Share message
Link Copied
Connection Question: What stood out to you from this week’s message about the questions we ask when life goes wrong?
Context Question: Have you picked up the idea that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people? If so, how has it shaped the way you think about suffering?
Clarity Question: The disciples assumed someone was to blame for the man’s blindness, and Jesus said no one was. How did this week’s message clarify or change the way you think about hard things in your own life?
Application Question: This week’s message gave three ways to respond when you’re stuck: look up, look back, and look around. Which one do you need most right now, and what could it look like this week?
Main Scripture: John 9:1–3
Chapter 8 closes with Jesus teaching in the temple, where He called Himself “the light of the world” (John 8:12). The religious leaders picked up stones to kill Him, and He left the temple (John 8:59). John 9 picks up right where John 8 leaves off. Jesus leaves the temple and walks past a blind man who has been without sight since birth.
The disciples ask, who has sinned, this man, or his parents? The disciples’ question reflects a common belief of their day: suffering points back to someone’s sin. Some read passages like Exodus 20:5 as children paying for their parents’ sin, and some teachers even speculated that a person could sin before birth. It’s an old instinct. Job’s friends were certain his suffering had a cause, and God told them they had not spoken the truth about Him (Job 42:7). Jesus confronts the same assumption in Luke 13:1–5, and the prophets had already pushed back on the error of thinking that children carry their parents’ guilt (Ezekiel 18:20).
John, one of Jesus’ closest followers, wrote this Gospel so that readers would believe Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and have life in his name (John 20:31). In the rest of chapter 9, Jesus heals the man, the religious leaders investigate, the man’s parents keep their distance out of fear, and the man is thrown out of the synagogue. Then Jesus goes and finds him, and the man worships Him (John 9:35–38). Meanwhile, the religious leaders turn out to be the ones who are truly blind (John 9:39–41). God’s works are on display in far more than restored eyesight.
Jesus’ answer in verse 3 doesn’t mean the man and his parents had never sinned. Everyone has. It means this blindness was not punishment for some specific wrong. Jesus also doesn’t fully explain why suffering exists. He moves the question away from who caused it and toward what God is doing in it. That fits what Scripture says elsewhere about who God is: He works all things together for the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28), His power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9–10), and He is good and does what is good (Psalm 119:68).
Maybe something in your life went a way you never wanted, and the questions haven’t stopped. You can bring every one of them to God. Ask Him to show you where He has been at work when you couldn’t see it, to strengthen you where you feel weak, and to make Himself seen in you to the people watching. Close by reading 2 Corinthians 12:9–10.
What do you do when there is nothing that you can do? I mean, it’s week four into this series called Stuck and we’re still asking the same question. What do you do whenever you find yourself when life has just turned itself upside down? When you find yourself in a set of circumstances that you didn’t expect, that you didn’t want, that you would have never wished for, that in fact you weren’t even prepared for. It seemed to have caught you by surprise, kind of like when you weren’t looking. And now you don’t know what to do and part of you wants to scramble, part of you wants to fix it. You’re not sure that life is ever gonna get better. What do you do when there’s nothing that you can do?
We talked about this relationally, financially, professionally in your world, in your sphere of influence. Maybe it’s with your family. If you’ve ever been stuck, if you’ve ever been in that season of life where you just feel stuck, it’s natural to tell yourself some things. In fact, it’s natural to tell yourself some lies. And you might say, “I’ll never be happy again.” You might find yourself saying nothing good could ever come from this circumstance, this set of circumstance, this new normal that is now in my life. You might tell yourself that lie that there’s no point in continuing on.
See, sometimes we get stuck. And I want you to catch this. This is gonna take us where we’re going in the message today. Sometimes we get stuck and we’re more interested in solving our brokenness. Than taking our brokenness to Jesus. Sometimes our circumstances, they become a problem for us to solve instead of an opportunity for us to let others see Christ in us. Because when something bad happens, it’s easy to jump into problem solving mode, right into damage control. I mean, that’s my personality. I’m a fixer by nature. So when something is wrong, something is broken, unless it’s broken in the house, then I don’t know how to fix it. But if it’s broken anywhere else in life, I’m a fixer, I wanna fix it, I wanna jump in, I wanna do the damage control, I wanna try and somehow make it better. When things go wrong in our lives, that’s what we do. We try and steer the ship. We try and turn the wheel. We try and figure life out. We wanna solve the problem. We wanna avoid the problem. We wanna move past it, we wanna get around it. We don’t wanna suffer any longer than we have to. Part of our problem solving damage control mode, we start asking a different set of questions. I mean, we wanna know how this happened. I mean, why did this happen? I mean, God, if you’re good, and God, if you only do good, and Lord, if I’m one of your followers, if I’m one of your children, if you’re my heavenly Father, then God, why did this happen? And if this happened, and since it’s a reality in life, we wanna ask another question, whose fault is it? I mean, is it my fault? Is it your fault? Is it someone in your family lineage three generations ago? Is it something that they did and somehow somebody told you because they did something three generations ago that you’re paying the price for it now? Hey, before we get to that spot in the message, that’s false, that’s wrong. Who’s at fault? Who’s to blame? And we wanna know how long is it gonna last? I mean, is this gonna be a short while? Is it gonna pass or is this gonna be what my life looks like? And we ask God, God, are you mad at me? God, are you punishing me? God, did I do something to deserve this? And we ask ourselves these questions, and after a while we start asking other people these questions, we ask God these questions, and to a certain degree, some of these questions are normal.
But somewhere in the midst of this sea of questions and that doubt and wondering why and how and what would be the cause of all of this, we end up asking this question, why do bad things happen to good people? See, we ask this question and we really start thinking about situations that we know because in reality, we would never look at ourselves and say, hey, we’re good. Because I know me better than you know me, and I’m really glad that you don’t know me as well as I know me. But we look at that faithful family and their child gets a disease and the child passes. We look at that wife who did the right thing stood the ground and made the right decision and followed what the Bible said and now she’s raising two children on her own. We look at the faithful couple who served God for years in church and they can’t have children. You look at the person that started the company from the ground up, built its reputation and was pushed out of their own company. And now they have to start all over again. And we look at that and we say, why do bad things happen to good people?
And I wanna catch your attention here. That statement, why do bad things happen to good people? It’s not rooted in theology. It’s not a statement that brings resolution for a couple of reasons. The first one is this, it assumes that all people are good and they aren’t. It assumes that God isn’t sovereign and He is. It assumes that we’re able to define what is good and what is bad and I’m gonna be honest with you, we can’t. And really what we want are just answers to the questions. Why did this happen? Whose fault is it? How long is this going to last? And why am I in pain? Or why is someone that I care about and that I love in pain? And sometimes we ask these questions because our emotions get so frustrated with what we see that we stop connecting what we see with the truth of God’s word in our hands.
You don’t have this in your notes today. You might wanna write this down. Doctrine answers questions. Doctrine answers questions. Hey, our solutions won’t answer questions. Our way and our effort, it will never answer questions. All of my damage control and my desire to problem solve and my desire to avoid it, to blame whoever’s fault it really belongs to, all of that, it will never solve the problem. And it’ll never answer the difficult questions of life.
And so I want you to hear me clearly. Hey, bring your questions to God. Listen, there’s a difference between asking God questions and questioning God. Hey, ask God your questions. Bring Him your hurt. Bring Him the circumstances that you don’t understand. Bring Him the life problems that have just dropped into your lap and you’re going, wait a minute, but I’ve done everything right. Why is this happening? Bring Him your why. Bring Him your difficulty. Bring it all. You can be real with God. You can be raw with your heavenly Father. He can handle it. He’s there for you.
Today I want you to see something that our questions aren’t the solution. Take your questions to God, but our questions aren’t the solution. There’s something more and there’s something deeper, something richer, something that’s life-changing.
All throughout history, people have watched things go wrong and they asked questions about it, even their friends and the followers of Jesus, they ask these questions. And it’s in John chapter number nine that the disciples notice something that they don’t understand. I mean, they see something that doesn’t make sense to them. And so they’ve got some questions and they bring their question to Jesus, but I want you to get this. What’s more important than the question is the answer that Jesus gives. And it changes the way that we ought to see ourselves when we feel stuck.
John chapter number nine, verse number one says this, “And he,” this is Jesus was passing by, “and he saw a man blind from birth. “And his disciples asked him, “who sinned, this man or his parents, “that he was born blind?” Hey Jesus, there’s gotta be a reason that this man was born blind. Like, what did he do wrong? Like, who sinned? Whose fault was it? There’s gotta be someone to blame because something like this just doesn’t happen for no reason at all. Why did this happen in this man’s life? What did he do? What did his parents do? What did his grandparents do that God would make him born blind? See, it’s in their religious system that when they saw people in pain, saw people in sorrow, saw people that were suffering, they concluded that God was punishing them. Here the disciples, they were focused on what went wrong. Just like you do, just like I do. Normal, natural. The problem is, it’s kinda like an awkward conversation. I mean, they’re like, “Rabbi, this guy’s blind. “I mean, whose fault was it, like him “or was it his parents?” And you gotta remember, the blind guy wasn’t deaf. He was just blind. Like, he’s hearing the entire conversation. They’re like, “Rabbi, listen, who’s the bad guy? “What did he do or what was he gonna do “that he was born blind?” Hey, sometimes our religious system gets us focused on the right and the wrong of something, and we miss people that we’re supposed to care for in the moment. I didn’t say that we take right and wrong and push it aside. We just gotta remember that we’re there for the people and their religious system had them thinking, somebody is wrong, somebody’s paying a price, and they didn’t leave room for what God was really doing.
Now Jesus, he’s faced with this question, who sinned was it this man or his parents, and thankfully, thankfully for you and me, he didn’t say it was his parents’ fault. Thankfully for you and I, he didn’t say it was this man’s fault, that God was punishing him, that God was withholding sight from him. And maybe you’ve heard somebody on TV and they were preaching or they were trying to sell their book or you’ve heard some podcast where it says that if you give enough money or if you’re faithful enough to God, that bad things won’t happen in your life and that bad things are a sign of judgment and the good things are a sign of blessing and that if you do good for God, then God will do good for you. That’s not what Jesus said. Jesus said there will be tribulation. There will be difficulty, but that he’s overcome all of it. So don’t buy into what’s natural for us to think because I’m going through this moment, because I’m going through this difficulty that somehow God is attacking me, that God is chastening me, that God is beating me up or judging me because I did something wrong. Listen, if God is chastening you, you will recognize his voice as he corrects you. So thankfully, Jesus didn’t say it was his parents’ fault. Thankfully, he didn’t say that it was the man’s fault. But what he did say is answer, it’s life-changing. Look at verse number three. Neither this man nor his parents sinned. I mean, Jesus doesn’t even get distracted with the question. I don’t understand what you’re asking. He doesn’t even get distracted with the question. He says, I understand why you’re asking, but you’re focused on the wrong thing. I’m concerned with something different. Sometimes things enter into our lives and we go, why God? Why would you allow this? Why would you bring this into my life? Why would you do this, God? If you are good, this doesn’t feel very good in the moment. But can I tell you, our focus is on the wrong thing. When God is concerned with something completely different in our lives. Look at the rest of the verse. This came about so that God’s work might be displayed in him. Some of you have been told that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people. And Jesus just said something completely different. He said, this came about so that God’s work might be displayed in him.
So in case I lose you in the rest of the message, here’s the big idea when you’re stuck. Stop asking who’s to blame and start asking how God wants to be seen in you.
If you’ve read the story in John chapter number nine, you know the rest of the passage that Jesus goes on to heal the man. But I don’t want you to get confused today because the point of the passage is not the miracle. It’s not that Jesus made a man who was blind and gave him sight. Because if that was the point, then what do we do when there’s no miracle? I mean, what do we do when there’s no healing, when there’s no rescue? What do we do when it doesn’t feel like God is fair? What do we do when good doesn’t always triumph? And what do we do when heartache just seems to get heavier and it seems to hit the people that we would call innocent? What do we do when God’s good work doesn’t seem good? And it’s why we don’t look to our circumstances to answer questions. It’s why we look to doctrine to answer questions. And here’s what doctrine says in those moments. It says that God is sovereign over what happens over me and over everything in Romans 8.28. It says that God is present and strong in exactly the place I feel weak in 2 Corinthians 12. It says that God is good and that he only does good in Psalm 119.68. You see, doctrine won’t change your circumstances the moment that we understand it. Doctrine isn’t going to change your life just because you understand it and you see it for the truth that it is. It doesn’t mean that your circumstances will change but it does give you something to cling to when your circumstances won’t change.
And the point of the passage is the conversation that happens before the miracle, the moment Jesus has asked the question that all of us will eventually ask. And many times we’re focused on who to blame. What went wrong and how do we figure this out? How do we avoid this?
And I want you to understand this, our questions, and what we’re really after is we’re looking for a way out instead of a way forward. We’re looking for God to erase everything in our path rather than him take everything and just make a way forward right through all of it. And all too often, our prayer life circles around God, would you take this thing out of my life? God, would you ease this pain in my life? Would you take this heartache out of my life? Would you fix these people in my life? And all too often what we’re looking for is we’re looking for a way out of the circumstances that we didn’t want to be in. Once we realized that there was no way to avoid it and that we couldn’t blame someone else for it and that there’s no way out, all of a sudden now we just want out instead of forward.
And listen to me, God is more concerned with how he can be displayed in your life and in my life than he is with figuring out our problems. And it’s completely possible that God is on display in your stuck moment, in your pain, and that you don’t even realize it. It’s because hindsight is 20-20. I mean, in the middle of our circumstances in the middle of the brokenness, in the middle of the pain, it’s hard to see anything good coming from it. It’s all that we can focus on. It’s all that we can see is the negative or the bad that is happening in that moment. We want to focus on what’s wrong rather than seeing what God is doing right.
But once that situation gets behind us, once that thing gets a little bit further in the rear view mirror, and time puts distance between us and it, we often look back and we see far more clear than we did when we were right in the middle of the circumstance. Sometimes we see God’s hand at work through the entire thing. Sometimes we get just little glimpses of what God was doing. And when we focus on what’s wrong, we lose sight of what God is doing right.
There are far too many times in my life where I’ve said, “God, why are you doing this? “God, why do bad things happen to good people?” I’ve asked all the questions on who’s to blame and how do we avoid it. And I’ve missed seeing his hand at work in my life because I was looking for a way out instead of a way forward. And God in his goodness and his mercy and his grace, sometimes allows me to see in the rear view mirror, in the hindsight of 2020, what he was doing.
But what if we went at our problems in a different way? When we realized that we’re stuck, when we realized there’s no way out, when we realized there’s not a way forward in our own strength. What if we just said, “Okay, God, “I’m gonna look to you in whatever you do “because I wanna see you at work in this.” Sometimes we lose sight of God making a way forward, of God making a way through. So many times we say to ourselves, “Nothing good can come from this “when God has been doing good all along.” Our eyes were just closed because we were focused on the wrong thing. And there are times that we think our circumstances are the worst thing that have ever happened to us. And then looking back, we realize they’re the best thing that has ever happened to us. That the problems and the pain and the sorrow and the difficulty that some of us have tried to pray our way out of have been the greatest things that have ever happened in our life. To make us a better parent, to make us a better spouse, to make us a better friend, a better follower of Jesus. We look back and now we see the hand of God at work, slowly chipping away who we are, who we were, that we would look less like us and more like His Son.
So your circumstances may be part of your life now. They may even be part of your life for the rest of your life, but they won’t be part of your eternity. So imagine with me for a second that you were able to focus less on what went wrong and more on God. How are you making this right? And God, how are you doing good in this? See, that’s not easy. Yeah, I know. It’s difficult. But if we did it, how much weight would it take off of our shoulders? If you didn’t have to wonder whether you deserve this, if you didn’t have to worry whether God would do this, whether God was mad at you or if God was punishing you, if God was withholding something from you, what if you didn’t have to worry anymore if your family was cursed or whether, whether this problem was just gonna go on forever? I mean, how much pressure would that take off of you in your life? We spend so much time and so much energy worrying about what we can’t change, about what we can’t fix. And he’s in control.
Hey, what if people around you, the ones that you love the most, the ones that you care for the most, the people that see you the most often, what if they saw you walking through your problem? You remember the one that you want to avoid, but you can’t, the one that you want to get out of, but you couldn’t, the one that you said, nothing good could ever come from this, I’ll never be happy again, there’s no point in continuing on. Hey, what if people saw you walk through that problem with hope? What would happen to the world around you? What if people saw you walk through those difficulties with joy and with peace that passes all understanding? What if people saw you with patience, when you have every reason to not have patience? What if people saw you with a perspective that understands when people would give you a pass for not being able to understand anything in your life? So we get focused on what God is doing in our lives, and sometimes we just allow ourselves to see it in the negative. We see what’s going wrong, rather than saying, okay, God, clearly you’re doing something and I just want to see your hand at work. What if they could look at you and see that faith? What would that do to their relationship with their heavenly Father, their hope, their joy? How would it change their faith to watch you come through the other side of this thing that you said will never allow you to be happy, will never allow you to have peace, that’s so bad that you just shouldn’t go on? What if they saw you go through on the other side and say, this was hard, this was difficult, this was the worst season of my life, but I’ve seen God on display in my life, and I’ve seen his presence in my life? What if we did that?
Here’s what I want you to know. No matter how dark it seems, no matter how absent God feels, no matter how hopeless you think you are or how close you are to giving up, God will carry you through this. And while he does, he desires to be on display, no matter how difficult you think things are, he’s working his good. I’m gonna be honest with you, I’ve seen God’s work in my life way too much to deny it. God’s work comes with purpose and a promise. I’ve seen it again and again and again and again. You say, well, I don’t see the purpose and I don’t see the promise right now, hang on. You might not see it right now, but you will see it in the future. Maybe not in this life, but in eternity with him. And we may be consumed with all the hurt and the pain and the difficulty, and it’s easy to get lost in the sea of our own questions, and I know it has the potential to make you lose sleep, and I know it has the potential to make you worry about the future and worry about your family and just overwhelm you.
But God says, I wanna be with you, I wanna be on display in your life, I wanna make something beautiful, out of what feels so terrible. I’ve given you a story to tell and an audience to tell it to, and in that we ought to see our stuck circumstances different. We ought to see the problems that we want to avoid and that we want to escape different. And our heavenly Father is in the business of making something beautiful out of what feels terrible to us. What if we could just learn to receive adversity as a gift with a promise and a purpose? Maybe then we’d find the secret of contentment that it’s Christ in you, and what if we turned our attention away from the questions, away from the noise, away from the pain, away from the difficulty, and said, God, what are you doing in this? And how do you wanna be display and on display in my life?
You say, Anthony, I want that, I wanna do that. How do I do that? I want you to write these three things down. The first one’s this, look up. Stop looking at who’s to blame. Look up and ask God how God wants to be on display in your life. Trade your why for how? Hey, asking why keeps you stuck, looking up moves you forward.
Here’s the second one, look back. Hey, look back and remember where God was faithful when you couldn’t see him. Look back and remember the goodness of those moments when you were like, God, I can’t see your goodness and God, I can’t see your hand at work, but I’m gonna trust that this is what you’re doing and you get further down the road and all of a sudden hindsight becomes 20, 20 and you see God’s hand all over your life. Remember those moments. If God was working when you couldn’t see it then, then he’s working when you can’t see it now. An older, wiser preacher once said, about the hand of God being at work. But don’t doubt when you can’t see the hand of God at work because he’s always at work.
The third thing is look around. Someone’s watching you. They’re watching how you’re walking through your pain. They’re watching how you walk through your difficulty. They’re watching how you walk through problems that you want to avoid. You’ve said you’ve wanted to avoid it. Look around and see that you’ve got an audience. Not for your talent and not for your voice. That God wants to tell a story through your pain and through the pressure in your life. Because he has a purpose and it comes with a promise. Hey, your stuck season, it might be someone’s first look at Jesus.
And the audience that you might be on display for, it might not be this room. It might be that lost coworker that you’ve been trying to witness to. It might be that friend that you have that you’ve been trying to get to church. And the problem is they just don’t know that God is real. It might be that God brings something into your life and he decides to be on display in a way that we don’t understand in the moment. But his purpose, his purpose works in a way. And we’ll see what he does in the results.
What if we just trusted that God can make right what feels so wrong? Maybe you’re thinking, I can’t receive adversity right now. I’m too tired. I’m struggling just to trust God. And start where the disciples started. Take your questions to Jesus. Take your hurt to Jesus. Cry out to him. Take him your problems. Take him your pain. Take him your questions. Take him your fear. Take him your troubled heart. Stop asking who’s to blame and start saying, God, how do you want to be on display in my life? Trust that God is good even when your circumstances don’t look good. You say, will I always be stuck? You know what I’m starting to learn? Is that when I can see his promise and that there’s a purpose, when I can see that he wants to be on display, when I can see everything else that we’re learning out of this series, I’m starting to learn that even when I think I’m stuck, I’m not stuck. His hand is at work and he’s doing something I can’t see.
So would you stand with me? We’re going to sing in a moment. Your heart might be heavy and it might say, well, how do I sing? If you’ve ever prayed with me, I’ve ever prayed for you. About eight out of ten times, I’ll start praying with this statement. God, you’re good. The reason I start praying that way is because there was a period of time where God didn’t seem good and I couldn’t see his goodness. And so I kept telling myself, God is good. God is good. God is good. Then it moved into my prayer life. And I started telling him that he’s good. When I didn’t see it, when I didn’t know it, at times when I didn’t even feel it, then it got to worship and I started singing with a loud voice, that God is good.
And I’ve learned that when I declare truth that it’s true about God to God, that I get to say what is true in the face of everything else that I feel, of everything else that I see, of everything else that’s going on. And there’s something so rewarding about just going, God, I know you’re good, even though I’m walking through pain. God, I know that you’re good, even though I’m walking through difficulty. And I’ve found that the difficult is less difficult. The pain is less painful. Because I don’t focus on that. I focus on his goodness.


