Lisa Harper: Grace In The Pain (LIFE Today)

[Music] the following program is sponsored by friends of life outreach international when god allows pain in your life more often than not it's a promotion it's him saying your shoulders are wide enough to carry this in a way that you'll bring me glory and i think when people have been through stuff i know some of the times you've prayed for me and spoken to me when i was in the dark if you hadn't had your own difficulty i'd be like you're driving me nuts like get away from me pollyanna lisa harper next on life today [Music] hi welcome to life today i'm sheila walsh and i'm really glad you decided just to sit down get yourself a cup of tea or coffee and join me i don't know how you think as you think back on 2020 i don't know how you felt about the presence of god in the midst of the suffering you saw and i actually found comfort unusually in a book i would not have expected and that was in the book of job i actually found some redemption i hadn't seen before and then i heard that one of my favorite people on the planet had written has done a bible study on job and so um i said i have to have lisa harper here lisa i have to tell you first of all welcome to life today this is probably one of my favorite studies that you have ever done you wouldn't expect to find comfort in the book of job i was i was actually doing a word study for a class on the word happy in the bible because usually it's translated in our english bibles is blessed but it's in the old testament's usher new testament kairos and i was doing a study on that and i sense you know sometimes god will speak to you and you go surely that was just caffeine like that that could not have been the voice of the lord in my heart mind but i sensed god wanting me to study job and to study suffering at the same time i was studying happiness and i was like ooh yikers i don't like i mean i have avoided jug like job like the plague no pun intended my whole life but he he was just insistent that i studied the book of job and i mean i spent a year in the book of job wow before i ever wrote a word and it it was so personally healing for me because i was afraid of pain my whole life i thought if i sat in the in the deep end for too long i was afraid it would swallow me and i wouldn't be able to get out of it and one of the first things you see in job is that you know pain isn't it's not punitive in the economy of god when he allows i'm not saying all pain is divinely causative but when god allows pain in your life more often than not it's a promotion it's him saying your shoulders are wide enough to carry this in a way that you'll bring me glory and i think when people have been through stuff i know some of the times you've prayed for me and spoken to me when i was in the dark if you hadn't had your own difficulty i'd be like you're driving me nuts like get away from me pollyanna you know go get a tweety bird tattoo because it just wouldn't have carried weight but knowing you had suffered yourself and had walked through it and since god's presence it's like your words carry weight you become kind of a spiritual ef hutton only the over 40s who are listening will get that but you know all of a sudden you go i have a credible testimony because it hasn't always been easy but he has always been accessible one of the things that to me is the most fascinating and i want you to dig deeper because you you're you're deep well is that when all the bad news comes to job and it all comes that some of you see the presence of devastating pain and worship oh that's that was like my favorite it's the end toward the end of chapter one i want to sit somewhere in the 20s 2022 or something job chapter one and he's lost everything you know he's lost every everybody his children have been killed he's lost his health he's lost his wealth and he was a big deal you know he would have been traded you know on wall street i always think it was cool because his wealth was in agriculture and i tend to be drawn toward guys and wranglers more than skinny jeans so i kind of like that part of joe but he was a legitimately wealthy man and a good guy says before he lost all that that he helped the poor and the powerless he loses everything through no fault of his own so he doesn't do anything there's no hidden sin and and you would think he'd be mad or or he you know there's a million ways i would have reacted he's very honest about his grief it says he tears his robe which is a sign of deep grief in that ancient era and he shaves his head so he's not faking it not pretending like everything's okay but in that very same verse it says he grieves he he tears his rub shade and said and he worships and when i saw that i went no stinking way that you can have a broken heart and raised hands at the same time that it's not incongruent to be in grief and praise god knowing that somehow some way even if i don't see it with my natural eyes you are good and i'm going to trust you and so he was i love his honest response he he grieves he he even gets mad at god and god allows that but he doesn't doubt god's presence yeah yeah job changed my life i for so long i was afraid to go to really grieve to really go to the deepest places of pain even from my past and some you know some of the stuff we we have similar stories with some of the some of the abuse and had some molestation and i just didn't want to go there and when i went there i realized oh my goodness i didn't realize to trust god in the dark meant that he took a lid off my joy i actually have experienced so much more joy and liberty i was i was bound by fear for a long time and it really was diving deep into the book of job and seeing this unlikely joy and you know before everything's restored i love the end i mean i love the whole book there's so many lessons but when he says my ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you and it's before anything's restored he's still broken he's still you know just in every way another human would look at him and say that's the saddest life i've ever seen and yet job says i have seen you and i love that that's before everything was restored but yeah that that book more than i've always of course loved the new testament i love the psalms because it's god's ipod but i had avoided the book of job and that book more than um it would be among my top three or four of scripture now i'm thinking of some of our viewers you know i'll get regular letters from viewers some are in prison some are sure um some have lost everything and you know kind of a minuscule version of job and then along come the friends and obviously i put that three stages yeah um but but they almost re-emphasize this kind of belief of well you must have done you must have done something you know even when we talk about god as sovereign i think most of us live our lives under this kind of canopy of deservedness if you if you live a good life there's some scale somewhere some ethereal scale if you live if if you do write then good things will happen that's not biblically defensible that that that's karma and and that's what his friends say his friends are like surely there's something you've done maybe some late night stuff on your ipad i mean have you got something secret because surely you brought this on yourself one of them goes so far as to say your children deserve to die i know which was just and you go what a i mean i think one of the things we can learn from job real basic is if you get to walk alongside a friend or family member who's grieving you don't have to say much right don't give them advice don't you know don't cross stitch a verse just walk with him pray for him but at the very beginning when his friends were good comforters all they did was sit with him when they actually yeah seven days shiva i know that was but you know i think of the people who are told um well i'm sorry a daughter got raped but if she hadn't been dressed like that right or you know right just the way the deliciousness um yeah the way that we place blame onto people but but there's something about the umbrella of the sovereignty of god and job but it's to me it seems like you have to get to know him you do and you have to get to trust him in the dark yeah i think we're always going okay god if you'll show me the other part of the story where you know i have tight skin and high metabolism then i'll do the hard stuff for you but job is job just gets to that point of it's that habakkuk point though you slay me yet will i trust you because somehow some way because you are a perfect redeemer i love that job uses the word redeemer i know for jesus you know after basically saying this is the worst thing ever i'm going to go eat a worm usually the only verse anybody knows about job comes from nicole mullen when she says my redeemer lives we all know that one verse but to understand the context of that verse that job is just about to throw in the towel and then he goes and he uses the word go l you know which is a word that they didn't use in that context it's like he sees he sees jesus he sees the shadow of jesus before 2000 years before jesus comes and he goes my jesus is coming wow my redeemer lives and so all this in the context of jesus this is okay it's hard and i'm grieving and i don't like it but in the context of divine redemption i'll i'll walk this out to you and so yeah it's a beautiful story but to me the thing i always come back to is got this because we tend to think satan did this satan's a bit player you don't hear from him again after chapter two even the word god uses in the hebrew of god having a conversation with satan it's not a face-to-face conversation it's not peer-to-peer i was going to ask you about that that's cool yeah tell me tell me about that well i don't remember how to pronounce the word all my hebrew sounds german because i can't do the guttural hebrew thing but the word there when it says you know god and satan are talking they're talking about he's saying can i sift him because he's saying yeah he looks like a good guy but as soon as he loses all of his followers on instagram and you know he he's gonna he's gonna curse you and so god's like no you can you can mess with joe it's almost like his faithfulness is what made him contract to be to be in pain you're like surely if you live a good life nothing bad will happen job lives such a good life that god said he will be faithful no matter what but the word to describe that conversation with satan and and i always call him the lizard the liar is uh he condescended to let the enemy speak i love to know don't you love that yeah and then later on when he speaks to job it's a totally different hebrew word for conversation he allows job to have a a relational conversation with him not as a master with a slave but as one who loves somebody else i i love just even that nuance that's huge i was sitting talking about that just last night at dinner you know why was this lizard allowed to stand right in front of god and talk to him and you go god god was going to use job's story to teach us in the same way he did with homer you know jose and gomer you're like oh my goodness i'm so sure you know the good guy marries the girl with the 1 900 number it doesn't make sense in our human logic and god is not capricious he's not punking us but god goes i'm going to show you a higher way a bigger way this very very good man is going to lose everything and he is going to walk this out in a way that ultimately ends up for as good but it brings me glory because he knows me and he's not gonna he's not gonna lose his hope when his circumstances are the opposite of what he even prayed for and so yeah it's a it'll blow your hard drive because you go pain as a promotion like that that just doesn't that just doesn't compute because again we tend to live in that you deserve what you get you know a friend that you know of mine eva whittington self um was paralyzed in a car accident when she was 17. and i mean she i always say in in the world of faith she walks a lot faster than i do love her the way i love you but often times i'll be with eva her spine was shattered severed actually in this car extent but because she's in a wheelchair will be places where people will go if only you had more faith oh gosh you wouldn't be in that wheelchair and you know i want to punch him in the throat her response is much more redemptive but eva will say you know god actually gave me this chair he could have fused my back back together had he wanted but this chair has taken me places that i never would have seen i never would have met my husband i never would have had my daughters i know she sees it as a means of grace we tend to see pain as always destructive but david said in your faithfulness you've afflicted me you've allowed me to ache so that i'll actually turn to you and i think that's part of it too is it can accelerate us moving toward the lord for comfort you know i remember being at a big um speaking a conference in hawaii and there was an evangelist from africa and he made this declaration everybody here in the room tonight is going to be healed and i've met this amazing guy who'd been in a wheelchair for 11 years after a bad motorcycle accident and you know the evangelist spoke prayed and then was rushed off in a limo you know back to the airport and eventually the tent and empties and there's just my friend still in the wheelchair and me and so i walked up to him and he could tell because i was crying and he said sheila come on don't cry i know god could heal me but until he does i'll worship from here that's right that's right and we see it from such this narrow human perspective of oh that's bad instead of oh i wonder how god is going to use that for good because i'm not my mind is too dinky to see something that's hard you know had i not you walked with me when i lost an adoption at the 11th hour that i mean it it ripped my guts out i i was you know i was so i had the you know the room decorated i had the baby named it was four days before i was bringing her home when that fell through and i remember thinking i don't think i'm gonna be able to be able to peel my heart up off the pavement after this one i'm just not sure that i can actually i mean i'll you know i'll keep walking but i i just don't think i'm ever going to be able to lift my head up again and had it not been for that excruciating uh loss and the grief god used that and i'm not saying that was god's will but he always uses what the enemy intends for evil to to just plow up the places in my heart that we're afraid because i don't think i would have when they said there's a little girl in haiti whose mama died of aids and she's been given two months to live would you consider seven i wouldn't have been brave enough to do that i would have been like no thank you that's too scary had i not been through that dark season and god just carried me i don't think i would have been prepared for the joy he had planned for what i remember about that was i was with you and the person said to you why don't you pray about this and you said no i've been praying about this for a long long time yeah it's he i am so slow to understand i am so remedial when it comes to god's kindness but he i love psalm 84 11. no good thing will he withhold from him his walk is upright wow so to me that's even job if you keep moving toward jesus whether you're limping crawling just keep moving toward jesus he will redeem it there will be good things in your story and so many people listen to you who are in grief right now and i think the world tells them just paste a happy face on it um because the world has a hard time handling grief mostly it's like well you know we'll grieve for that we'll shiver for seven days after that you know put on your your big girl pants and quit whining and to actually walk in a way that's redemptive with someone who eggs someone who's lost a child someone who lost their job with covid and to go i'm not going to say a platitude i'm not going to say something pithy i just believe that god will use this ultimately for your good but um you can trust him enough to cry with him it's interesting too lisa at the end of job's story that i mean you have these three friends and then the young dude you know who are supposedly saying all the right things but in the end the only one that god says spoke rightly about him was job that's right he kind of cuts those guys down it's like justin don't doesn't pray for you guys you're really in the hospital that's right you know what i think so cool there too is his wife gets such a bad rap because she says curse god and die but she's lost her children yeah she's very tense i can't even imagine what i would say if uh if god allowed me to lose missy and so you're like oh my goodness let the poor woman grieve and say a few bad words in traffic i mean she's been through a heck and back but god doesn't discipline her at the end of the story she is reconciled with job and then you know they have more children and he names the daughters and in that culture women weren't named because they're named where names were considered profane and it gives them an inheritance so i go my goodness even there the just the redemption is so much it's much bigger than would have happened in human context god's ways are always better um for any gift at all we're going to send you the job study which you're going to want the study guide but you're going to want it is it like seven sessions teaching sessions you've got videos so um you're going to want to go on to lifeway.com lifeway.com and they're like maybe two dollars three dollars a piece for the teaching that goes concurrently you're going to want those you're going to want it because you can tell when you sat in a book of god for a year the wealth that pours out is amazing um but one of the things i would like to ask you to do for us one of the greatest passions of my heart here at life is what we call rescue life where we go and um reach rescue and restore girls been caught up in sex trafficking and i want to take you with me and let you see what happened on our very last trip there's a little trick that's helped me through some of my darkest days in the field with life outreach international i smile i smile not to trivialize the unimaginable despair of those who are suffering but to remind everyone including myself that a little kindness can bring some light to a dark world and it can be such a dark world the sexual abuse of children has been industrialized and brought to scale in what i believe to be one of the starkest examples of demonic activity on earth today i asked her who do you have who is caring for you she has no one she started out trying to sell cookies and she couldn't make enough to live on so she ended up having to sell her own body now i am no stranger to the plight of a desperate soul but the young women i've spoken with young children have left a mark on my life that will stay with me forever this precious girl was begging for money on the streets when she was first abducted at the age of nine her captors raped her and forced her to sleep with up to four men a night [Music] it's horrific to think of the unspeakable torment that children face and i'm grateful when they survive it but survival is a far cry from healing god has given you and me the sacred power to help reach rescue and restore a precious life from the evils of human trafficking right now the choice of whether to exercise that power is ours to make you know i love all our missions here at life i love when we have um our water for life i love mission feeding i love it all but i don't think anything has scarred my heart as much as as rescue life you know in southeast asia so many of the countries where we work i've seen girls i mean they're literally they're not 18 19 they're 10 11 and 12. they are little girls and they have been sold and told that they are worthless so many of them have a number tattooed to their thigh so the guy doesn't even have to know their name they can just say i'll take number three and so many many of you have written and said well why are they out there where are their parents so many of these girls i have been with their fathers in prison um they're in debt you know if you have to get medicine for a child they have to borrow money from money lenders then they're in debt and what else is the girl to do most of them go out at night between about 11 o'clock at night till two in the morning and they gather up beer cans from outside the clubs because they can sell like six or eight cans for like the equivalent of like a quarter but that's when when they're trying to do that and they're trying to help the family that's when they're snatched sometimes they're given a meal what they don't know is the meal is drugged and they wake up in the morning and suddenly all their innocence is gone so i mean we are committed here at life for as long as the lord tarries we're committed to this mission what we want to do is three parts reach first of all we go in to the villages and we we warn the children i mean some of the things we've had to tell children i'm like oh my gosh i can't believe we're doing this it's probably the most important news they'll ever get you know if you see this if a man says this run shout as loud as you can never go out by yourself always go out with a friend so we we teach them then we rescue i mean some of the teams we have literally gone at midnight and kick down doors and rescue these darning little ones and watch these traffickers being hauled off to prison but then we have so many beautiful places that you have helped us build where these girls can come and be restored be told you're not a number that you are precious that you matter to god you have a future you have a hope so please would you help us we have some amazing friends who are giving us a matching gift for this whole mission 320 000 is a matching gift normally it would take about 128 dollars to be to put a girl in that process of being reached rescued restored but now if you could do 64. that will be matched so together with somebody you might not meet until we're all home you'll have that impact 128 normally one girl but because it's a match gift too if you're able to give 1280 that will be matched and 20 girls will be literally snatched from the gates of hell and brought into freedom and told that they're loved so please would you call just give what you can and together when we all do that we will invade the kingdom of darkness with the kingdom of light in jesus name human trafficking is one of the world's darkest sources of criminal activity and money as a result children and young people are being abducted and sold at the hands of violent predators into a never-ending nightmare through mission rescue life you can reach out to warn children who are at the risk of being trafficked rescue those already enslaved and restore young lives giving them a future with a generous 320 000 matching gift now your gift of 128 to help reach rescue or restore one child can be double to help two children your 64 gift will be matched to help save one child from the horrors of human trafficking and a 32 mission rescue gift will be doubled to 64. with your gift today we'll send you natural remedies this beautifully illustrated and essential book explores ancient nutrition and the health benefits found in god's creation a valuable reference with biblical insight to help you live your best life with your gift of 128 or more you'll receive the jesus my refuge journal and pen set filled with scriptures reminding you of god's covering in times of need you'll also be reminded to pray for those seeking refuge from the horrors of human trafficking finally please consider a gift of twelve hundred eighty 280 which will now help rescue 20 children and you may request our inspiring bronze sculpture divine servant please call write or make your gift online thank you thank you for caring this really really matters this is not just poverty this is an attack from hell yes and we can do something in jesus name and i know that's close to your heart too oh you know missy would have been trafficked in haiti had there there's some places where god rescued right yeah that's very very close to my heart and just you can't believe that this still exists in our world this kind of wickedness and just the the horror of it i love that y'all are doing this you know i don't know if you know this it's a 150 billion dollar industry we need to match that so um ask for lisa's job study it's amazing thank you for diving deep into job it's really made an impact thanks for being here with us i love being with you loved it i'm going to follow you home we will see you next time thanks so much for being with me here at live i'm sheila walsh and i'll see you next time promised to set you free you made a vow to your mother [Music] that you give your life to your father [Music] to me i'll be your refugee tomorrow james and betty explain what it looks like when you lose your life for kingdom purpose that's what god did with me betty and by the way he can do it with any of us life today is made possible by the supporters of life outreach international your gift will be used exclusively for the exempt purposes of life the ministry features specific outreaches as examples of the programs it supports and conducts gifts are considered to be without restriction as to use unless explicitly stipulated by the donor the ministry is a member of the ecfa

Channel: lifetodaytv

Views: 6,035

Rating: 4.9473686 out of 5

Keywords: life today, james, robison, christian, television, tv

Id: WhVNFSB7QqQ

Length: 28min 31sec (1711 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021