A couple of weeks ago, Stacy attended a meeting at the seminary hosted by Chosen Families, a ministry which focuses on hidden disabilities. At the meeting, someone recommended a sermon by John Piper on John 9:1-4 entitled “Why Was This Child Born Blind?”
When God has something to teach us, he often confronts us with the same truth in a number of different ways. The truth of this passage as expounded by John Piper was right in line with what God had been teaching me already over the past few weeks (which I blogged about last week here). Piper explains that “suffering can only have ultimate meaning in relation to God.”
I understand how people would want to explain away the obvious meaning of Jesus‘ explanation of the man’s blindness—”that the works of God might be displayed in him.” How could God be so selfish as to ordain my suffering or, even worse, my child’s suffering for his own glory? Undoubtedly this is a hard pill to swallow, and it makes no sense apart from a belief that God is our greatest good. As John Piper says in the “cleaned-up” manuscript of the sermon:
[F]or our suffering to have ultimate meaning, God must be supremely valuable to us. More valuable than health and life. Many things in the Bible make no sense until God becomes your supreme value.
I hope that this sermon will be as great an encouragement to your family as it was to our family.
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