It’s unnatural to really feel the personal pain of someone else. You can sympathize, but really feeling the suffrage of another isn’t something we intuitively do.
And why does it matter anyway?
Well, for starters, it’s a way we can keep our own personal pain in perspective. But another, and more important, reason for empathy is to better serve others while connecting them to God.
That’s because our personal pain distracts and disconnects us from our creator. It removes our focus from God and puts it all on ourselves. Yes those pains may draw us closer, but they need our energy and resources nonetheless.
Examples from a General Worship Service.
When children are disruptive during worship, it’s stressful and taxing on the parents (not to mention those around them). I keep coloring books and crayons in my backpack for this reason. It’s a low-cost and small way to help relieve that pain. I’ve been there and been that parent. I relate and feel that personal pain. I know how it took my worship from God and put my focus on my pain of the moment.
In another example, the volume levels of the music or other audio can remove people from worship. Too quiet and we can’t hear. Conversely, as much as I love it loud, I don’t love seeing someone being pained in worship because it’s unbearably loud for them. I feel that pain and think about what it is like to be disconnected from my God. When my spirit should fill with the love of Christ, it’s emptying because of someone’s personal pain.
These examples, of course, are small-scale examples. They are not of martyrdom, souls who fight hard and sometimes give all for keeping their connection to God. Frankly, our personal pains pale in comparison. And they pale further when in contrast to the pain of an eternal Hell.
This is what Edwards is asking us to consider with Resolution #10.
Jonathan Edwards Resolution 10
Edwards’ Resolution #10 (in my modernized language) In my pain, I’ll remember the pain felt by Jesus and his followers and I will acknowledge that my suffering hardly compares to the reality of theirs or of eternal hell.
The Ultimate Price of Purpose and Pain
Let’s consider these real-life accounts of Gospel givers in the field:
The Price for 20 Men
In 2015, twenty-one male captives knelt on a beach of the southern Mediterranean coast of Libya. The so-called “People of the Cross” were being held by Islamic extremists. All but one was a follower of Christ. The twenty-first, Matthew Ayairga, was not. One-by-one, each was commanded to renounce his faith.
A refusal meant decapitation. One-by-one, twenty men beheaded. Ayairga, though, was known up to that time to have pledged his allegiance to Allah, the god of Islam.
The Price for J.W. Tucker
An eternal perspective inspired J. W. Tucker to risk earthly life for the gospel by going into the Congo during a civil war. He and his family had served there as Assemblies of God missionaries from 1939 to 1964. Less than two weeks after a furlough return to the Congo from America, J. W., his wife, and their children were captured and placed under house arrest by rebel forces.
J. W. Tucker was later beaten and thrown into the crocodile-infested water of the Bomokande River with sixty Christian cohorts. Tucker weighed the cost with his friend Morris Plotts, who tried to convince Tucker not to go.
“If you go in,” he said, “you won’t come out.” Tucker responded, “God didn’t tell me I had to come out. He only told me I had to go in.” (source: Mark Batterson)
In the midst of our personal pain, we do tend put more focus on ourselves than on God. Edwards sought to keep perspective by remembering the torments of Hell whenever he was inclined to lose that focus.
The Ultimate Purpose of Pain
Purpose for the Pain of 20… 21 Men
As shared in the pages of Kingdom Citizen: Your Role in Rebuilding a Broken Nation, In giving their lives, the last person in the line of captives saw the faith of those 20 men murdered in his presence. Conceivably, they could have renounced their faith in God and lived. But they did neither. And Ayairga, was aware of this fact.
Instead of taking the easy road, by pledging his allegiance to Allah and denouncing God, he shocked the extremists. He said to the terrorists, “Their God is my God.”
He knew God only peripherally and momentarily on earth. Then gained eternal life with God.
Purpose for Tucker’s Pain
Tucker’s wife, Angeline, telephoned to ask of her husband’s welfare. The response was a simple, “He is in heaven.”
A 1965 book by Tucker’s widow took those words as its title and J. W. Tucker became well-known for his martyrdom. A revival swept through the region, claiming thousands of new souls for Christ. In fact, the Assemblies of God reported 4,710 adult members and other believers in 1964 in Congo. Fifty years following Tucker’s death, the count amounted to 570,859.
At least some of this drastic increase was because of Tucker’s sacrifice and willingness to go in. (source: Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center).
We are to prepare ourselves to battle for God and our faith, yet few of us will ever have to choose our lives for the cause. There are captives in many places of the world where Christian brothers and sisters suffering persecution for Christ.
Some of them face a very real possibility of death.
Certainly, it is not without purpose.
My Personal Pain Pales in Comparison to The Pain of Hell
Abel was killed by his brother, Cain (Genesis 4), because Abel’s sacrifice was accepted by God and Cain’s was not. It placed him as the first martyr of the Bible. Chronologically, the last martyr recorded in the Old Testament is, as Jesus tells us, the prophet, Zechariah (Matthew 23:35; Luke 11:51).
The first martyr of the New Testament we know of is John the Baptist (Matthew 14:1-12). Herod the Tetrach had imprisoned John due to John’s disapproval of the king divorcing his wife to marry his sister-in-law. He then beheaded John at the request of his new step-daughter and wife.
In Acts, Stephen preached the Gospel, calling out those who crucified Jesus. In response, they stoned Stephen (Acts 7:54-60). He looked to Heaven while dying and saw Jesus at the right hand of God. He then asked for mercy on his persecutors.
Think about that for a moment…
After being brutalized and slowly, perhaps methodically, killed at the hands of another, you pray that your murderers get grace and mercy. That they would be forgiven!
Why? Because what you just experienced pales in comparison to the torment of Hell.
And the personal pain of those less persecuted pales in comparison to the martyrs.
Edwards on the Weight of Hell
This is a hard concept to grasp. I think we like to downplay the torment – even the existence of – Hell. It’s with that perspective, I urge you to seriously ponder and read the proposed reality that Jonathan Edwards relayed in The Eternity of Hell Torments:
How dismal will it be, when you are under these racking torments, to know assuredly that you never, never shall be delivered from them; to have no hope; when you shall wish that you might but be turned into nothing, but shall have no hope of it; when you shall wish that you might be turned into a toad or a serpent, but shall have no hope of it;
…after you shall have worn out the age of the sun, moon, and stars, in your dolorous groans and lamentations, without any rest day or night, or one minute’s ease, yet you shall have no hope of ever being delivered: when after you shall have worn out a thousand more such ages, yet you shall have no hope, but shall know that you are not one whit nearer to the end of your torments; but that still there are the same groans, the same shrieks, the same doleful cries, incessantly to be made by you, and that the smoke of your torment shall still ascend up, forever and ever; and that your souls, which shall have been agitated with the wrath of God all this while, yet will still exist to bear more wrath…
… O how dreadful will eternity appear to them after they shall have been thinking on it for ages together, and shall have had so long an experience of their torments!—The damned in hell will have two infinites perpetually to amaze them and swallow them up: one is an infinite God, whose wrath they will bear, and whom they will behold their perfect and irreconcilable enemy. The other is the infinite duration of their torment.