God's apparent unfairness

This word is taken from Psalm 73, verses 1 through to 17, inclusive. Psalm 73, verses 1 to 17. Truly God is good to Israel, even to such as are of a clean heart.

But as for me, my feet were almost gone, my steps had well nigh slipped. For I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For there are no bands in their death, but their strength is firm.

They are not in trouble as other men, neither are they plagued like other men. Therefore pride compasseth them about as a chain, violence covereth them as a garment. Their eyes stand out with fatness, they have more than heart could wish.

They are corrupt and speak wickedly, concerning oppression they speak loftily. They set their mouth against the heavens, and their tongue walketh through the earth. Therefore his people return hither, and waters of a full cup are wrung out to them.

And they say, How doth God know, and is there knowledge in the Most High? Behold, these are the ungodly, who prosper in the world. They increase in riches. Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency.

For all the day long have I been plagued, and chastened every morning. If I say, I will speak thus. Behold, I should offend against the generation of thy children.

When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me. Until I went into the sanctuary of God, then understood I their end. And so may our Heavenly Father bless this, thy holy word, to our hearts and eyes of understanding, that we may receive a deep understanding of the content, the great depth of understanding contained within these words.

With the helpful aid of our divinely inspired and appointed pastor, Lord, O God, for his sake, for Jesus' sake, we ask thee to bless this word, for the sake of thy Son, the Holy One of Israel, the faithful and true One, the Lord Jesus Christ, our Saviour, Redeemer. Amen. With those words in our minds, help us as we come around Scripture and make this a sacred moment.

Help us, as it were, to take the shoes off our feet as we stand on holy ground and minister to our hearts and encourage us along life's journey for the Saviour's sake. Amen. Psalm 73 verse 2 has within it just three words which really contain almost an ocean of meaning.

For a lot of people, that ocean is full of pain. It's full of questions. And they can identify with what the psalmist is here saying because, well, that's true to their experience.

Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart, but ask for me. Ask for me. You see, the psalmist here is sort of an exception.

He puts down what is a general pronouncement against which none of the Jews would presumably have in any way queried, raised an objection. But he says that that may be true for them, but it's just not true for me. And I want to speak very feelingfully this morning to friends who find themselves in this particular condition.

I have almost fought over this word. I haven't got my overhead projector because I've been incapable of just bringing this in some alliterated fashion. And that's perhaps a good thing because I don't just want to have one way of explaining Scripture.

There are those who have great problems in acknowledging what I've been preaching on in terms of the goodness of God because of, well, what has happened in their lives. There's a great essayist at the end of the 19th century by the name of John Stuart Mill. Stuart Mill came to the conclusion that God didn't exist.

He was an atheist. It was fashionable to be an atheist at the end of the last century for a number of reasons that I'll not go into, but it was. It was the thing done.

And he said, well, if we could look upon a world in which good was granted and punishment was meted out in accordance with the evil and the good that people had done, then we might be able to believe that behind this phenomenon of life there was the Christian God. But he said, clearly, this is not the case. I mean, there are those who do evil and yet they are not punished for the evil that they do.

And there are those who seem to live a very decent and a very honorable life and yet they are not rewarded accordingly. Now, said John Stuart Mill, the obvious conclusion that one draws is that this whole business of some kind benevolent God, well, it's an utter nonsense. You see, he wanted in our lives a sort of cause and effect relationship which was speedily delivered, like if you put your hand on the flame of a candle.

Now, that's a daft thing to do, isn't it? And immediately you do that, you get a reaction to your stupidity. You're punished by the flame actually burning your hand. Now, John Stuart Mill was, Mill, not Milm, Mill was saying, M-I-double-L, that it would be in keeping with the concept of a good God if immediately there was a response to the evil that people had done and immediately there was a response to the good that they had done.

But clearly this is not the case. People who are evil go through life and sometimes they have great blessings, or seemingly so. That was the problem in the 73rd Psalm, that I stand out with fatness.

These evil people. And yet there are some folks who give 20 shillings or 100 pence to the pound who pay up their shackles in Jewish currency and they're quite honorable, and yet look at them, look at them. Now, not that the psalmist brought the same conclusion to bear as John Stuart Mill and said, well, therefore God doesn't exist, but he did say, as for me, well, I've got a problem, about the fairness of God.

The fairness of God. Do you have that problem? There's a Jewish rabbi who wrote a book quite recently. He's a bestseller in America.

He's an American rabbi, an American Jew. And the book was entitled When Bad Things Happen to Good People. When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

And as I say, the work was so popular that it's selling by the hundreds and hundreds of editions. Now, I'm aware that we can't just easily dismiss this great problem that confronts a lot of friends. And neither can you speak about it in a purely academic fashion.

He laughs at wounds who never felt a scar. And I felt quite a number of scars in my life. And probably you're in the same category.

And so let's try to think through as carefully as we can how we cope with what I've referred to as the seeming unfairness of God. Surely, God is good to Israel. But, as for me, I'm an exception to that rule.

Now, let me say this, for starters, so to speak, that it's not just the psalmist here who is confronted with this problem. It's not just this man in the 73rd psalm. He does have great difficulties, as you've gathered as our brother read the chapter.

And if he'd read the whole of the psalm, the difficulties would have stood out even more. But it's not just this psalmist who has the sort of as-for-me clause in his life, feeling that he's an exception. You see, Joseph could well have been in the same condition, couldn't he? You remember Joseph? I mean, his brothers, they were reasonably well-treated.

In fact, they were very well-treated, but the way they treated him when they put him in that well and then had him carted off to Egypt, he could have said when he arrived in his bondage, in his slavery in Egypt, well, God is good to the rest of my brothers, but as for me, I just don't fit into that category at all. And someone with whom I'm on much firmer ground is a woman in Scripture by the name of Naomi. You read of her in the book of Ruth, and Naomi has had some very difficult experiences.

She left her native Bethlehem with her husband, went to the land of Moab, and ultimately she returned home as a widow, not just having lost her husband, but also having lost her sons. And so she says in the 21st verse of the first chapter of the book of Ruth, the Lord has dealt, or verse 20, God has dealt bitterly with me. Don't call me Naomi, call me Mara, because the Lord Almighty has made my life very bitter.

I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me. The Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.

Now remember the context of those remarks. She's talking basically to the womenfolk in Bethlehem. Now it seems as though they'd done all right, but not Naomi.

She had done anything but all right. The Lord has afflicted me. As for me, God has been good to the citizens of Bethlehem, but not me.

I'm an exception to the rule. What about Job? Now you know of Job, don't you? Because he's called a patient man. I think it's ironical that Job was called a patient man.

I think he's anything but patient, quite frankly. I mean, there are 30-odd and more chapters in the book of Job where he's just venting his spleen before the Lord, where he's telling the Lord that he just doesn't understand. He's not the most patient man that ever there was in the world, not at least in that respect.

And he's got three most unhelpful people, and they say that the problem of Job is his unrighteousness. And Job says, no, the problem is God's unfairness. I have lived blamelessly before the Lord.

Now, he won't slander God, he won't libel God, but he does say, I don't understand this God, why he has allowed these things to happen to me. And incidentally, my friend, the book of Job never resolves the problem of God's unfairness. Right at the end of the chapter, right at the end of the book that bears Job's name, you get an encounter of Job with God, but God never, never gives you an answer to the unfairness that he seems to have meted out to Job.

He dismisses those three men and their explanations, but all he does to Job is love him, really. He just takes him in his arms and he loves him. And Job, in the presence of the Lord, discovers that all his problems really cease to exist.

They're there no more, simply because, well, the Lord has made himself known, but there is no answer to the problem of God's unfair dealings in the book of Job. And aren't you glad that I can dip into the New Testament and bring you such a remarkable character as the Apostle Paul and say that if you find yourself in the category that I'm touching on this morning, if you find yourself in that category, then at least have this as a piece of consolation, that the Apostle Paul found himself rather stretched at being able to understand God's dealings with him from time to time. Look at 2 Corinthians 4 and verse 7. Paul is here listing a catalogue of problems that he's had.

He'll tell you a little more. Those of you who've got time later in the day to read it, he'll tell you more of his problems in the first chapter of 2 Corinthians. But here in the fourth chapter, he's summarising it all.

And in the seventh verse, he says, we have this treasure... He's referring to the blessings of the Gospel. We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. Now, more precisely, we are hard-pressed.

He's a missionary, you see. There's great difficulties that he's encountered in Turkey and in the rest of Asia and on into Europe. We are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed.

We are perplexed, but not in despair. Here is the Apostle Paul, and he is saying that there are times when he is perplexed. Now, why is he perplexed? Well, he doesn't understand God's dealings.

The Lord allows certain things to happen that are beyond the comprehension of Paul, beyond the reasoning of Paul. Now, doesn't that occur in your life? Now, I want to say that when that does occur, don't get over-alarmed, because as I've said, there are these great men in the Old Testament, and let me say, I wasn't denigrating Job. I have great respect for him.

There is this fine Lady Naomi. There is this great man, this illustrious evangelist in the New Testament, the greatest theologian that the Christian church has ever known. And he says, there are times in my life when I'm cast down, or as Phillips puts it, I'm knocked down, but I'm not knocked out.

There are times when I am utterly perplexed, but I still go on, I still believe, even though I don't understand the way that God has allowed certain things to happen to me. So, we come back to Psalm 73, and we find that in that second verse, he's locking up not only his experience, but the experiences of several people in the Old and in the New Testament. And I think, because I feel it in my bones this morning, and I use that expression deliberately, I feel it in my own heart, my innermost being, that there are those in this assembly of folk who are in the same category as the Psalmist here, and you need help.

God is good to the rest of them, but as for me, there's an exception. No, you're not in the same condition as John Stuart Mill. You're not saying that because God doesn't reward you as He ought to reward you, and He doesn't punish people as He ought to punish other people.

You're not saying that you don't believe in Him. It's not atheism that's your problem, it's agnosticism. Not agnosticism in the sense that you've no awareness of God either, but agnosticism in the sense that there are times you don't understand the infinite.

And let me tell you this. I do not know of a Christian of whose writings I've immersed my mind, in whose writings I've immersed my mind, or whose story I know because I've met him or her personally, who hasn't at some time, and probably for prolonged periods, known in some area of his life a sort of agnosticism. Lord, I don't understand.

I believe, but I don't clearly grasp all that you are allowing to happen to me. As for me, I find it so difficult. Now, let me suggest to you some of the categories that people find themselves here in our congregation this morning, the reason for your difficulty.

Now, I'm going to be treading on some very intimate matters in some respect, but they've got to be laid bare. You see, it's so easy for you to have a grudge against the Lord when he's not acting in the way that you want him to act. I've known of womenfolk whose faith has almost been blown to smithereens because they've never married.

And this for them has been a very great difficulty. They've wanted to marry, they haven't found themselves with the gift of celibacy, they have all the natural desires of a woman to show affection, and all the desires to want affection to be shown. But the years roll by.

The twenties are merged into the thirties, the thirties go to the forties, the forties go to the fifties. And sometimes they can be brought almost to a peak of bitterness and just break apart spiritually. I've seen it.

I've tried to help in conditions like that. Now, it's got nothing to do with their disbelief in God and his general goodness, but in this specific, it's so very, very difficult for them. Surely God is good to the rest of those brothers and sisters.

He's so good, I can see it. But as for me, you see, that's the nature of my problem. There are some folks, and I've known this happen in Christian circles, and they've gone into what we wrongly call, but you understand the term so I use it, full-time service.

And they've read of others, and they've been pastors, and they've been missionaries, they've been evangelists. And these others have done very well. You know, success has attended their mission, and people have spoken very fulsomely of them and of the benefits of their life, but they go to the mission field, or they enter into a pulpit, or they surrender all, as I remember a couple of old friends telling me in Worthing some years ago, not members of this fellowship here.

They gave everything up to serve the Lord, and yet, when they moved into their specific sphere of service, it just didn't go right. And they regarded themselves somehow as being the failures, you know? Either they got it wrong, or as they conceived God got it wrong for them. And it's a great problem.

A very, very great problem. Sometimes when you think of folks who are successful, don't just glory in their success before God. Think of the others who look at those people, and their very success becomes something that haunts those who feel that they are failures.

I wonder if you worked out the logic of what I was trying to say there. It's very, very important, you see. What about the man who, he decides to risk some of his savings in setting up his own business.

Now, he's read of others who've done this. I have a very dear friend who took a calculated risk when he was in his mid-50s. He felt that the firm that he was working with were practicing commercial methods which were completely alien to the Bible.

So he cut himself off from the board of directors and he set up on his own. He could have dived, or he could have been a success man. And actually, his is a success story.

The possibility is he's going to get the Queen's Award, or one of the Queen's Award for local business enterprise and for the success. But you see, for one that you can quote that way, you can quote others too, for whom it's not been so easy. And they've done something that they felt was for the benefit of their family.

And as Christian people, they thought they were in line with the will of God, but it all smashed up. And we have to deal with that sort of thing. Why did God allow it? Why is God seemingly so unfair? Or the young couple who tripped down the aisle here, and in almost ecstasy, they were married.

And then the child was born, and it was a Mongol child. How do you cope with that? Or, you know, he married her, as happened in my own experience back home amongst my own very close circle of friends. By back home, I mean back in Sheffield.

A chap I used to go swimming with every Thursday night before the Bible study. He suffered from multiple sclerosis. He started to show the symptoms within just a couple of years of marriage.

Now, everybody's sympathy went towards him, and that was right. But what about her? I mean, it must be incredibly difficult, mustn't it? Just being the partner of someone who's got a disease like that. And that lady, doubtless, in fact, I know she did because I often used to speak to her when I was back in South Yorkshire, found herself to be in this category of verse two of Psalm 73.

You know, God is good to Israel, but as for me, it's so unfair. Well, then, how do you try and cope with these difficulties as a Christian? Because these difficulties do exist. And it's so necessary, my friend, that I deal with these for several reasons.

I'll give you a few of them, but number one is it's not fashionable to deal with this in evangelical circles today. It isn't, you know. We live in a very sort of triumphalist evangelical world very often, and a lot is celebration.

And do not think that my using that term means that I am therefore criticizing folks and this whole business of praising the Lord. I'm not. All I'm saying is that it's so much easier to come to a celebration meeting and deal triumphantly with various aspects of the Christian gospel than it is to come to grips with a tragedy that very often confronts people in the normal run-of-mill way of life.

Now, thank God for the positive declaration of the gospel and the blessings into which the Lord brings us, but not everybody gets healed. I would love everyone to be healed. For some people, and I say this without any boast, and it's not theatrical, I would walk barefoot if I could to Greenland to get their healing, but I can't.

And it's not been a lack of prayer. And we live in days, in the evangelical world, particularly in America, and I think it's the world actually coming into the church. There is this teaching that every Christian is going to be prosperous.

You know, God wants you. This is the creedal statement, healthy, wealthy, and happy. And deriving from that creedal statement, if that's too complicated, is one a little more simple, name it and claim it.

And that's infecting some of evangelicalism in South Africa, too. Now, life isn't like that. The life in which we as Christians find ourselves involved is a life with our great pressures and there are great problems.

And that's why I have to talk to you about the unfairness of God, because sometimes God does seem to be unfair. And some of the simplistic answers from so-called evangelical pulpits, or at least from fringe groups within evangelicalism, they patently do not deal with the problem, not honestly. And I must put up another protest.

You see, there are those who, they approach the difficulty that I've delineated, that I've defined from the pulpit in a different way. And they say, well, you see, the reason for your problem is that you just don't understand God. You see, the God that you believe in is not really the God of the simple Christian faith.

You see, the God of the Christian faith talks about God being near and God isn't near. God is there, but he's not near. And they will use the illustration of the watch and the watchmaker.

You see, the watchmaker, he makes a watch, but he's apart from the watch. He makes a watch and he, in effect, says, well, watch now, get on with it. And so you've got God sort of looking from afar on his world and allowing the world to get on with it.

You see, he's not imminent, he's distant. And that's the reason for some of these problems because God isn't directly in control of the world that he has made. A refinement of that is the one by the Jewish rabbi, Rabbi Kushner, who I referred to, who wrote that book, what happens when bad things, how do you act when bad things happen to good people? And he says, well, you see, the world is like a spaceship and God was in control of the spaceship and then it went out of skew.

Certain things went wrong with the mechanism of the spaceship and God is now in such a condition that he can't cope with a spaceship. And so you've got the doctrine of a God with limited sovereignty. And as I say, that book is selling by the hundreds or by the thousands in the United States of America.

And you can understand why Rabbi Kushner takes this particular line. You see, his son had one of these appalling diseases which accelerated age. I mean by that, that by the time his lad was, if my memory serves me right, 15 or 18 years of age, he was like a 60-odd, 70-odd-year-old man.

Now when you see something like that happen in your family, then of course it causes you to try and re-examine your whole belief as to who God is and what control does he have in our world. But we have to reject this as Christians as we reject the sort of happy-go-lucky theology of those fringe evangelical groups, so we must reject this whole idea that God is unrelated or only semi-related to our world because the Bible speaks of a God who is imminent, he's near, he's involved in everything that happens to us. So we have to dismiss those possibilities.

And then of course there are those who say, well, you know, sickness and material things themselves, they don't really exist. I mean you get this from the Christian science, don't you? Deny the reality of matter. But that's well answered in that lovely rhyme that I quoted some years ago here.

There was a faith dealer, a faith healer in Deal who said, although pain is not real, when I sit on a pin and it punctures my skin I dislike what I fancy I feel. Pain is a reality, isn't it? The suffering is a reality. So having tried to outline the nature and in some senses just touched in on something of the answer to the problem, let me try and approach it full on now.

What does the Bible tell us about the unfairness of God? Well, first of all, the Bible tells us that we've got to remember that we live in a society which is not totally redeemed. Now Jesus died on the cross to save us, that I believe from the depths of my being. But my body is not redeemed, is it? I mean if my body was redeemed then I wouldn't be wearing contact lenses, I would have perfect sight.

If your body was not redeemed then some of you wouldn't be looking as old as with great respect you look. Some as jaded as you look. Although there are some here who are very healthy though you're probably in a minority.

Joking aside, you appreciate what I'm trying to say. The Bible makes this very clear. Somebody sent me a paper to read, a theological paper, I don't mean a newspaper, while I was in Africa and I was studying this on the banks of Lake Victoria, actually, just a few months ago.

And I wrote an appraisal of the paper and I wrote to the dear man who had written the essay and I said, the problem with your essay, he was trying to deal with adoption of healing, the problem with your essay is this, it doesn't take into account the fact that our bodies have not been made like unto the Lord's body. Now one day they will be, but that's future. John makes this clear, isn't it? Behold, we have not yet seen him.

Behold what manner of love the Father hath declared upon us. And though we haven't yet seen him, when we do see him, then we will be like him. But not until then.

Our body is not redeemed. Paul calls it, Paul, Mark you, underline that, the inspired apostle Paul, he calls it our vile, corruptible body. It has its seeds of decay.

Ah, some of you say, well you're denying the very doctrine of divine healing. Not a bit. I prayed for hundreds of people, literally.

And sometimes I have known spectacular results in terms of the healing of the person as God has answered prayer. But many a time there has been no observable result at all. Now God can intervene with this mortal body that we have, frail though it be.

And he can return to us for a time our health. But ultimately, as with Lazarus, we will lose our lives. Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead.

He didn't totally redeem his body. He brought him back in a body which was essentially the same as the one the man had before. So our bodies are not redeemed.

And Christians are exposed to bacteria in the same way as everybody else. You don't have a sort of spiritual immunization or insurance policy that means that these difficulties won't attack you. They will do.

Even though God, in his grace, can intervene and at times set to rights the ravages of the bacteria and so forth. And what's more, we live in a world which is not conducive to fairness. You say, what do you mean? Well, Adam was expelled and Eve were expelled from Eden, weren't they? They went to live east of Eden.

Now there was only protection in Eden because that is where God was. It was Eden that was the paradise of God. But when they live east of Eden in a world that has been cursed as a result of Adam and Eve's transgression, they move into a hostile environment.

And that's where the unfairness comes. The seeming chance of the earthquake, the flooding of the Ganges Delta in Bangladesh and so on and so forth. Nowhere in the Bible is there any indication at all that the world in which we live has somehow been brought into such an alignment with the perfect will of God that these things won't happen.

All we have in the Bible is an indication that one day the world will be restored to what it was when it first left the hands of God. And until that time there will come occasions in our lives as individuals or in communities as a whole when God seems to be utterly unfair because He does not react in the way that the heat reacts to the skin going back to my initial analogy of burning yourself deliberately on the candle flame. You see, what God does is the most annoying thing of all.

He delays His reactions. And this is what seems to bring to us the problem of God's unfairness. He could react immediately but He doesn't.

And so there are what Carlisle calls the great delays of God which so baffle us. You get this in Scripture, don't you? Here's Mary and Jesus comes along and she says, Lord, if only you'd been here. But He deliberately delayed coming to the tomb of Lazarus even when He'd heard of the sickness of His friend.

Lord, if only you'd been here. And that's it. Within that expression is in total the difficulties that I think that we are confronted with as Christian people.

God does sometimes delay not because He has disinterest but in terms of bringing about His judicial purposes He delays the application of His will to allow for the salvation of as great a number as possible. And until that time there is bound as a consequence to be what are apparently the unfair dealings of the Lord. What is more, you know, we Christian people I wonder if you understand this or whether it would give you a bout of theological hiccups we don't have full revelation.

Martin Luther used to talk about the hidden God. There is that about God which we don't know. God has revealed to us of His purposes as much as is sufficient for our salvation.

But there's a great deal about God which we don't know. Now we see through a glass darkly but then says the apostle Paul we'll see face to face. God's thoughts are not our thoughts His ways are not our thoughts and in the unknown area which is quite vast of the person of God are the answer to some of these irresolvable problems that we know cannot ourselves find any light on.

Now you get some indication of this in the book of Job, don't you? Because you know what's happening. Job didn't. You see, you've read the first chapter or the second chapter in particular.

Job hadn't. And even at the end of the book, incidentally Job hadn't had that disclosure that what was happening to him was as a result of Satan's activity. But because you've had a sneak look at the beginning of the book and the end of the book the book begins to make a little bit of sense to you.

But don't you see that within that book itself is God speaking to us and saying, hold it. When it appears that I am unfair realize that the information that you have on which you're making these far-reaching conclusions is utterly inadequate. And have I not given you sufficient evidence in the meanwhile for you to trust me when you cannot trace me.

For you to believe in me when you can't understand some of the things that I am allowing to happen in your life. So we go back to our psalmist for my final word. As for me, he says, my feet had almost slipped.

I nearly lost my foothold. But when you get him in the 28th verse at the end of the psalm not that his problems have been resolved. They haven't.

But he has had an experience of the Lord and he's able to say but as for me it is good to be near God. I have made the sovereign Lord my refuge. I will tell of all your deeds.

What happened to him? Well, you'll find halfway through the psalm that he slipped into the presence of God and in the loved one's embrace problems are not answered. They rather cease to have significance anymore. And the difficulties that you have my friend and the difficulties that confront me about certain things that God allowed to happen in my family life they tend to be utterly insignificant.

At that moment when I'm aware of God's presence and I know his love and it's just like my old dad taking me as a lad in his arms when I was a youngster and giving me a hug. He didn't answer some of the reasons why my tears were falling but the very fact that he was there and he embraced me was sufficient. So God sends his son into the world to declare his love to us.

He dies on the cross of Calvary to show us that suffering is redemptive and he's raised from the dead to give us an anticipation that one day in the resurrection you and I will see something of the resolution of the problems that confront us now. Yes, God sometimes appears to be unfair but within the Christian doctrine within the faith of Christianity there are immediate hints as to an answer and a long-term promise that ultimately God will resolve every difficulty and the plea to follow him in the interim closely. So let's do that as we sing our final hymn at least our final hymn for this part of the service.

3-9-1 Be still my soul the Lord is on thy side. The cross of grief or pain is to thy cause in every change is faithful deliverance. Be still my soul peace to earth.

Be still my soul I hope thy spirit shall be still my soul the ways and his voice be still my soul be how his days be gone when we shall be forever with sorrow be still my soul when we shall be Listen to Paul again writing to the Colossians Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body which is the church. Father help us to live redemptively help us to realize that all the anomalies and the seeming unfairnesses therefore the sufferings which we encounter are but as little chips from the cross of Christ which you ask us to carry and to bear until that moment when we see you and then we believe that as the pain of childbearing is lost by a mother as she enjoys with rapture holding the child in her arms so we will be able to say that the sufferings of this present time were not worthy to be compared with the joy that God had in store for us. Help us to live redemptively and sensitively in regard to the needs of others for Jesus Christ's sake.

Amen.