You have not made us drink this cup in vain

Recently, John Piper posted this to his website:

John Piper's Funeral Prayer for a Family of Five

It is not easy to read through or listen to, but I contend is necessary and essential to understand the value of the Christian life. In the current phase of life I am in, I am involved with the lives of younger Christian men, guys in their 20's and 30's who have this amazing and exciting perspective on God's design for their lives. This is not a bad thing. This is an incredibly good thing. However, the zeal for life will at some point inevitably encounter what life has to offer in a fallen, broken, sinful cursed world. So what then?

What do you do when your business calling from God results in bankruptcy? When your spouse has mental illness? When you run out of money? When you bury your child? What then?

I don't wish these things on anyone in my life, but these are the encounters with a spiritual reality that will come for any Christian. It is these events that are still missing from the lives of my younger friends, just like it was missing from my own life during my 20's and early 30's.

But then it happens, and your world crumbles, not once, but daily, even hourly. What happens to your theology that is based on an idea that it is God's desire to make much of me? I contend that this is when your faith becomes most precious, because only then can you see with clarity that Jesus himself is the highest treasure you can seek, not your spouse, or your family, or your job, or your calling to go to another country to spread the Gospel. And this is so, so critical to learn, even as the often necessary steps to this lesson can and must come through suffering. But don't get me wrong; that doesn't mean that sadness is the only thing to look forward to in the Christian life, that we are sentenced to a somber existence that bear more tears than smiles.

As Piper wrote during his final sermon to Bethlehem Baptist Church:

I have tried these thirty-two-and-a-half years to lead the staff and the elders and you in the experience of sorrowful yet always rejoicing. I turn with dismay from church services that are treated like radio talk shows where everything sounds like chipper, frisky, high-spirited chatter designed to make people feel lighthearted and playful and bouncy. I look at those services and say to myself: Don’t you know that people are sitting out there who are dying of cancer, whose marriage is a living hell, whose children have broken their hearts, who are barely making it financially, who have just lost their job, who are lonely and frightened and misunderstood and depressed? And you are going to try to create an atmosphere of bouncy, chipper, frisky, light-hearted, playful worship? 

And, of course, there will be those who hear me say that and say: O, so you think what those people need is a morose, gloomy, sullen, dark, heavy atmosphere of solemnity? 

No. What they need is to see and feel indomitable joy in Jesus in the midst of suffering and sorrow. “Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” They need to taste that these church people are not playing games here. They are not using religion as a platform for the same-old, hyped-up self-help that the world offers every day. They need the greatness and the grandeur of God over their heads like galaxies of hope. They need the unfathomable crucified and risen Christ embracing them in love with blood all over his face and hands. And they need the thousand-mile-deep rock of God’s word under their feet.

Just as Naomi cried in the book of Ruth after losing her family and the continuance of her name, “Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me." However, as Piper has also argued, she may have been in a state of despair, but her theology was not broken, but rather able to maintain three things: God is real, God is sovereign, and God was the one who afflicted her. The problem was not her theology, but rather that she had forgotten the story of Joseph and to believe that the story was not yet finished.

There are times in life when the cup from which we drink is very bitter and it feels like the substance that we have to choke down will never end, and sometimes even more frustratingly, does not end, not because of circumstance, but because of who we are as fallen people, our own sin perpetuating the struggle. But Piper's prayer is a reminder that when the taste is most bitter, Jesus shines most brightly because only in those moments are His promises of salvation most clearly understood - that there is nothing else on which to hope except the author and perfecter of our faith.

As I wrote a few months ago in the aftermath of NBA coach Monty Williams eulogizing his wife Ingrid, when the world totally fails, the grounds for joy remains:

The power of a saving faith is that it can position joy and sorrow side by side, respecting both, while diminishing neither. Why does a leader attend a memorial service in one step and then return to his charges to compete in the next? Perhaps because there is significant, and one might even say eternal, value in understanding and exercising that if your faith cannot speak both to you and through you during your own times of the most painful kinds of trial in order to encourage others, then what really does your faith have to offer the world?

Habakkuk 3: 18-19

Though the fig tree should not blossom,

    nor fruit be on the vines,

the produce of the olive fail

    and the fields yield no food,

the flock be cut off from the fold

    and there be no herd in the stalls,

yet I will rejoice in the Lord;

    I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

That is a faith, a joy, and a savior worth holding onto, because the cup of bitterness has not been consumed in vain. The sorrow is real, but so is the joy that walks along side it.