joy comes by humbling oneself by adopting the beatitudes as role models in our lives.
Todd
