Introduction: Why This Message Matters

So this morning I’m going to be teaching a lesson that doesn’t apply currently to most of you. It’s entitled “I Have Cancer, Now What?” Part 1. Part of the reason I’m going to be teaching that this morning is because I have cancer. I found out a few weeks ago: a new diagnosis of prostate cancer. That’s now the third time in my life where doctors walked up to me, handed me results from a test, and said, “You have cancer.” My son David has had five separate occurrences of cancer over the last 11 years. I, like many of you, have had many close friends receive cancer diagnoses and even die from that. So I’ve been deeply affected by cancer, but I know I’m not alone.

Today I’m teaching this lesson, I hope, in order to provide a resource for those who find themselves facing that diagnosis. I know some of you here today are facing that diagnosis. Some of you here today have cancer in your body and don’t know it. So many of you, I hope, will come back to this lesson in the future. I hope that most of you, if not all of you, take close notes and pay careful attention today in order to prepare yourself for that day when you might face that trial, or any other number of trials. There’s nothing particularly special about cancer except that, like so many other trials, it tests our faith. It pulls away strength in ourselves and makes you come to grips with, “What do I actually believe about God?”

So I want you to know that if you don’t have cancer today, there’s a very high chance that you will. It’s almost certain that someone close to you will, in the next few years, certainly over your lifetime. Just statistically, in case you weren’t aware of this, there is a one in three chance that you will have cancer in your lifetime. Men, a little bit higher: 41% chance of getting cancer. Half of those are fatal. That means if you look around, if you’re a man, there’s about a one in five chance that you’re going to die from cancer, given current statistics. Women, 39% chance of getting it, but you guys are better at living through it. There’s only about a 17.7% chance of dying.

I want to encourage you not to start thinking about cancer once you get it. If you have it, it is critical that you begin to shepherd your heart to think rightly, and that’s my goal today. So let me pray, because that is a big task: to hope to have a resource that when somebody gets that diagnosis, or you do, you go back and say, “I want to listen to that. There’s some truth there that I need to hear. There’s hope. There’s comfort.” That’s a really high task that I know I’m going to fall short of, but I’m going to pray that God helps me produce something helpful this morning.

God, I do pray for my words over the next 45 minutes or so. I pray that they would first of all be true, that they would be an accurate representation of you, the way that you rule the universe, the way that you relate to us in our suffering. God, I pray that your Holy Spirit would be active in me through what I say, guarding me from being a hypocrite, and that your Holy Spirit would be active in my hearers today and maybe in days and years into the future through any recording that is made of this. God, I pray that you get the glory. I know that that is your purpose in cancer. That is your purpose in all things: that you would be glorified, and you will be. I pray that this message this morning would tend toward that aim. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Cancer Is Not Your Biggest Problem

So I just want you to know that cancer, if you have it, or cancer, if you fear getting it, or any other way that you might suffer or die, that’s not your biggest problem. Sin is. Sin is something that every human being has. Every human being does. Sin is against a holy God. That means that your problem, my problem, our biggest problem, is not cancer or any other way of suffering and dying, but that you and I have offended a holy God. We deserve his judgment. We deserve his eternal judgment because we have sinned. We have offended. We have rejected the rule of an eternally holy, sovereign, righteous God.

If it were left to us, I promise you that you and I deserve something far worse, far more miserable, far more hopeless than even the most hopeless cancer diagnosis. Apart from God’s grace, you and I rightly face an eternity of hopelessness, of judgment and suffering that does not end. Cancer can only kill you, and then what is mortal for the Christian is actually swallowed up in life. Cancer and any other thing in this world can only harm the body for a few years, and then you face your biggest problem or your only hope: God himself.

Matt Dodd, in his testimony, stood up here shortly before he died. Many of you know him. He was a missionary to Papua New Guinea. He was my best friend for almost 20 years. He had lung cancer that metastasized to his brain. He had a stroke. The church body cared for him so well. He had a little time of reprieve. The drugs started working. The tumor started shrinking. The drug then failed, and he died. Up here he said, in a testimony to the church entitled “Four Truths to Sustain a Dying Man,” “I will never suffer.” First off, “I will never suffer in the way that I deserve.” And he said, “I will never suffer as much as my Savior suffered for me, because he bore my wrath.”

Jesus took that eternal punishment for my sins, that my sins deserved, when he died on the cross. I’m not getting what I do deserve because Jesus took what he didn’t deserve. He didn’t deserve to be mistreated or beaten or spit upon or crucified or bear my sin and punishment, but he did it for me. He did it for every believer. This truth—that I will never suffer as much as Christ suffered for me, and that I will never get what I do deserve because Jesus got what he didn’t deserve—has sustained me. That’s what Matt Dodd was able to say up here, and it did sustain him until he died. It’s what countless Christians have been sustained by, and it will be the only truth that will sustain you through a cancer diagnosis or any other trial.

And it’s not just positive self-talk that will make you feel good as you die, or as you suffer, or as you recover, or even in the context of blessing. This is the Christian’s only hope. This is the only boast that we have. This is everything for the Christian because, apart from Christ suffering in your place, your biggest problem and my biggest problem is that we will die and face a God whom we have offended, who will rightly cast us out of his presence into eternal suffering.

God loved the world in this way: that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but will have eternal life with him.

So if you are facing cancer, or anything in this life, and you do not know God, if you have not turned to him in faith and said, “God, I need saving. I don’t need saving because my body is falling apart. I don’t need saving because I’m sick or because I have cancer or because I mess up every once in a while.” But you say, “God, I need saving because I am a sinner. There is nothing good in me. I can’t give you anything that would be pleasing in your sight. I need a Savior.” If you come to God like that, he will answer that prayer and save you.

That doesn’t mean that you won’t suffer. It doesn’t mean you won’t die of cancer or anything else. But what it will mean is that when you die and you face God, you don’t face him as judge, but you face him as your Father.

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God.

If God loved you so much that he would make you his child, if God is love and he proved that love irrefutably to you, Christian, when he adopted you, and you can look back at the cross and say:

God made him who knew no sin to be sin—that’s Jesus—so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

God took your sin and he placed it on Jesus and punished him, and took Jesus’ righteousness and placed it on you so that he could treat you as his child. That means that no matter what you are facing, if your sin has been done away with, if you are his child, there is no ounce of wrath left in that.

So what I want you to know, what I must know, what every Christian must know, is that in your suffering, whether it’s cancer or anything else, there is no wrath in that. You are not getting what you deserve. Jesus already got what you deserve.

God Designed Your Cancer in Love

That means that God has designed your cancer in love. Do you get that? God doesn’t merely use your cancer for good. God intends it for good. You can fill in the blank with lots of other things besides cancer, but this is one that you might say, “Okay, God has allowed cancer.” Yes, he has. There is no rogue molecule in the universe. There is no mutation in any one of your cells that happened apart from God’s permitting it. But God didn’t merely permit it. God intended it for good. God intended it for your good and for his glory, for purposes you or I may not know, but that I promise you are right.

The first thing that you must know is that cancer is not your biggest problem, and your response must be, “I trust you.” Your response must be, “I trust you.”

I remember—thankfully I don’t remember a lot from the six months when I had Burkitt lymphoma and was on the verge of death multiple times in the hospital. So many from this church cared so well for me, especially my wife. The suffering was real. There was pain that I can’t even describe. My brain was swelling. My brain was soaked in chemo, and I ached with a pain that was unrelenting. There was a weakness. I couldn’t even stand up in the shower. My muscles were so weak. I remember laying on my side in bed, hurting but too weak to turn over.

And there were fears. What’s going to happen when I die? How will my family be provided for? How will my kids grow up without me? What if this happens in treatment? What if I don’t die, but this complication happens and then I’m dependent for the rest of my life? What’s going to happen to my brain? Will I ever be back to who I was? What if, what if, what if? Sometimes I couldn’t even string together thoughts long enough to ask those what-ifs. I would start, and I couldn’t even finish a sentence. But what sustained me, and what I would commend to you, is the simple statement: “I trust you, God. I trust you.”

So if you are facing a cancer diagnosis, I just want you to say those words: “God, I trust you.” In anticipation of the cancer diagnosis, or whatever trial you might face, you need to study God’s word and you need to know this God in his love and his sovereignty and, most of all, his trustworthiness, so that when you face that trial—and it’ll come, it might be cancer, it might be something else, but it’ll come when you don’t expect it—your reflex is, “God, I trust you.”

There is a wisdom in what we do every week at Grace Bible Church when we take a piece of bread and a cup of juice and we remember the cross. There’s so much that we remember there, but what I hope every week you don’t miss is that there is irrefutable evidence at the cross of God’s sovereignty and God’s goodness and love for his own.

If you look at Acts 4:28, this reality sustained the apostles in the midst of suffering. They had just been beaten and told, “Don’t share the gospel.” They came back and they prayed together. Their prayer wasn’t first to ask for anything. They just reminded themselves of something that was true, and they reminded themselves of what was true at the cross: that when Jesus died, there was gathered together against him the Gentiles and the Jews to commit the most sinful act in all of history. And how did they describe it?

To do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.

God didn’t just use the evil of the cross. He predestined it. He intended it. God is sovereign over evil.

You see the same thing in Genesis 50:20, where Joseph is able to testify, “You brothers meant this for evil. When you tossed me in the hole, you sold me into slavery, you wanted to kill me, you intended that for evil purposes. But God meant it for good.” Lamentations 3:37 says, “Who has spoken and it came to pass unless the Lord has commanded it?” Good, bad, everything comes from the Lord.

When you look back to the cross, you can remember and remind yourself that even the most sinful, wicked action in eternity wasn’t caused by God in a way that would make him the author of sin, as if he tempted them to sin. But God is so sovereign and so separate from evil that he not only uses but actually intends evil for his good. That’s not even what we’re talking about with cancer and suffering. This is part of a fallen, groaning world where there is death and there is suffering. If God can intend, use, and purpose even sin for his good purposes, how much more the suffering in this world. And he will, and he does.

We know some of those purposes. Some of those purposes are to prove your faith. Some are to prepare you for eternity. Some are to break you from self-reliance. He has countless other good purposes in your suffering. You don’t have to know what those are. You don’t even have to have a good guess. You can just say, “God, I trust you.”

God’s love is not absent in your suffering. It’s very much present, and you can trust, and you must trust, that this cancer, or whatever you are facing, comes from a heart of love, if you are his child. If you’re not—if you’re facing this cancer and you aren’t sure if God is your Father, you maybe are turning to him, or you’re trying to impress him with your good works or your self-sufficiency, and you just realize in the face of cancer, “Oh man, I can’t do this on my own,” or, “This faith that I thought I had is being revealed. I actually don’t trust God”—turn. Just say, “God, I trust you. Give me that trust. God, I trust you not just with cancer, but I trust you with my eternity. I trust you to take my sin away. I know that my sin is my biggest problem before you. Please forgive me.”

Just like the thief on the cross, moments before his death, turned in faith to Jesus, and he said, “Even this evening you will be with me in Paradise,” God will forgive you. He will reconcile you to himself. Then you can know for certain that this cancer, or whatever you are facing, is for your good and that it is from God, and you can trust.

This is a pretty simple truth. If God is infinitely holy and infinitely good, and he is your Father, and you know that he only has good purposes for you, and you know that God is totally sovereign—that nothing can happen in the universe, nothing can exist, nothing can live, nothing can die, no cells can reproduce, no cells can grow, no cells can die, no DNA can mutate apart from God’s sovereign ordaining of it—if God is perfectly good and totally holy, that means that what’s going on in your life right now is exactly according to plan from the one who you want to make the plans.

I stood up here right after my lymphoma diagnosis and said I was shepherding my own heart with a game. Have you ever played “Would you rather?” and you get two really bad examples—would you rather eat a scorpion or something dumb? But I was facing “Would you rather?” Would I rather grow to a really old age, be successful in life, be able to provide for my kids? Would I rather have everything go in my life exactly how I would prefer and ordain it? Or would I rather, at that point facing probable death statistically—I’m not facing that now. Prostate cancer isn’t that deadly, but who knows? God does—would I rather have Burkitt lymphoma, suffer, and die in my late 30s?

I don’t think anybody would say, and I don’t think you ought to say, “God, give me cancer.” But what I shepherded my heart with, and what I would recommend you do the same, is this: if you were ever given that question and God said, “Hey, how should I run the world?” I think the right response would be, “God, I don’t have the perspective to know the right answer. Will you do what’s right?” And that is exactly what’s happening. No matter where you are in life, the trials or successes that you are facing are ordained for you by your loving heavenly Father, who is infinitely good and totally wise. So trust him.

Fight Cancer Without Trusting the Chariots

So if you are trusting God and you’re facing, “I have cancer in front of me. What should I do? How should I fight this?” I’ve seen some people respond to that challenge by saying, “You know what? I don’t need to think about it. I have cancer. I don’t need to think about it. I’ll just trust the Lord with this.” What comes out of that is they don’t pursue treatment. They’re content. They’re just saying, “Well, I don’t necessarily want to fight this,” or, “I don’t want to fight it well.” They don’t think hard about their cancer. They don’t research. They know that something may not be right in the treatment they’re getting, and they just say, “I’m going to trust God with that.” Maybe they delay care or show lack of interest in care, saying, “I trust God.” Maybe they are trusting God. Maybe you are trusting God when you do that. But I want to say there’s nothing particularly right or meritorious in doing something foolish and masking it with the statement, “I trust God.”

You can and should pursue treatment. You can and should pursue the best treatment. Learn about your cancer. Learn about what you’re suffering. Pursue the right treatment. If it seems like you’re not getting the right treatment, go find a better doctor. It’s right to understand what you’re facing, to anticipate the side effects, and to make an informed decision about the treatment that you pursue, the chemo or whatever means you’re going to be fighting it with.

But on the other hand, there’s another danger: you can get so focused on the treatment plan that you find yourself trusting in doctors and chemo in a way that means you’re not trusting God. Psalm 20:7—turn there. This was a helpful illustration that I gleaned from John Piper in his incredibly helpful book Don’t Waste Your Cancer. It’s not even really a book. It’s like 11 chapters, each chapter like a paragraph. It’s more like two pages. But it is usually the right amount of information that you need when you are facing this, and your brain, if it was anything like mine in the fog of war when I was first facing this diagnosis, has a hard time thinking deep thoughts. So I apologize for my rambling here, but anyway, that’s a great book.

Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.

Piper writes on this, “The design of God in our cancer is not to train us in the rationalistic human calculation of odds. The world gets comfort from their odds, not Christians. Some count their chariots, their percentages of survival, and some count their horses, the side effects of treatment, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.”

This is a helpful passage because he’s saying there is a way to fight a battle where the horses and the chariots are your hope, and the horses and the chariots get the glory. There is also a way to fight a battle where God, not the horses and chariots, gets the glory. For David in that day, leading Israel’s army out there, there really wasn’t much of a way to fight a battle without horses and chariots and swords and soldiers. So what are we to make of this? A God-fearing king would still have to fight, and a God-fearing king would still have to fight with horses, chariots, swords, skill, practice, tactics, and strategy. But he would fight in a way that when he won, or if he lost, it was not the horse or the chariot, but God that would get the glory, who provided the victory through the means of horses and chariots and skill.

So in your pursuit of trust in God, resolve to fight your cancer in a way where it is not the doctors or the chemo or your diligence or your wisdom in pursuing treatment that gets the glory, but God does, and you trust that God is using those means to accomplish his goal. A king would be a fool if he were to enter a battle with rusty chariots, a dull sword, and old decrepit horses. It’s not necessarily godly to say, “I’m going to face my struggle by not facing it,” and to say, “I’m just going to trust the Lord in this,” and not do your part. You can fight your cancer, or whatever struggle you’re facing, in a way where the tools that you employ don’t get the glory. That’s not where your trust is. Your trust is in God himself.

Piper writes in a different chapter, “It’s not wrong to know about your cancer. Ignorance is not a virtue. But the lure to know more and more, and the lack of zeal to know God more and more, is symptomatic of unbelief. Cancer is meant to waken us to the reality of God. It is meant to put feeling and force behind the command, ‘Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord.’ What a waste of cancer if we read day and night about cancer and not about God.”

So how can you know which one this is? This is a hard thing to parse out in your life. It is for me. I’ve done a lot of reading about cancer in my life. If you ask me about lymphoma, leukemia, prostate cancer, or any other number of health things, I’ve done a lot of reading about that. It hasn’t always been in a way that wasn’t distracting me from God. I can confess to you there have been times where, in my desire to understand what I was facing, I lost sight of the God who ordained it and who ultimately would determine success or failure. That’s why I am encouraging you to consider this: how can you know if you’re trusting God and learning well?

If, as you read and you see the odds, you start to get a panicked feeling in your heart—“Oh, this might kill me. Oh, this side effect, that’s going to be really hard”—and you start pre-suffering tomorrow’s struggle, and you start saying, “Oh man, my odds are not good here. I need to read more. I need to find a better treatment,” and you don’t find yourself praying instead, that would be evidence that you are not trusting God.

If instead you say, “Man, my odds don’t look good. God, I’m not dependent on odds as to whether or not I live or die here, or whether I face this side effect or not. If that side effect comes, it was your sovereign hand who ordained it. Sustain me in that day. God, if I die, I can’t add one moment to my life. You ordained my days before the foundation of the world. Thank you for every day you’ve given me. And God, that clinical trial looks very promising. Thank you for the timing that I got cancer when that clinical trial existed”—that’s different. I’m so grateful for clinical trials. I think my son would be dead four or five times over by now if it weren’t for clinical trials that just happened to pop up when he needed it most. God can be very gracious by providing treatments.

On the other hand, if you read something and say, “Oh, those odds don’t look too bad. Hey, look, I have a 95.7% ten-year survival with what I’m facing right now. Those odds look pretty good. I don’t need to worry about it,” and now you’re not praying, that would likewise be evidence that you’re trusting the odds, that you’re trusting the treatment and not God, who is going to determine your days.

So learn what you can. Pursue the best treatment. Be diligent to take care of your body. Do it in a way that whether you live or you die, you’re trusting the Lord and giving him the glory for the fight.

Cancer Is a Testing of Your Faith

Cancer is a testing of your faith. Do you trust that God is who he says he is? I’ve just proclaimed some things that you might know in your head, that you’ve heard week after week after week, and they’ve hit you numbly. You tune out because Jacob’s sharing the gospel again. But does that sustain you when you are facing the reality of suffering, when you’re facing the reality of death? Does that gospel sustain you in hope, or does it all of a sudden become an afterthought — maybe insufficient?

No. God intends every trial to prove your faith. If God is the author and perfecter of your faith — Hebrews 12 — if your faith was a gift, not a result of works, so that no man can boast, when God tests that faith, what is he testing? He’s not testing to see if you’re strong enough. He’s actually proving to you and to the watching world that what he made in you is genuine.

So we can rejoice in our sufferings. Romans 5:3. That sounds crazy. “I have cancer. I’m probably going to die of it. It’s going to be really hard, and it’s going to hurt my family and those around me. I could have a really hard time. There are a lot of unknowns I’m facing. I’m scared.” Rejoice?

“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” (Romans 5:3–5)

And James says:

“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” (James 1:2–4)

This is a very familiar verse. Let it strike you with the surprising force of it again this morning. Count it joy when you face trials. This isn’t positive self-talk — “buck up, it’s not that bad.” No. This is really bad. You’re probably going to die, and if you don’t die of this, you’ll die of something sooner than you hope. Count it joy.

It’s not happiness — not the kind you get when you have your favorite dessert and you’re happy because it’s going to taste really good. That’s not the kind of joy the world can offer. This is a kind of joy that’s unobtainable through religious effort. Nobody but a Christian can know this joy. It’s what will set you apart from your Mormon neighbor who is religious and knows some of these truths, or some version of them — or from the person who is religious and sort of knows of a God but doesn’t trust in Jesus, the good sovereign orchestrator of all that is and will be. Only a Christian has this joy.

When are you most joyful? It’s when you get what you really want. Your team wins the Super Bowl — you’re happy. You got the dessert you wanted — you’re happy. You worked really hard to pass that test and you got an A — you’re happy. So what does the Christian want most? What ought the Christian to want most?

What God wants for you: your holiness. God is forming you into his image. He’s made you his son. He declared you righteous when he saved you and set you on a trajectory of sanctification that will culminate in your glorification when you see him as he is. “See what kind of love the Father has for us — he’s made us children of God. And we are. You are children now, but what you will be hasn’t yet appeared. We know that when he appears, you’ll be like him, because you’ll see him as he is.” He’s setting you on a trajectory to become holy, to mature you. And these slight momentary afflictions — which can only last as long as this life lasts — are preparing for you an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. These sufferings are not even worth comparing to what will be made known to us and in us when we see him, when we are with him in eternity.

So we are most joyful when we get what we want most, which is God and holiness — and that is exactly what God is accomplishing for us in trials. That’s why Romans 5 says we rejoice in our sufferings, because they are producing maturity. It’s why James says you rejoice in your trials, because the end effect is that you will be complete, lacking in nothing. That’s the hope of Hebrews 12: followers of Christ facing the very real prospect of weariness, being disciplined — not punished, but disciplined, trained for righteousness — by means of trials, by their heavenly Father. God says the conclusion of that is: strive for holiness in the midst of your suffering. Strive for holiness, without which — Hebrews 12:14 — nobody will see the Lord. God is proving and forming in you the only thing that will be acceptable to him: a faith that can endure trials.

Do you know that your faith will endure? He knows if your faith will endure. But do you know it? Not until it does. But if you know it’s from him, you know that it will. And so you get to say, when you get cancer: “Thank you, God, because I will now see the miracle of the faith you created in me play itself out in a way that I certainly could not do on my own.”

That’s why when Paul pleaded with Jesus in 2 Corinthians 12 — “Can you remove this thorn from me?” He didn’t just ask nicely; he pleaded multiple times. And what did Jesus say? “No, because my grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in your weakness.”

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9)

When cancer pulls away all your strength — and a lot of cancers are like that, and a lot of the treatments are brutal — when cancer kills you, it will ravage your body and take you to the very end of yourself, to where you don’t have strength. It will sap your mind of the fuel it needs to think, your body of the fuel it needs to move, and ultimately overwhelm your body to where it just fails and you die. That’s horrible.

But it isn’t — because that means you’re at the end of yourself. You have no strength. You can boast in your weakness, because you can say, “God, I can’t endure this. I can’t even string together a thought. But when I trust in you, when I’m weak, then I’m strong” — because your strength isn’t in yourself anymore. And it actually reveals that it never should have been, never could have been.

Without that testing, you don’t get to prove that. When you’re healthy, when you can just go to the store and buy your food, that’s a different kind of dependence than when you don’t have any food and you say, “God, I don’t know where my next meal will come from,” and then he provides it. In both cases, God provided the food. If you go to the store and pay for it, you should say, “Thank you, God, for providing this.” And you shouldn’t do it in a way that feels less meaningful than if you were destitute on a desert island, starving, and God miraculously had a bird fly by and drop a Happy Meal in your lap — and you say, “Oh wow, God, thank you, you provided this.” In both cases, he provided it. You’re no less dependent on God’s strength to endure the day when you’re strong and fit and all your organs work than you will be in organ failure because of cancer, completely dependent on machines and transfusions and medicines and doctors and loved ones. But there is something about that desperation that shows you what was true all along, and makes that statement — “when I’m weak, I’m strong” — true.

“For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:10)

Coming Next Week

We are coming to the end. This actually became a two-part series — my elder Smed knew me. I said I could get this in one week, and Smed just said he was going to go ahead and put part two on the schedule for next week. He was wise.

So next week we are going to be talking about how you cannot grow weary — because that threat of weariness is real. That is really the bulk of what Hebrews 12 is about: don’t grow weary, consider him in your discipline, consider him in your suffering, so you might not grow weary and faint-hearted. I’m also going to talk about embracing help, and a little bit about what those around people who are suffering with cancer can do to practically help — what kinds of words of encouragement and practical deeds are most helpful. We’ll talk about the importance of the body, some of the wisdom of Jesus about taking one day at a time and trusting him for tomorrow, and the perspective of eternity.

Closing Prayer

Let’s pray.

God, thank you for this morning. Thank you that whatever we face — cancer, car accident, sickness, even prosperity — whatever we face, it is sovereignly ordained by you, our heavenly Father, who intends it for good, who is using it to accomplish in us exactly what you desire, and it is best.

God, I pray for this morning, as we go out from here, that we would have the opportunity to serve one another, to love one another, that we would get our eyes off of ourselves. Let us be quick to see the good works that you prepared beforehand so that we could walk in them. I pray that your body would do the work of the body, each part, as we gather together as the church this morning. I pray for the preaching of your word — that your Holy Spirit would be active, that it would be clear, that we would listen well, and that you would be glorified.

In Jesus’ name, amen.