One of the most profound stories of suffering in the Bible is about a wealthy, deeply devoted family man called Job. While going about his life, disaster strikes Job tragically claiming the lives of all his children, stripping him of his wealth, and afflicting him with an excruciatingly painful illness. Job enters a period of deep, lonely pain and struggles to understand why all this is happening to him especially as a devout follower of God. What exactly does it mean to faithfully love God in moments of crisis like this? How should followers of Jesus respond to the call to love God when God very often does not make sense to us? The peculiar story of Job points to some answers and offers hope in those times when we do not understand God or our circumstances.

Job’s suffering gives us three critical insights:

1. We cannot fully understand God

2. Loving God is not based on our full understanding of God

3. God’s character inspires us to cultivate love for God and for others

We cannot fully understand God

When life gets unbearably difficult, we want to understand why. After losing almost everything, Job seeks to understand God’s rationale for suffering:

“I loathe my life;
I will give free utterance to my complaint;
    I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.
I will say to God, Do not condemn me;
    let me know why you contend against me.
Does it seem good to you to oppress,
    to despise the work of your hands
    and favor the designs of the wicked?
Have you eyes of flesh?
    Do you see as man sees?[1]

Job, bitter from all his suffering, demands answers from God. Job’s questions are similar to the questions we wrestle with when we encounter tough life circumstances. He demands to know why God sees it fit to oppress His creation and let evil reign in the world. He even wonders if God can ever understand his humanity.

Job’s story is our story. His struggle to make sense of his suffering mirrors our own. Eventually, God offers Job a pointed response:

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Dress for action like a man;
    I will question you, and you make it known to me.

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
    Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?[2]

God continues to question Job about his knowledge on a range of topics from astronomy to geology, from weather to the animal kingdom. In one of His most incisive questions, He asks Job:

Will you even put me in the wrong?
    Will you condemn me that you may be in the right?
Have you an arm like God,
    and can you thunder with a voice like his?[3]

In our suffering, it is often easy to accuse God of malice, incompetence, or malpractice. It becomes easy to channel our bitterness into attacks on God. God tells Job that as the Creator of the universe, we can never hope to comprehend His ways. In asking Job about science, God actually drives this point home. Even today, the more we learn about the natural world, the more we understand how much more we do not know in virtually every field. By virtue of being our Creator, God knows and understands far more than we ever will, no matter how much knowledge we ever amass. The ancient sage Isaiah received the following words from God:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
    neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
    so are my ways higher than your ways
    and my thoughts than your thoughts.[4]

Because God’s perspective is so much more expansive than ours, we will never be able to see the whole picture which would explain why certain things happen the way they do. Job himself is never privy to the reason for his own suffering. In the same way, we can never hope to fully understand how or why God allows suffering to happen – especially when bad things happen to us or to people we love dearly. Fortunately, although we can never understand God’s ways, we are never in the dark about His motives and how He feels towards us.

Loving God is not based on our full understanding of God

Fundamentally, we are created to be in a loving relationship with God. Out of a deep love for us and a keen understanding of our humanity, God gives us the instructions we need to live a fulfilling, joyful life. By following these instructions, our lives are marked by contentment, kindness, and beauty. But we can only follow these instructions when we grasp the depth of God’s love for us. This love is personified in the person of Jesus Christ, who taught:

Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”[5]

The more Jesus’s followers learned about Jesus, the more their love for Jesus grew, even though they did not understand everything He said or did. Their love for Jesus was based on the love He showed them and the power He demonstrated over the brokenness and death that they encountered in the world. Even though Jesus Himself suffered from the effects of this brokenness, He walked with deep compassion for people and worked to set them free from besetting personal struggles, inviting them to a different kind of life – one filled with freedom, strength, and joy, despite their suffering.

One of Jesus’s followers, Peter, endured a great deal of suffering. With this perspective, he wrote to his fellow believers encouraging them to trust that God would remain faithful to them:

Therefore let those who suffer according to God's will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good.[6]

We do not love God because we understand every facet of God. We love and follow Him because we understand that in Jesus, we find pure, perfect love with the power to redeem us and fill us with the strength we need even in our darkest days. This strength allows us to extend God’s love to others in surprising ways.

God’s character inspires us to cultivate love for God and for others

At the end of Job’s story, God vindicates Job in front of his friends and tells the three friends to have Job pray for them - essentially, reconcile with one another. This was a tough command for both the friends and Job. His friends had to have the humility to admit they had gotten everything about this situation wrong. They had unfairly judged Job and completely mischaracterized what God was doing.

Job, whose heart had endured harsh judgment from his friends, now had to find it in himself to forgive them and pray for them. How did Job find the strength to forgive friends who had wounded him so deeply? He finally understood the majesty of God.

If Job was following God out of moral obligation before his suffering, after Job encounters God in his suffering, Job follows God out of incredible reverence for God’s splendor and the forgiveness God extends to him. Similarly, when we encounter the life-altering love of Jesus, we are never the same even in hard times. We become humbled and changed by Jesus’s love for us. We become motivated to cultivate a richer relationship with Jesus which expands our heart, deepening our love of God.

When we have received God’s love in our lives, it overflows in our heart and reorients our heart with a greater, more genuine and sincere love for others – even our worst enemies.

Job’s suffering could have left him permanently despondent and bitter. He could have renounced God and lived life as he saw fit. But instead, he engaged with God authentically leading God to engage with Job and reveal more of Himself. Job never understood why he suffered as he did, but his newfound revelation and awe of God led Him to a new life and a new relationship with God that allowed him to love others more profoundly.

We too have this same invitation to encounter Jesus and allow Him into our hearts. This invitation is not a promise we will ever fully understand God because we never will. But it is an invitation to receive God’s everlasting love for us. This love gives us the strength to persevere through tough circumstances with the knowledge that despite our lack of understanding, God remains firmly in our corner.

[1] Job 10:1-4

[2] Job 38:2-5

[3] Job 40:8-9

[4] Isaiah 55:8-9

[5] John 8:12

[6] 1 Peter 4:19

Hardly a day goes by when we do not see the results of fractured communities around us: broken relationships give way to pain and suffering. Around the world, the desire for loving, healthy community unites us all. Sadly, this desire remains elusive. We remain divided and unable to transcend past and present slights. Followers of Jesus hold on to the hope of healthy community underwritten by God’s love and forgiveness as part of their mandate to love others. But how? How can we be effective ambassadors of love in a world with hurt and hate, especially as we navigate our own pain?

The foundation of healthy community

People are created to walk in close, intimate relationship with God. From this relationship flows our ability to love others well and foster healthy communities. Love reaches its apex in the context of perfect justice which is only possible in the context of moral purity. When moral purity is compromised, injustice spawns, obstructing perfect love, like arterial plaque clogging the heart.

Despite our best intentions, we instinctively understand that no one walks in perfect moral purity. We all have moments we wish we could take back. We have all experienced injustice. This means that none of us ever truly experiences perfect love. Just as the lack of moral purity impacts our relationships with others, our lack of moral purity also hinders a vibrant relationship with God. Passionate for relationship with us, God sent Jesus to invite us back into relationship with Him:

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.1

In choosing to follow Jesus, we accept this invitation, admitting our moral imperfection. We recognize we have fallen short, missing the mark in loving God and people. Then Jesus does something radical: He forgives us, clothing us in moral purity we can never hope to attain on our own, opening the door for us to experience God’s love in high fidelity.

When Jesus’s followers experienced this for themselves, it completely and utterly transformed their lives and communities. People in bondage to their imperfection entered a liberating, life-altering freedom. Consider the case of Zacchaeus, who was utterly redeemed by Jesus’ forgiveness.

The redemptive power of Jesus’s forgiveness

Zacchaeus was the chief tax collector, a wealthy, corrupt man who used this position to exploit vulnerable people. Hearing about Jesus, he was so desperate to meet Him that he climbed up a tree to his shame due to his short stature. Sensing his spiritual and emotional need, Jesus saw Zacchaeus and invited himself to a meal at Zacchaeus’s house. People questioned Jesus’s kindness and His association with such a greedy, corrupt man:

And when they saw it, they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.”2

But where people only saw the man’s repulsive and predatory behavior, Jesus knew Zacchaeus’s heart was dry and parched for love and forgiveness. Jesus’s love for humanity spurred Him to extend forgiveness to Zacchaeus. This forgiveness was so transformational that Zacchaeus changed immediately:

And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”3

Here was a rich, corrupt agent of the Roman government who had clearly abused his power and defrauded his own people. After a meal with Jesus, he had been so completely transformed that he vowed to give half his wealth to the poor and make restitution to anyone he had defrauded four times what he stole. Tax administration would be fairer and the defrauded would be made whole. Jesus’s love and forgiveness had transformed Zacchaeus with a profound redemptive impact on his community.

Seeing our own need for forgiveness

It is easy to miss the relevance of this story for us. Well, that’s well and good but I’m not Jesus. There’s no way I’m forgiving this greedy, corrupt person! And I’m certainly not as bad as Zacchaeus. Yet Jesus lovingly but firmly is categorically clear to His followers: we have a responsibility to forgive.

This responsibility is rooted in the spiritual reality of the forgiveness we experience as followers of Jesus. We often fall short of God’s standard of moral perfection. We hurt others sometimes. Followers of Jesus see and understand their moral shortcomings and do not engage in moral relativism to justify any of them. Followers of Jesus grasp the corrosive impact of their faults and are deeply grateful that Jesus does not hold these failings against them. Jesus forgives us fully and completely. When we understand this truth, we accept the responsibility to forgive others, hard though it may be.

Why forgiveness is hard

Forgiveness is not easy. Otherwise, the whole world would be transformed. The biggest hindrance to our willingness to forgive is our desire for retribution when we have been hurt and experienced injustice. When we decide to forgive, we accept the cost of forgoing retribution, trusting God will orchestrate justice for us.

Some mistake this forgiveness as giving license for others to keep hurting people, but that is not forgiveness. Instead, forgiveness is the decision to release those who we forgive of the moral debt they owe us arising out of the injustice they have perpetrated towards us. We do this because we realize God has done the same thing for us.

Yet, forgiveness is not naïve. Forgiveness fully coexists with accountability. The forgiven still face the consequences of their actions. The forgiven thief on the cross still died.4 Parsing our role versus God’s role in balancing the scales of justice is highly complex but here is the simple truth: in receiving Jesus’s forgiveness, we become responsible for extending the same forgiveness to others we ourselves have received. When we do, we invite healing and love into our lives and theirs, setting the stage for healthy community.

Experiencing the redemptive power of forgiveness personally and in community

Practically, forgiveness is usually a process, not a singular event. It starts with seeing and accepting our own shortcomings and understanding how much we have been forgiven. We must also have the courage and faith to believe that God will bring justice for us in His own wisdom and timing. In fact, it is virtually impossible to forgive others without believing in God’s fundamental fairness, wisdom, and ability to right the wrongs we experience.

Crucially, we must also seek forgiveness from those we have wronged. Zacchaeus’s transformation is most instructive in how completely he goes from causing offense to seeking reconciliation. When we truly experience God’s forgiveness, we become deeply troubled by the way we have hurt others and become motivated to seek reconciliation where possible.

By accepting Jesus’s forgiveness, extending it to others, and seeking reconciliation with those we have hurt, we set a powerful and durable foundation for healthy community, underwritten by the same love and forgiveness God has extended to us.

This is how imperfect followers of Jesus become powerful ambassadors for redemptive love, serving as agents of peace and compassion in the communities in which we live and work. As we do that, we begin to experience incredible emotional and spiritual freedom and we experience God’s amazing love for us enabling us to foster healthy community.

As followers of Jesus, we are called to be world changers. This means meaningfully engaging in the world’s problems in pursuit of productive, durable solutions as an outward expression of the inward love God lavishes upon us. Just as God’s love for us is not passive, neither is our love for people to be passive. So how does Jesus’s peace empower us to be fulfilled world changers especially when facing overwhelming challenges?

Jesus’s peace moves us to action

Jesus is the ultimate world changer. One night, a religious leader came to Jesus to understand His teachings. This what Jesus said about His mission:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.1

Following Jesus is not about avoiding fire and brimstone. It is about accepting Jesus’s invitation to enter into an eternal relationship with God and experience His incredible love for us. We accept this invitation by faith when we believe that Jesus came to save us from our wrongs. Jesus’s peace floods our heart as we realize we are no longer estranged from God. Instead, we begin a close, personal relationship with the ultimate Author of our peace.

Out of this relational peace, our hearts are ignited with a fierce desire for everyone to experience the overflowing sense of joy and freedom we have in Jesus. This love of Jesus and people becomes the foundational pillar of our engagement with the world.

Jesus’s peace directs our energies

While as followers of Jesus we are called to engage deeply in improving the world, where do we start especially when we confront really intractable problems? Jesus shows us.

Jesus grounded His time on earth in a close personal relationship with God, consistently spending long stretches of time with Him. This resulted in Jesus focusing the bulk of His energy on carefully nurturing His 12 closest followers even as He taught the broader community and tended to the immediate needs of the people. Jesus understood He was to spend time with God and make peace with the scope of what He was called to accomplish. As a result, Jesus masterfully balanced short-term needs with investing into the future.

Similarly, we must spend time with God regularly to understand where to direct our energies.  Importantly, this will be different for every follower of Jesus. God is magnificent in His creative ability, weaving in our divergent desires, talents, and life experiences to change the world. Our role is to hew close to God who will direct our energies and empower us for the work ahead. For some people, that means diving head first into an issue with laser-like focus. For others, the path will be slower, perhaps more dispersed.

As we spend time with God, as we use our talents and gifts, we will begin to experience an internal sense of peace that confirms our alignment with God. It is important to keep in mind that peace in this case does not mean satisfaction with the level of progress being made in solving an issue. We may remain highly impatient for change, as we should. But we will experience peace that we are where we need to be, which will sometimes seem paradoxical in light of the day-to-day frustrations we will encounter along the way. Jesus also faced this paradox and again, we can learn from His approach.

Jesus’s Peace fulfills us

The more we engage in the world’s problems, the more we face the potential for discouragement. This can stem from the magnitude of the problems we want to solve (like poverty), from the lack of seeing meaningful progress on an issue, or from burnout. Yet God does not want us to be discouraged. Jesus tells His followers:

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”2

In calling us to be world changers, Jesus does not expect any one person will tackle and solve the world’s monumental challenges alone. He wants us to use our time and talents in ways that will ultimately be fulfilling to us even when that impact is not always obvious or immediate. How do we know this? Because this is how He went about doing His work on earth.

At high noon one day, in the middle of a journey, Jesus stopped for some rest as His followers went to buy some food. Though He was tired, He saw a Samaritan woman at the well fetching water. He asked her for a drink and perhaps sensing a deeper emotional and spiritual need, engaged her in a conversation that ended up being profoundly healing for her. His followers came back to find Jesus re-energized:

Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.”

But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?”

Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest.3

From this story, we see how Jesus balanced work beautifully. Jesus had just spent time in a 1:1 setting creating relationship and bringing restoration to a woman who desperately needed Jesus’s love. This energized Jesus tremendously. At the same time, when Jesus references the fields “white for harvest”, we see that Jesus understood the enormity of the task ahead. He could not reach everyone in His limited time on earth. This had the potential to discourage Him but it did not. Instead, He shared an important truth with His followers:

Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”4

Jesus was saying that some people will do work for which they never see impact, and some people will experience impact that is built upon a foundation of others before them.

Changing the world is complex. Problems like poverty, social injustice, or inequality are not solved easily or quickly. Their very nature can leave us feeling destitute or overwhelmed, frequently because we are very personally impacted in the areas where we are called to engage and care deeply about seeing change. Thankfully, Jesus’s peace allows us to take on just the right amount of work which helps us avoid permanent discouragement.

As we do what we have been called and equipped to do, Jesus’s peace reassures us that we are being effective world changers. In the process, we becoming capable of deriving tremendous fulfillment even when we do not see direct, immediate results because as empowered followers, we are operating within the limits of our talent, design, and life experiences.

When life goes off course and our plans are upended by disease, war, fractured relationships, job loss, or cutting disappointment, anxiety, fear, and pain can paralyze us in debilitating ways. In these moments, we want to know that things will be okay. The night Jesus was going to be arrested, He understood that life was about to go wildly off course for His followers. They were expecting triumphant victory over an oppressive empire. They were about to encounter what would seem like deep failure and complete defeat. Jesus, knowing what lay ahead, gave them a promise:

But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.1

What is this peace? How does it transform us? And how do we get it?

Jesus’s Peace Reassures us about God’s Character, Authority, and Love

Jesus’s peace is the reassurance that even when we face life’s trials, three things are always true:

1. God is still good

2. God is still in control

3. God still loves us and is with us

God is still good

When disease, broken relationships, or tragedy strike, we wonder if God is good. We ask why. Why us? Why this tragedy? When we do not get the answer (and we rarely do), we are tempted to sit upon judgement on God. We think, “if God allowed this bad thing to happen, He is must not be good.”

But God is always good. We know this because we know Jesus. He radiated God’s goodness in everything He did – from protecting the weak and vulnerable, to healing the sick, to standing up against injustice and greed. Jesus’s peace reaffirms God’s good character in the face of a hard and cruel world.

God is in control

Sometimes we know God is good but we don’t think He is in control. The thinking goes like this: “Well, if God is supposedly all-powerful, why would He let this bad thing happen? He must not be as powerful because He did not stop this bad thing.” This thinking is amplified further when bad things happen to people we do not feel deserve it, such as our loved ones or people we think of as innocent, like children.

One of the hardest tensions to reconcile as a follower of Jesus is why a powerful God lets these bad things happen. Although we may not know why, we know for sure that no matter what happens, God remains in full control of the world and everything that happens in it.

Again, we know this from the life of Jesus. God sent Jesus to live a perfect life on earth, which He did. Yet, the religious leaders of His day were overcome with jealousy and fear leading them to unjustly arrest and orchestrate Jesus’s death. But God raised Jesus from the dead signaling that no matter what happens in life, He has ultimate authority – even over death. This means that even when the worst happens in life and people we love die, death is not the end of the story. We do not know why God lets certain things happen, but we know that in the end, there is always a purpose we might not see. God is always in control.

God still loves us and is always with us

Maybe the most reassuring thing about Jesus’s peace is the comfort that Jesus still loves us and is always right there with us no matter what is happening. In our darkest moments, this truth gives us the greatest comfort.

We know God cares because we know Jesus cared deeply about the people around Him. He cared a lot about children. He cared about the poor and the rich. He cared about the weak and the powerful. He cared about all His followers. He cared about the in group and He cared about the outcasts. He cared about the very people who were putting Him to death. Jesus’s life is marked by a wellspring of love towards humanity that never runs dry.

When we understand that Jesus’s peace reassures us about God’s goodness, His control over the world we live in, and His unyielding love for us, our lives are completely transformed. How?

Jesus’s Peace Transforms our Approach to Life

The best way to understand how Jesus’s peace transforms our life is to look at how it transformed the lives of His earliest followers. Jesus hinged His entire life legacy on the inner circle of followers He had been training for three years. They were not sophisticated scholars or theologians. They were simple, ordinary men, mostly fishermen and tradesmen. These were the people Jesus trusted to be world changers. How were they supposed to do this in the face of the uncertainty and hard times they would encounter?

When Jesus promised to give the disciples peace, He promised to send them a Helper, the Holy Spirit, who would guide them in this mission. This same Holy Spirit authors the peace Jesus gives to us. Just as it transformed these early followers of Jesus, the Holy Spirit transforms us today. When we have the peace of Jesus, our lives are transformed in at least three fundamental ways:

1. We are inoculated against bitterness

2. We are given a more mature perspective

3. We are empowered to persevere

Jesus’s peace inoculates us against bitterness

Jesus’s peace protects us from bitterness. We may still wonder why God is allowing something to happen. But instead of judging God as either uncaring or incompetent, we have the confidence that God still cares about us. This knowledge prevents bitterness from building up like spiritual plaque within us destroying our faith and sapping our vitality. When we know that God cares about us, we can take comfort in the words of Paul. As a follower of Jesus, He was deeply familiar with suffering. Yet, he still wrote these encouraging words:  

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.2

We may not understand the suffering in the moment, but we can still trust God knowing that He will find a way to use our suffering for good.

Jesus’s peace matures our perspective

We tend to want to boil down complex concepts into simple cause and effect. We look for explanations that make sense. While this is not wrong, it can lead us into overly simple ways of thinking that might be incorrect. For example, we might think of peace as the absence of conflict and have a picture in our minds of total calm. However, peace often coexists with other complex emotions.

On the very night Jesus was telling His followers about the peace He would give them, He also prayed to God. Jesus was going through extreme levels of anxiety because He understood the imminent emotional and physical agony He was about to face. He knew He would die a gruesome death on the cross. Jesus acutely understood that God was good, in control, and loved Him. Yet Jesus still asked if there was another way. If He could avoid this agony. Despite all the peace Jesus had in willingly surrendering to God’s way, He grappled with the unavoidable pain and torment He would shortly endure.

Paul, the same follower who wrote that all things work for good, also experienced a “thorn in the flesh.”3 We do not know what this thorn was though some suspect an ongoing ailment. But we know that Paul, who also trusted in God’s goodness, His sovereignty, and had personally experienced the overwhelming love of Jesus, lived with a chronic condition that seemed to stay with him for life.

Instead of turning over every rock for an explanation of our suffering, or maligning God’s character or competency, or trying to come up with simple explanations to complex realities, Jesus’s peace matures our perspective. This perspective places trust in God and holds the peace we experience with the tension of unresolved difficulty, the lack of any good answers, and the complex emotions of the moment.

Jesus’s peace empowers us to persevere

When we have Jesus’s peace, we are empowered to persevere during the hard times. Jesus endured the cross with all its brutality and injustice. Because He knew God would triumph over death, He submitted Himself to the most humiliating and painful experience. Paul endured horrific suffering as well because He understood that his pain had an ultimate purpose.

After spending extensive time preparing the disciples for the hardship they would endure, Jesus gave them a promise about the future:

So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.4

In part we endure through the hard times because we know there is a better day coming, when our joy will be full. We look forward to a time when the moments in which we were enmeshed in pain and grief give way to boundless joy. Holding on to this promise in the moment is incredibly difficult. But it is easier when we remember that God is still good, God is in control, and God still loves us.

So how do we get this marvelous peace of Jesus, which reassures us in tough times and completely transforms our approach to life?

Jesus’s Peace Stems from a Relationship with Jesus

To experience the peace of Jesus, we need to have a healthy relationship with Him. Cultivating a healthy relationship with Jesus requires three things of us:

1. Faith in the reality of Jesus

2. Surrendering our life to Jesus

3. Acting on the implications of these truths

Faith: Believing in the reality of Jesus

Among prominent historical figures, Jesus is unique for three important claims He made: 1) He said He was the Son of God - and that He was God; 2) He said that out of deep love for us, He came to save us from all the wrong things we have ever done; and 3) He said He came to offer eternal relationship with Him to anyone who believed in His claims. Understanding and accepting these claims may take some time. It is time well spent because our faith needs to be grounded in the reality of who Jesus said He was, what He came to do, and in the recognition of His love and power.

Surrender: Yielding our life to Jesus

Everyone has a specific philosophy or worldview around which they order their life. If, as followers of Jesus we believe that Jesus came to earth because He loves us and wants an eternal relationship with us, then we must be willing to live according to how He wants us to live, not according to how we want to live. That is hard because our own desires often pull us away from Jesus. Because Jesus understands more about the world and spiritual reality than we do, He shared with us how we should live. When we align our lives with these teachings, our relationship with Jesus grows. As our relationship with Jesus grows, our love for Him and for others naturally grows deeper, especially as He reshapes our desires.

Action: Nurturing relationship with Jesus

Like any relationship, being in relationship with Jesus means we must cultivate and tend to that relationship regularly. And because Jesus’s desire is that our relationship with Him would be the most important relationship we have, it means that if we want this relationship to thrive, we must tend to it daily. Jesus spent long stretches of time with God. He did this not out of obligation but desire. In the same way, as an outgrowth of our love, Jesus desires that we would spend time with Him regularly.

Healthy relationship with Jesus leads to us walking according to His ways. It also naturally leads to us experiencing the peace that Jesus offers which is the reassurance that God is always good, is always in control, and loves us deeply. As we experience more of this peace, our lives will be profoundly transformed, allowing us to cultivate the resilience we need in the face of life’s challenges. In this transformation, we become world changers who even in our toughest moments, point more people to the love of Jesus and radiate this love in the world around them.

At the end of a long day talking with people and sharing with them more about His mission and vision for the world, Jesus and His followers got into a boat to go to the next destination. Exhausted, Jesus fell asleep. Before long, a tempestuous storm arose. Water started filling the boat as it rocked back and forth, threatening to capsize. The followers, experienced sailors, were afraid and quickly woke up Jesus. They wanted Him to do something and do it immediately. How is it that Jesus was asleep in the middle of this storm, they wondered? Why was Jesus not frazzled by this storm? These questions are as relevant for us today as we seek to navigate our own storms. One big promise Jesus gave was that in following Him, we would have peace. What does this peace look like and how do we get it? When we begin to understand the peace that Jesus offers, it becomes irresistibly attractive, even medicinal, in a world wracked with turmoil and anguish.

What Jesus’s Uncommon Peace Is NOT

When I think of peace, I picture several different images. I think of the still waters of a lake or a beautiful ocean with clear blue waters as the wind blows a gentle breeze while enjoying a good book. Or I think of world peace, which always feels elusive, desirable though it may be. In essence, I think of peace as the absence of conflict and freedom from strife. In some ways, this image is accurate but when Jesus talks about peace, I am not sure that this is entirely the picture He has in mind. Before He left earth, Jesus gave His followers this promise:

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.1

Jesus said these words on the night He was going to be arrested by the religious leaders of His day. He knew His followers would be disoriented yet He did not equip them with clever rhetoric, or weapons for a fight, or give them a strategy to escape. He gave them these cryptic words. Jesus was not giving them a recipe for the absence of conflict or freedom from strife. In fact, Jesus seemed to have promised the exact opposite. He told His followers earlier that if they followed Him, they would suffer. He even told them at that very same dinner that they would face hardship and persecution on account of following Him. So what exactly was Jesus promising?

Jesus’s Uncommon Peace: Strength for Life

Jesus said that he was giving them “my peace”. He was promising them the same power from which He derived His own peace. He was giving them the strength and power to navigate life’s most difficult situations with courage, grace, and the confidence that God was in control.

These life situations span the breadth and depth of human experience from economic uncertainty to social injustice to the suffering borne out of deep anxiety and ruinous grief. Peace in each of these situations is complex yet comforting, enigmatic but empowering. In each of these situations, peace is a little different and deserves a deeper look.

Eventually, the picture that emerges when we understand the uncommon peace of Jesus is the creativity and magnificence of the divine, and the unexplainable mysteries of God, mercy, and forgiveness, and the unfathomable invitation to partner with God to bring peace on earth. More practically, we also derive the strength we need to navigate the toughest storms we face in life. Because what Jesus ultimately promises is that His peace will see us through the conflict, through the strife, through the storms.

Interestingly, when Jesus woke from the storm, he pointed out His followers’ lack of faith. For us to experience the peace of God, faith is a critical ingredient. Faith that God is good. Faith that He is in control. Faith that we can rise to the occasion, even when it might be the hardest thing we ever face. Admittedly, drawing on this faith to experience peace in the middle of a storm is hard. Sometimes, our faith is shipwrecked by the storm. Yet, if we persevere, we find that faith and peace mix to form the antidote to worry and fear. In the coming weeks and months, we will see how these dynamics play out, practically across different life situations.

But for now, we take solace in these words, penned by Paul (who uncovered the peace of Jesus) from a Roman jail:

do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.2

On September 21, 2013, terrorists seized Westgate mall in Nairobi, Kenya in what would become a multi-day siege leaving scores of people wounded and dead. My wife and I were shaken. Were it not for a weekend trip, we may well have been among the victims since this was a place we went regularly. More recently, attacks against the Asian community in the US along with tragic shootings leave us wondering how to grapple with the evil of violence and hate.

Struggling with evil

After these kinds of events, the first question we often ask is why? Why me? Why us? Why them? There is no emotionally satisfying answer to the reality of evil especially amidst its immediate effects. Usually, we are just angry and in pain.

This anger arises from two deeply human instincts. First, the injustice. When terrorists assault unarmed civilians, anger overwhelms us. When an elderly citizen gets attacked by a young man out of hate, anger wells up within us. Second, we are angry because of our powerlessness. This anger often gives way to fear - of the sense that this injustice and powerlessness might find our way to our lives, if it has not already.

Sometimes, our anger is directed at God. For people of faith who look to a just, all-powerful God, the immediacy and reality of evil seems to imply that this all-powerful God is also powerless against evil. In our own moment of powerlessness, grappling against injustice, crying out to a good and powerful God to stop the evil only to see it continue challenges our faith at its most fundamental level. Where is God when evil strikes? How are we to love a God who seems absent in the middle of evil?

God in the middle of evil

In the aftermath of Westgate, survivors told stories of feeling God’s presence with them as they evaded the terrorists. They recounted miraculous encounters of God’s protection in the chaos. One answer to where God is when evil strikes is right in the middle of it. Even in the worst moments, God is right there with us.

Another group of people spoke of the almost serendipitous way they avoided the attack. They normally went to the mall, but something averted them from going that day – maybe they forgot something at home or had an alternate appointment. God’s sovereignty does work to also keep us from experiencing the worst effects of evil.

But how about the victims? Where was God for them? For their families? I struggled with this question when I found out that an acquaintance of mine had lost his life in the Westgate attack. I was grieved when I found out the news, recalling the last meeting I had with him. He was a wonderful, kind, and incredibly smart person whose life had tragically been cut short.

In those moments, the most comforting thing to remember about God is the victory that Jesus has over death. Wrongfully accused and brutally tortured, Jesus experienced evil in the worst way. Isolated and alone on the cross, Jesus would cry out before He died:

My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?1

Jesus, the King of the universe, felt intense loneliness and separation from God as He endured death. Jesus knows our pain because He Himself has felt the injustice of evil. If the story ended here, Jesus’s followers would have no hope. But after a gruesome and violent death on the cross, Jesus rose again, claiming victory over death.

When we feel crushed by evil’s devastating impact on our lives or when we experience the loss of our loved ones, followers of Jesus derive the most comfort from knowing death is not the final chapter of life on earth. Jesus continues to write our story even after death. Beyond the end of our time on earth, wrongs will be righted and Jesus will have the final word over evil. Knowing this truth has powerful implications for us today.

Living in an evil world

How should this knowledge shape how we live in a world where evil seems to reign unfettered?

First, we should place our emotions in all their messy forms at the feet of Jesus in worshipful surrender. God is big enough for our emotions and questions - even our sorrow and our anger. The psalmists regularly did this:

For you are the God in whom I take refuge;
Why have you rejected me?
Why do I go about mourning
because of the oppression of the enemy?2

Still, even as the psalmists cried out, they also exalted God. They understood He still reigned over the world even when they did not see the full picture:

Send out your light and your truth; let them lead me…
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.3

God’s goodness is always at work. Because He is in control and reigns over death, we can surrender our emotions and lack of understanding to Him. God’s light and His truth grounds our hope releasing our hearts to praise His goodness even when we do not see it in the moment.

Second, we should endeavor to radiate the love and compassion of Christ to those impacted by evil. Practically, this might mean being a shoulder to cry on or supporting a loved one struggling under the weight of grief. Maybe it means providing financial support where it is needed or using our voice to combat evil. If we are open, God will lead us to be His instruments of healing equipping us with kindness, grace, and compassion for those around us who need it the most.

Third, but certainly not last, we should place our eternal hope in Jesus. Followers of Jesus place their hope in the goodness of Christ and His return. In this Easter season, Jesus’s followers know that because of His victory over death, God is at work today and they keenly anticipate God’s eventual triumph over evil. This is the world followers of Jesus look forward to:

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Death will no longer exist;
grief, crying, and pain will exist no longer,
because the previous things have passed away.4

God cares about injustice. He cares deeply about eradicating evil. He is still in control with a plan we do not fully see or understand. Knowing this truth, we can rest assured that God is always at work in the middle of our pain, over the circumstances of our lives and in the world around us. One day, Jesus will come back and make all things right.

When we face illness, lose a job, endure injustice, or find ourselves in difficult relationships, finding a way to stay emotionally healthy or spiritually vibrant can feel impossible. How do we know that God is there to help us in the middle of life’s challenges? Through grace, a beautiful, marvelous gift of God that powerfully unlocks our understanding of His love in the context of suffering.

What is Grace?

A common definition of grace is that it is God’s unmerited favor towards us. In other words, God gives us something that we do not deserve. This favor falls on all of us, like the rain falls on good and bad people alike. Grace is God reaching out to humanity inviting every single person into personal relationship with Him - not because of our perfection, but because He is a perfect and loving God. Accepting this invitation, however, does not pluck us out of the world and its challenges.

This is where a second definition of grace comes in: grace is God’s power to help us navigate life’s challenges. Consider the life of Jesus. He lived a perfect life but He still endured incredible hardship. He experienced temptation, emotional and physical fatigue, saw loved ones die, and died brutally on the cross for a wrongful conviction. How did Jesus endure suffering without cursing God or hating those who hated Him? Through grace.

When Jesus’s follower, Paul, cried out to God in anguish, God’s response was not to take away the pain. It was to give him the power to bear the suffering, the same power He also gave Jesus. He told Paul:

My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.1

God gave Jesus, Paul, and gives all of us the ability to endure really difficult situations through this special power called grace.

Why Grace?

There are at least two reasons God chooses to equip us for suffering with grace instead of taking away suffering altogether.  

First, grace transforms us. It reveals to us the areas within our lives where we are not fully dependent on God. Grace removes our propensity for self-sufficiency which is a deep human need. Grace shifts our gaze from our weakness to God’s infinite power and love. Truthfully, this is confounding. Why does God not just use this infinite power to magically solve the world’s problems? We do not know, but we know that the more we learn to rely on God, the more we see His love and the more willing we are to accept the wisdom of His ways.

Second, our ability to endure suffering gives us the ability to help others down the road. When we look back at some of the people who have helped us the most, we see they have faced similar challenges to ours. Even though it is hard in the moment to endure suffering or pain, it is sometimes comforting to know we can help others who find themselves in similar situations.

Taking Advantage of Grace

So how do we tap into God’s power for navigating life? We cry out for help. David, the great ancient king of Israel, wrote:

The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous
    and his ears toward their cry.2

When we are in a tough situation or facing a challenge, we can freely cry out to Jesus who understands what we are going through. He gives us the strength we need to be able to survive the moment.

The challenge will rarely disappear magically. Illness may remain – and may even result in death. A tough relationship may persist – sometimes for a long time. Grace is not God’s promise that the situation will change overnight - if ever. Grace is God’s promise that He sees our pain, understands our struggle, and will give us the strength and inner fortitude we need. We will need to cry out to God frequently. The situation may be particularly difficult, or it may pass but a new one arises.

How do we know that God has answered our cry? Usually, God will bring people alongside us, reframe our perspective, bring an encouraging word to mind, or change something about the situation. How God chooses to help us is up to Him, but one thing we know is that God will always send us a custom-made solution, tailored just for us.

Grace is God’s answer for survival in a hard world. Through grace, God helps us when we need it the most. As we call on God, He transforms us and gives us the ability to better reflect His amazing love to others as we lovingly use our experiences to also help other people. Grace knits us simultaneously to God and to each other by using our life experiences as the common ground for discovering and walking in love as we all overcome life’s challenges together.

Growing up in a predominantly Christian country, my earliest images of God were of a higher power that was to be taken very seriously often laced with images of fear of eternal damnation. This version of God is highly offensive to people. No one wants to be scared into being a good person. But how are we to understand God, who is at once both sacred and personal, especially when we do not feel God’s presence? How do we find a personal connection with a God who sometimes feel inaccessible, distant, or even uncaring and disengaged in our everyday life?

Seeing God in Jesus

When Jesus was preparing His followers for his imminent death, they were anxious. Jesus comforted them by sharing more about God:

Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?1

Jesus was trying to share two truths about God. First, that Jesus was God and second, that God was Jesus’s father. The followers were still confused. Who was this Father that Jesus was talking about? His followers still did not fully understand this relationship. Jesus explained more:

Whoever has seen me has seen the Father…The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves.2

Jesus was saying something profound: everything He did represented God. When Jesus rose in anger at the injustice of organized religion taking advantage of poor people, He was representing God’s heart for justice. When Jesus stood up against greed, He was inviting us to experience God’s generosity. When Jesus had compassion on the hungry or the sick, He was showing us that God deeply cares about the marginalized in society and those who are hurting. Jesus showed us that God is very engaged in human affairs. Most importantly, Jesus was extending an invitation to everyone to embrace God’s love.

Embracing God’s Love

Even with this invitation, there are lots of times and situations in life that might cause us to wonder if God exists, and if God exists, whether He loves us. Jesus’s followers felt afraid. Jesus was reassuring them they were not alone. Through Jesus, we understand that God has always loved us and continues to love us even today. The Hebrews writer explains:

Going through a long line of prophets, God has been addressing our ancestors in different ways for centuries. Recently he spoke to us directly through his Son. By his Son, God created the world in the beginning, and it will all belong to the Son at the end. This Son perfectly mirrors God, and is stamped with God’s nature. He holds everything together by what he says—powerful words!3

God has been speaking to humanity for a long time. When Jesus came on earth, He was representing God. Jesus came to share important truths, inviting the world into a personal relationship with His father, who is a loving God. We know this because Jesus was intensely personal with His followers. As Jesus was talking to them, He wanted them to know He would always be with them. Instead of being an abstract concept, God, through Jesus, was being as personal as it gets.

Why does any of this matter? When things go sideways or when we face disappointment, we can feel alone and abandoned. We can feel like no one in the world cares about us. We sometimes imagine that God either does not care about us or does not understand what we are going through. But in looking at the life of Jesus, who was tempted in every way, enduring terrible injustice and incredible suffering, we see that God cares about us and understands what we are going through. Jesus faced dark times. He felt abandoned. He suffered deeply. Yet it is precisely because Jesus went through these experiences that we can confidently call on God knowing that He sees us, understands us, and loves us deeply.

That is what Jesus’s life and mission were all about. Jesus came to bring us into a thriving, vibrant relationship with a living, caring, just and personal God who continues to love us even in a busy and modern world.

One day, Jesus’s followers came to Him with a question: what was the most important commandment?

Jesus’s Jewish followers looked to Scripture for how they should live since the law regulated every area of human affairs from criminal justice to immigration to social justice to work and even rest.

Jesus, whose messages upended how they thought about the world, responded by simplifying the entire law into two basic commandments: 1) Love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind; and 2) Love your neighbor as yourself.1 A decision to follow Jesus is a commitment to loving God and loving people.

Loving God

When my father died, I had a huge problem with loving God. In the middle of my grief, I felt disoriented. Staying connected to God was difficult and sometimes He felt distant.

How do we hold on to the truth that God is always there for us, inviting us into deeper relationship with Him when the wounds we sustain along life’s journey lead us to question whether He is really there or even loves us?

This is a huge tension and for many people, it unfortunately becomes a deal breaker to following Jesus. When we begin to look at the life of Jesus and see how He willingly suffered for our sake, it becomes easier to love God even in the middle of life’s hardest moments.

Loving Others

Loving others is not always easy. Of course, it is easy to love those who love us, but that is not the standard. Jesus does not simply tell us to love our friends. He tells us to love our enemies too. When some of the people around Jesus heard this command, they tried to get around it with a legalistic question: who exactly were they being called to love?

In response, Jesus told a story of a Samaritan man who was on a journey and came across an injured Jew. This Jew was the victim of a brutal robbery and left for dead on the side of the road, ignored by people who should have known better: priests and such. Although Samaritans and Jews did not get along, this Samaritan man looked at this Jew and with no regard to his ethnicity took him under his care, at his own cost.2

What does it look like to love those who we least agree with, those who we least respect, those who might even hate us the most? This story tells us that love is messy, inconvenient, and costly. In today’s hyper-polarized world, that can feel like an impossible goal, yet loving everybody is the standard Jesus set.

The Essence of Following Jesus

The essence of Christian faith is loving God and loving others even when it is not easy (or perhaps when it is especially hard). It is not easy to love God when we are in the middle of suffering or when we feel disappointed with Him, nor is it easy to love those who hate us. Loving God and others is hard to do well when we begin to confront the practical realities and tensions along the way. Yet, it is not impossible!

The goal of this newsletter is to help people who want to follow Jesus navigate these tensions. This goal stems from my own walk with Jesus, often navigating dueling ideas and conflicting emotions while trying to understand the heart of God. In a world filled with many different voices, I aim to make difficult subjects accessible promoting deep rigorous thinking on topics such as truth, justice, and relationships with compassion and empathy. Using the Bible as the foundation, drawing upon stories and other Christian thinkers, I hope to show that authentic relationship with Jesus is the best way to resolve the tensions that come up as we seek to follow Him. Along the way, I hope readers will cultivate a healthy, vibrant relationship with Jesus that leads to a fulfilling life.

Thank you for coming on this journey with me.

Karibu

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